I’ve met the perfect man. He’s married, but you can’t have everything.
**
But before I follow up on that teaser of an opener, let me backtrack to the Occupation. As everyone knows by now, the “Occupy” protests have been happening in many major cities around the world, including my own, since late September. I’ve made a commitment to attend every Saturday rally and march. It isn’t wise or practical for me to try to camp out, but I otherwise support the Occupation in whatever way I can, whether it’s by waving at rush hour traffic alongside the sign-holders or bringing the food table a case of hot cocoa from the dollar store. This week, police in riot gear evicted people forcibly from the park with clubs, tear gas, and pepper spray, making dozens of arrests, confiscating sleeping bags and tarps, even destroying the food station with fire extinguishers. This violent crackdown has apparently been part of a coordinated national effort (according to the mayor of Oakland); the Wall Street occupiers have taken their case to court. I’m sure I could spend an entire post on what’s happening in my city and elsewhere, but there are plenty of savvy bloggers covering it already. This movement isn’t going away. And I’ve got smaller fish to fry at the moment…
I do feel badly for not camping out in the cold night after night like some of these intrepid kids, with my hyperactive bladder and my prodigious talent for creating pneumonia out of the simple head cold. Granted, I’m not nineteen anymore. I don’t have health insurance. But the limitless self-sacrifice and perfectionism bred into all good fundamentalist females nags at me that nothing short of dying of exposure for the cause is good enough. I feel guilty for sitting outside on my day off, enjoying the sunshine far from the Occupation, letting the rays work their magic on my moods. I feel guilty for not spending all my free waking hours with the dedicated core, who have been beaten and tear gassed and spent nights in jail. I feel guilty for using a good part of my time at the rallies scoping out the menfolk. Truth be told, I’ve learned to live on less than a shoestring and a prayer, and what I still want more than anything is to cherchez l’homme.
**
Apropos of that very issue, my biggest problem at the Saturday marches has not been police in riot gear. It’s been the problem of having to constantly dodge Eli. Every week, whether I come alone or am “shielded” by my activist friends (usually gay boyfriends like Greg or Danny), there he is, reappearing at every turn, no matter how many hundreds or thousands of people surround us.
Eli had called and emailed a couple of times since our unsavory little hiking expedition. I had not responded. “Don’t dignify him with a reply,” was the advice I received from friends both male and female. I didn’t know what to say, anyway. I couldn’t act as if everything were fine. And I really didn’t want to see him again, even if he had one of my favorite Tom Waits CDs. I didn’t want to have to attempt to explain myself, and face “who-me?” denial or supercilious condescension. Nor did I feel like inviting further unkindness about my ill-conceived drunken flirting.
It would all just be a repeat of the old and unhappy pattern I fall into, practically without fail, with very clever men who, when confronted with my intuitive or emotional grasp of a situation (especially one that may not reflect well upon them) have to pull out their semantic bag of tricks to demonstrate that they’re more “rational” and “objective” than I am — not to mention inarguably in the right. I don’t want play that tiresome, rigged game anymore. I’m done trying to date Dad. I’m OK letting Eli feel superior and right forever, if he wants; I just don’t want him around while he does it.
After one particularly obvious “dodge” at another Saturday march, he emailed me and said that since I hadn’t been responding, and seemed to not want to talk to him at Occupy, he had concluded that I didn’t feel like interacting right now. But he still needed to get my CD back to me.
After some thought, I wrote back:
That’s a fair enough assessment…
I dread ‘breaking up’ with friends, but it dawned upon me quite suddenly that our association has been a somewhat labored exercise in vanity. Yours and mine both. And life is simply too short to waste one’s time. (That’s a lesson I took, anyway, from the recent passing of a loved one.) If you’re looking for some further explanation, well, I don’t really feel like arguing about it. Which is why I postponed reply indefinitely.
I know I’m not such a big part of your life that you’ll miss me terribly much. I do miss my Tom Waits CD, though…you could just stick my name on it and drop it off to one of the dreaded hipster baristas at (the coffeehouse) the next time you’re in the neighborhood. I’m sure they’d get it back to me safely.
All of life is a series of experiments, no? Some of them work, some don’t. Cosi e la vita.
Eli did not reply. I was relieved.
But when I see him at the rallies now — he seems to make a point of stalking angrily by my friends and me — he shoots me the kind of stink-eye you’d typically only see coming from a wet cat who’d been thrown in the bath.
Surprisingly, I can live with that.
**
Thus ends the story of Eli. It was a rather lengthy dead-end street, but I guess I needed to follow it to its natural conclusion to see where it ended up.
Let’s move on to a tale Katherine Woodward Thomas tells in her book Calling In The One, which, as some of you know, I diligently workbooked my way through a year and a half ago in a concerted effort to be more relationship-ready.
Thomas’s client “Melissa” was a lesbian, but otherwise had a couple of essential things in common with me: she struggled with deep feelings of unworthiness, and she secretly feared that surrender to another person in love might mean surrender to control and even abuse. The latter was thanks to a frightening, domineering father; I got my love vs. control issues from both Mom and Dad and their nasty despot of a God.
Anyway, this was Melissa’s experience after working on her relationship blocks with Ms. Thomas:
As is often the case, the first several opportunities that Melissa encountered for romantic liaisons were again with people who were unavailable. One was an actress who was on her way out of town to do a play in another city, with an anticipated long run. The next was a smart and savvy bisexual woman who, it turned out, was still living with her ex-husband. The third, Alison, was the “woman of Melissa’s dreams.” She was everything that Melissa had hoped for — charismatic, bright, funny, spiritual, beautiful, and extremely accomplished. Unfortunately, Alison also happened to be in a long-term relationship with another woman, and together they were co-parenting a child. He was only five, and Alison made it clear that they were committed to living as a family unit until he graduated from high school. Talk about a no-win situation. I wish I could tell you that Melissa wasn’t tempted, but she was. It was agony for her to turn Alison down. But, after a few topsy-turvy weeks, turn her down she did. She made the difficult decision to avoid an avoidable drama, even if that meant that she would be alone in life. Two weeks after making this decision, Melissa met her partner, whom she considers to be the love of her life and her soul mate. Looking back, she now shudders to think how close she came to missing the opportunity to be with her mate, for what would surely have been another heartache and disappointment.
**
I guess you could say I’ve met my “Alison.”
Which, given this story, could be a good sign.
**
To return to the opening line: of course I know no one is “perfect.” The person to whom I refer is not even “perfect” in the way I used to define “perfect.” He’s not a scintillating graduate-level intellectual or committed progressive activist like Eli. He’s not a sculpted yoga god like Sonny who can quote the Dalai Lama while standing on his head. He makes the occasional very bad joke.
Our chemistry, however, was instantaneous and powerful, from the day he walked onto the call center floor three months ago. I felt like I’d been whacked upside the head by Cupid’s Louisville slugger. I didn’t know what hit me. And unlike nearly all the other men (save Sam) to whom I have traditionally been attracted, he makes me feel really, really good. He laughs heartily at my wisecracks, flushing red and showing a broad, irresistibly dimpled smile. He tells me I’m interesting/smart/awesome. He gets neither defensive nor aggressive about my diet, something I’ve come to expect from meat-eating men (cf. Herman Cain, “sissy pizza”). Nor does it seem to bother him one bit that I’ve read (insert intimidating philosopher here) and he hasn’t. Frankly, I couldn’t care less that he hasn’t read (insert intimidating philosopher here). The man seems wholly unthreatened by and is entirely respectful of me. I have nothing to battle or defend. This feels as strange, relaxing, and delicious as sliding into soft suede slippers after years of training one’s feet into hard, pointy pumps. Ahhhh.
Dan’s vocational passion in life is to build beautiful wooden furniture. He’s a master of his craft. His flawless pieces look like they should be sitting in the palatial homes featured in glossy style magazines. He even studied and apprenticed in Romania, his ancestral homeland. So yes, he’s another artist doing grunt work to pay the bills. (Next year he intends to start school to become a radiologist, which will pull in a better income.)
And no, he’s not another seductive, elusive tease like Ted, looking to snare groupies or score with pretty young things. He’s more like some big, friendly, handsome dog, a Labrador with his tail wagging, winning over the prickliest people with even-tempered bonhomie. The surly but essentially good-hearted old alcoholic who snarls at every newcomer chats him up amiably; even the hardcore lesbian feminist who criticizes almost everyone and everything finds him undeniably appealing. He seems to have absolutely no clue what a dreamboat he is (I think he resembles nothing so much as a proletarian American version of Colin Firth), which is totally refreshing after God’s various Gifts to Women, and makes him just that much more attractive. Dan belongs to my generation, so he remembers all the odd pop-culture ephemera from our childhood (e.g. the short-lived, silly TV series “The Greatest American Hero”) unlike our young cohorts. He loves to shop thrift stores. He digs my funky secondhand shoes.
But the real clincher is that he was raised by a fundamentalist mother and stepfather (!), so he knows right-wing Christian insanity intimately, from the inside — although it appears to have done him less damage than it did me. He’s not terribly interested in organized religion these days, but he’s not bitter. Long story short, it is very difficult not to fall in love with this guy. Madly. And in a tedious job where hours creep by like days, talking to Dan makes the hands of the clock fly.
He makes a point of mentioning his Asian-American wife, Mai, fairly frequently, as if to remind us both that he’s taken. His marriage appears to be harmonious; at the same time, our affinity is so strong even our hardcore lesbian coworker has noticed and commented on it. One of these days I need to inform Surly Alcoholic Stan (who is fond of me) that Dan is married — he seems at times to be trying to nudge me in Dan’s direction. I’m obviously not the only person who thinks we’d make a fine match.
It’s times like these that I almost wish we were renegade Mormons living in Idaho. That wouldn’t really work, though, because none of us want kids, and that’s the main justification for polygamy.
If Dan were my husband, however, I wouldn’t want to share him.
**
You-all don’t need to panic or get your knickers in a twist. You know me well enough to know that I have my own personal Hippocratic oath to “first do no harm.” I’m going to have to trust that the Right Thing is either just around the corner, as it was for Melissa, or that unforeseen events will dramatically change the current situation somehow, and let this become the Right Thing.
Dan has said, in a wholly unrelated conversation about his childhood, that he believes in Fate. I’ve always been an agnostic on the question (regardless of all the philosophers and theologians who have argued themselves blue in the face for centuries about it; let’s please not go there again). But say, for the sake of argument, that there were such a thing as Fate. I wonder, then: to what end would Dan enter my life at this precise moment in time? Ms. Thomas might say it’s a kind of test of my progress and resolve, like what Melissa went through with Alison. On the other hand, a romantically minded biographer of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (whose mantra is All’s Fair In Love And War) might disagree. You do, after all, hear stories about eventual couples who were married to other people when they met. It’s not unheard of. Many unpredictable things happen in life. Mai could have an affair with her coworker, and decide she wants to leave. Nearly half of all marriages don’t survive.
Unfortunately, I am neither omnipresent nor omniscient, and am forced to live my life forward, without 20/20 foresight. What I do know for sure is that whatever happens, it’s essential for me to hold to my own integrity. And have, dare I say it, a little faith.
It’s worth noting that I went through something like this once before, many years ago, with my dear friend Ben — and I (mostly) behaved myself. Ben was a brilliant Buddhist scholar with a wry sense of humor and impish blue eyes, and he was as fond of me as I was of him. He also married his fiancée, a warm and compassionate woman he loved, during the time that I knew him. I managed my feelings toward him pretty well, most likely because I didn’t feel as deprived around him as I did around the men I usually chased after. I felt loved, seen, and appreciated by Ben, and for that reason most of the time felt as if there were no significant lack. The only thing I ever felt I lacked, where he was concerned, was an intimate sexual relationship…on those nights when the gang would go out for beers and nachos, and I’d had a drink or two, I’d look across the table at him and feel a hopeless yearning (not to mention a wicked horniness). It was a bittersweet sort of ache, without the sharp edge of rejection that made my usual romantic obsessions so consistently and profoundly painful. I truly felt that if Ben could have been two people, he would have been with me too. Somehow that was a consolation.
**
It is heartening to meet someone wonderful, whom you find incredibly attractive, who also finds you wonderful and incredibly attractive. More often than not, I’ve wound up spending my time with an Eli or a Ted, someone who keeps me handy merely to stroke his ego while he chases other women. Once in a while there will be someone like Bart, the old college classmate who, despite my attempts to discourage him, cultivated a long-term crush on me, and recently announced that he was coming to town with his two daughters to scope out real estate. He wanted me to meet him and the girls. I nixed that meetup in genuine alarm. I was always slightly repelled by Bart, for reasons other than (or in addition to) his substantial girth. Possibly pheromones, possibly personality. But here I am, apologetically groping for acceptable reasons to refuse him.
And why should I? Sometimes I buy into that old double standard that women must look and act as alluring as possible (men being the visually oriented ones, after all), but must be able to “see past” a man’s slovenly exterior. The old Beauty and the Beast trap. And sometimes I resent that. There’s a voice (Mom?) that always whispers, “At least Bart likes you. You should take what you can get. The attractive ones are all jerks, anyway, who play around or think they’re better than you.” You may have heard this called conventional wisdom…
Meeting Dan gives me hope that the so-called conventional wisdom isn’t ironclad. Because, damn, the man is fine. He flips my switch like you wouldn’t believe. And he’s not a jerk. He’s not a player. He’s not aware enough of his own hotness to even think about being a player. I’ve seen pictures of his wife, and she’s not Zhang Ziyi.
Dan is an astoundingly modest man. Dan is an astoundingly attractive man. Dan thinks I’m astoundingly awesome just the way I am.
I sincerely hope that there’s another one out there just like him for me.
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