Frosty Outside with Time to Write
Sophia,
I am not sure what happened. I respect your prerogative to
change your mind. I was not sure if you were blowing me off on the phone or if
something came up. It does not really matter. You don’t owe me nor do I expect
an explanation. I wish you the best.
I did not want to call you back on the phone to even ask,
because I want to respect your privacy. I did not want to put you in an awkward
position of possibly feeling like you had to explain yourself to me or make you
feel pressured to any extent. Your silence pretty much told me anything I might
have been wondering.
I do find myself thinking of some thoughts I would have
liked to have shared if we had met. Hopefully this email will assist me in
coalescing them into a coherent platform, if you will indulge me the courtesy
of reading.
I date with purpose. It is not very often. I am also an introvert and prefer a few deep
friendships and personal relationships than wasting my time with people who
only lead to surface level dynamics.
After living my twenties, I have my operations in order, my
career, my parenting-skills, my recreation, my studies, and my spirituality. I
don’t fuck-around literally or figuratively. At the end of the day the work I
do and what I choose to do with the resources I have are muscle and sinew,
dressing over the core if you will.
To me human love is the blood; without it we are each
buried stoic clay-soldiers eternally damned to wait to participate in a battle
that will never come, wishing for a chance to prove our worth, not to the
other, but to ourselves. There is no difference between a solitary lamppost and
a man who never bares his veins to love’s interdependence. No matter how many
he attracts with his midnight glow, if he cannot form a bond of mutual need he
will find himself feckless every sunrise.
I have seen the innards of life. I have seen the darkness
that most people take sixty years to see. I have breathed it in and spat it
back, while recognizing the part of myself that lives in the darkness. There is
not much that rattles me anymore. I do not assume my tomorrows will outnumber
my yesterdays. So when I intersect with people who stand out to me I do my best
to be proactive and enrich my life, because we never know which day will be our
last. I would rather light myself on fire like Mohammed Bouazizi, then to
remain dumb or lame when seeing potential in front of me.
When I emailed you originally, it was part of a mini-project
I was attempting to try to simply connect my writing with women who appeared to
enjoy reading novels and thinking deeply. I did not email anyone in New Orleans
in a similar manner, because I was not looking to combine dating with what I
was doing. I was just trying something human.
Overall it went well. When you responded to me the way you did, I
re-read your profile and tended to concur with your line of thought. I kind of
doubted I would actually hear from you, but when I did I was open to the
opportunity. I was sick and hoping to plan something with you when I
recuperated, but alas your all-too recent kidnapping by robed-vandals has left
you indisposed.
The email I sent you was me being candid. Sometimes humans
participate in psychological guessing games in dating and appear aloof or try
to see who moves first. I just don’t do that shit. I am (insert age), a decade
into my career with an (insert age) old daughter. I am very good with me and
with what I want and what I don’t. Frankly, I just don’t meet a lot of women
who are worldly, intelligent, and cognizant of the big picture in a similar
stage of maturity within driving distance. At least that is how you came
across.
There are certain psychological-evolutionary interactions
in male and female courtship most people participate in through subconscious
response, but rarely logically analyze why a man does what he does and a woman
does what she does. At a pretty young age I saw through the interworking parts
or at least I came up with my version of bullshit that makes sense to me to
understand life. To a large degree, it made dating more difficult, because I
found myself wanting to date people who were capable of seeing through the
mirage on a deeper level, to see behind the curtain if you will.
When mature adults first meet, we test each other, more so
the woman is testing the man. A man’s lack of a uterus tends to truncate his
priorities. Men get fed this message to refrain from complimenting women at the
onset. Compliments tend to raise feminine defensiveness and skepticism,
paradoxically repressing attraction due to their predicable nature in how a
woman categorizes the man making them.
Whereas cocky, but not arrogant and slightly sardonic humor
tends to send a psychological message to a woman that he has conviction if done
within that fine-line between mature self-confidence and being a jerk. He is not going to be walked-over or pushed
around to submit to her requests because they are subconscious Freudian tests.
He is a stand-alone representation confident and consistent in who he is
independent of her presence. This
certitude is often magnetic and the root of female to male attraction, which is
most often a reaction rather than a choice based on substantive criterion.
Ultimately this communicates that she will get to fulfill
the female role in the relationship and he will in fact step up and be the man.
He will take charge. She will at times, but this distinction provides her with
an invaluable versatility and option that if she does not wish to take charge,
she knows he will and this delineation makes a grand difference by reassuring
her that her option to be a vulnerable female which exalts her nature remains
open.
It is core and as natural as the vulnerability a woman
requires bearing a child to maturity in her womb. This bargain is at the
essence of our evolution towards male/female pair bonding. It is also never
more pertinent as women are asked to be more masculine every day in the modern
workforce, especially in our generation.
Masculinity is attractive and paramount. A man who is
buying dinner and flowers or telling an attractive woman how beautiful she is
too early, is killing any mystery for her to sort what type of man he is lover
or husband material, as well as communicating he will give her almost anything
she wants, which in other terms is saying he is a boy asking for a mother and a
not man who will stand up for his own convictions pursuing a lover or a wife.
Men do not want to marry girls and women do not want to
marry boys. Men’s opinions and standards do not change or bend based on the
whim of impressing or appeasing others. Men are reliable, foundational, and
stalwart in times of crisis or criticism. Boys ask permission and have the
female in their life lay out clothes on the bed.
Modern Gen-X men pay the mortgage, make sure our suit is
tailored properly, can cook our own dinner, disinfect a countertop, help our
child with her homework, and pay attention to our libido. Gen-X women do the
same in a female paradigm. I think recognizing the existence and necessity for
this convergence is crucial for healthy modern-adult relationships.
I am not unique in understanding these common dynamics. I
do however wish more people saw our human sociological mating and pair bonding
rituals with as much detail, so that I could just proceed with learning about a
woman at the root of who she is so that I can ascertain the validity of any
mutual fit without having to jump through hoops of bar games and alcoholic CAFO
lots. It is one of the reasons I have tried online.
Whether most people would put it in those terms or not, I
doubt it, but at the end of day I tend to look at male and female dynamics with
a perspective that recognizes human evolution. Why people get together is one
set of variables, why they stay together is another entirely.
These thoughts remind me of
a letter I wrote to a friend once.
Maybe the essence of
femininity rests inside the ability to be comfortable with being vulnerable to
a measured degree of latitude inside a woman’s daily life. Allowing her self to
be vulnerable is like an orgasm of the soul; it opens her up to feel alive. She
needs to be able to express her self; to open up without directly correlated
linear problem to solution sequential experiences that are more inherent to a
man’s world rather than her own.
In corporate America we have
directives and objectives. I think some women find it difficult to flip the
switch in their personal lives to open up, to take their guard down and be
feminine. In being able to open up a woman expresses a release to silence the
concerns of imperfection, of not meeting the standards of beauty, of a career,
of motherhood, of domestic chores, or errands, of a whirlwind of a life that
asks her to be all to everyone.
In her soul she is trying so
hard and is liberated in being vulnerable and comfortable with a man to express
her self to, to listen and not correct, criticize, or instruct her in how to
deal with those concerns, but simply to have him there like an external bowl of
hands. For him to be there for that moment, no matter how non-linear the words
may come out, to be able to deposit them for that moment, for that time, gives
her the release, it relieves the pressure of her system that reverberates and
echoes in her soul a sense of harmony and joy.
Men above all yearn to be
appreciated for providing the happiness in our wives lives. If you let a man
know what he can do for you to make you happy and tell him you appreciate it,
he will bend over backwards to keep doing it. You are exalting his soul. If you
ask him to and help him be that bowl of hands and thank him for it, he will
become the vessel for you and allow you to retrieve from the bowl at will
without him altering or manipulating the contents.
This goes back thousands of
years into the development of human interactions. Men would go out and hunt in
groups, provide food, bring meat home and the woman would assist in watching
the children and preparing the meal. A man who could not bring home an animal
was a failure. His family went hungry. The man did not expect the woman to
provide his dinner just to appreciate his work.
The woman was rewarded by
being listened to in her gathering of women remaining back rearing the children
and collecting plants. The woman with the ability to speak held the torch of
power in the female-on-female dynamic as she went about her daily tasks in the
absence of her male counterpart still out hunting. When the male and female are
reunited after the hunt, this act of submission that a daughter shows to her
mother or two girlfriends show to each other of acquiescing to allow one of
them to hold the power to speak while the other gives the gift of listening is
mirrored between husband and wife when a man simply listens and does not
comment or try to fix.
In a traditional patriarchal
society, power was in the sword and muscles to wield it, but in a pair bond
when power is shared under a feminine paradigm, to a degree, listening becomes
the sword and humans transcend from the physical to the mental. When the two
entwine we have the spiritual.
The man decompressed in the
solitude of hunting and then sitting by a fire and gazing after his work while
the meal was roasting. As a man my greatest joys in life have come from
providing for my counterpart and feeling needed and appreciated for that.
I think in this duality
resides the balance of feminine and masculine. We struggle to find space in the
overlap without pushing the other out. He is trying to solve your problems, and
trying to do. You just want him to listen, but do not want to have to tell him.
You expect him to know what you need, but you need to tell him that you
appreciate him just being there to hear you.
Tell him that you are not
telling him these things because you do not have the answers, but because he is
important to your basis of being. The fact that you can share these problems
with him makes you feel close. When he tries to solve them for you it actually
makes you feel further away, which contradicts everything a man is biologically
engineered to understand. That is why you are writing me, you are treating me
like one of your girlfriends to satiate your feminine need to be heard and sort
your problems out through expression because I am listening.
I wrote that letter several
years ago. I think of it from time to time, most often when I think about the
kind of partnership I hope to find in my life.
With you, I obviously don’t
know you, but I was hoping to hear what you had to say, to simply listen, and
maybe get to read some of your writing at some point. It is the kind of thing,
where in my happiest relationships being the man my partner wanted to share her
day with was the core of the dynamic which I cherished the most. You just
seemed like you have a world to say, maybe you don’t, but I at least wanted to
see what was there.
I am a bit sorry I missed out
on hearing at least part of your story. I was looking forward to sharing a
drink and listening to you talk for a while. That might come across as silly,
but it sounded like a nice afternoon and one I probably would have remembered.
This is an excerpt from my
novel from this part on men and women that I wrote after I first started trying
to date again as a single father.
Women ultimately fall in two
categories to men: mothers or lovers. Stereotypes have ranges, but ultimately a
woman is perceived to be one or the other. Depending on the internal stage of a
man, he seeks a polarity, praying for an ultimate equilibrium. Women are not
all that different in their perceptions of men. Men are lovers or husband-material
when a woman contemplates attributes to attend to each spectrum in the bounty
and perils of piloting a womb. Evolution’s design propagates the bewildering
siren tests to encourage two-parent households. Thus the negotiations of the
bizarre scales of a ten-minute sperm donation are compared to a nine-month
gestation and a lifetime of umbilical servitude.
Most men marry mothers.
Mothers are carbon. Mothers control, do for a man, package socks like origami
tubes, pilot crock pots, manage little-league logistics, ensure the application
of Clorox. With accommodations mothers graduate to wearing stretchy elastic
jeans and slowly fold their sexual identities into light-bulb-shaped mannish
haircuts in the white flag of sexual surrender. Two generations ago stay-at-home
mothers exalted a man with these hen-rituals by appreciating his avenue to
financial security. Bread was praised in the bank account like manna from a
proper mortal-man.
My father’s generation
watched the mothers go to work. The balance died. Women mutated
schizophrenically-male into employed ubiquitous functioning automatons of
lunch-packing, business-suit, laundry-sorting, payroll-deduction, and
casserole-dishing commute queens. Ashley was a Gen-X mother, daughter to a
working mom, secretly proud and resentful of the station of her juggling
gender.
Men have been slower to
evolve. Madagascar’s of evolution exist in divorced single dads like me. These
gender isolation chambers allow men the space to wield the Batman utility belts
of forty-plus hours a week, to-an-from carpool, Gogurts, homework-rodeos, band
aids on bo-bo’s, board meetings, lawn mowing, pig-tail symmetry, sewing kits,
tooth-fairy plantings ruses, and stirring the gumbo roux. The habitat to breed
this species of man requires a space mother-lioness women rarely grant a man
the freedom to evolve into. Mothers patronize the male’s version of domestic
chores like Tourette’s tics.
The alternative is lovers.
Lovers are hydrogen. Lovers are independent agents slathered in sexual
independence often denoted by lower back tattoos. Modern women, mothers or
lovers both must work. There are few escapes from this economy. Lovers prune
and occupy a lack of need. Sex is far more egalitarian. The tastes and scents
of oral sex are aromatically decadent, rather than prudishly vouchsafed once a
solstice and equinox. Pleasure fucking is encouraged under the Athena goddess
gift of the pill.
These women spit out the bit
of submissive gender shackles. The moderates seek symmetry with mates: dish
washing, chauffeuring, orgasms, and bank account deposits. A lover and a man
can exist if the woman is given her space, and the man is given his praise in
her unearthed vulnerabilities expressed in their convergence. Otherwise a man
has no purpose in her world.
Since Gen-Xers marry after
thirty. Men may date a lover. No more married at twenty-two means a boy may
bolt on non-marriage material lovers and wed a bounce-back relationship mother
in six months. Women get befuddled as to why. Honest men question the inverse paradox.
Why when a man falls in line as a prototype-provider nurturing-man does he go
dateless? It is just two sides of the same question.
Men are oxygen. Our
gender-genetic instructions to a balanced partnership have never been more
mangled. Shall we form water or carbon dioxide? Fear or love: we choose. Will
she go through nuclear transmutation changing from one element to another? Are
MILF’s the new Arabian virgins? Can your graduate-degreed cranium still speak
to me with the vulnerability you shared bouncing on your daddy’s knee? Am I
useful?
Men are petrified. Her eye
shadow will pale staring atpinterest.com like geek-boys on EverQuest. Thighs will balloon into
saddle bags of subcutaneous fat. Dryer lint and a FICA deduction will breed a
martyr. I will be a vagabond electron to her self-sustaining element. Her
periodic table may be thrown asunder in transient priorities that his sperm
donor, DeBeers African blood-diamond contract once signed will morph the polarity
of his wife into either a gold digger or sex-less mini-van cyborg. We seek a
synthesis between sex, friendship, and function. Promethium is scarce.
I remember trying to make sense of the dating world back
then when I wrote that part of the book. I cannot claim that it makes much more
now. I know that both men and women have each component in them. I also know I
do not want to be with a woman who tries to mother me.
I can take care of my own household and pull more than my
share in a joint-home. I am looking for a lover, not a mother for myself, maybe
one for the children that my wife and I may be blessed to have together, but it
is paramount that to me that whoever I choose to spend the remainder of my life
with not want to mother me, but loves me for who I am and what I bring to the
table. She must have enough emotional intelligence to wield one type of love
for her husband and one for her children.
Each is beautiful, but I think there is a crucial
distinction. In a marriage a spouse comes first. Certainly both adults love
their children, but children grow, mature and bond with their own partner one
day. What then for a marriage constructed on a foundation with its pillars set
in the soil of child rearing rather than their marital bond to unite the
family? What do a man and wife discuss as they progress through the stages of
life if they obsess over their children?
I expound on these fundamental gender issues in my writing,
because they are dear to my values, to my flavor of love that feeds me. So I
attempt to be able to describe it openly so that I have a chance of finding
what I truly want, rather than compromising my long-term happiness.
You are probably wondering, if you have even read this far,
why the hell I am writing this email or went so far as to include an old letter
or a piece of my novel. I am certainly not trying to preach to you or impress
you as if I were an infomercial, Wikipedia or Freud. I am simply sharing what
is on my mind sort of the way a man writes a letter into a bottle and chucks it
into the ocean. I have no ability to hear or expect your response, therefore my
writing ranges from verbose to a diary entry to a stranger.
Since I never got to meet you, part of me wanted you to see
a piece of me. Given the stages I imagine we are both at with dating and such,
I thought the subject of gender dynamics was somewhat applicable.
One’s perception of gender has a profound impact on how one
approaches any adult relationship. Aside from the prerequisite logistical
conversations of name, allergens, embarrassments and hobby-based small-talk,
the first subject I find the most pertinent in a potential date is what she
values in a partner, basically what feeds her and fuels her soul.
I simply try to see that, never be that, for no person is
sustained by another. I think we are sustained by the reception of what we put
out into the world being heard, being listened to, this breathes most of our
happiness back into us. We are making ourselves happy in this regard. It may
appear to some people at times from coming from our partner, but in reality it
is how our partner allows us to feel based on what we are naturally inclined to
do reflecting back to us, which is the grandest prize.
However, as much as people may like to think people are rational
logical beings, when it comes to attraction and sex we are at our most
animalistic. We revert to our evolution. This rightly makes the hormones fire
off in our brains, blood flow to our loins, and bonds people in a way no words
can. In my experience this is only intensified by a mental unspoken
subconscious subtext of deep mutual understanding that circumvents the
machinations of our superego and tethers who we really are with another person.
This is where animal and man equally rejoice.
I see the hormonal-psychological panoply of ego prompting
people to do all sorts of absurd things. These MTV-Jersey Shore gyrations often
ensure people will rarely if ever make a genuine-deep human connection. When
existential-neophytes approach one, some freak out and over-react, because they
have no God-damn clue how to behave. I avoid all that pop-bulimia.
I have been as deep as people can go. I got stranded
spelunking without a head-lamp in the cave and had to crawl my way out blind
through the dark. I am fine now, but there is a part of me that has seen behind
the wizard’s curtain if you will. I want deep. I want mutual comprehension.
I want back there in a new iteration that works for both
involved. I don’t want to waste my time with surface stuff, because I know what
I have to offer down there mentally, spiritually, as a husband, and as a
father. To me that is the core of life. To get there is a journey, but I know
one cannot buy that type of dynamic. It is not the result of a polemic, but of
mutual choice. The choice gives it its beauty. Choice is everything. So much of
life to me can be defined by the simple question; which will one choose, love
or fear?
I am sort of like an iceberg at times. Part of me wanted
you to see some piece of that. I am not entirely sure why, but I think it might
be because something in what you originally wrote on the site prompted my
respect for how you saw the world. The same gender dynamics of that letter I
wrote and that part of my book, well some measure of that recognition for those
truths rung out as familiar in your words. Surely they were random in
comparison, but to me they came across with an intent that smelled of a kindred
level of intrapersonal intelligence.
Maybe I am misremembering, but you wrote something about valuing
books, poetry politics, philosophy, and theology. It was just stuff that I am
interested in as well. You also wrote something about wanting men to be men,
which conveyed a level of maturity and comprehension of the gender stuff I have
been writing about that struck me as, “Oh, she gets it.”
I have been happy, but I am happiest around others who ask
questions, creative imaginative people, who are also self-disciplined to
instill a sense of daily structure that facilitates a healthy balance between work
and play. I am a business man and a poet. Few of the people at the different
firms I have worked with are as creative. Few of the people I meet doing
open-mic stuff are as structured. I am an anomaly of sorts. I don’t need or
want a clone, but it is difficult to come across women who feed me on each
level.
I see and feel what is going on our planet, in our
financial markets, in people’s fears and loves and I feel immensely
interconnected with that. I’d like to find a partner one day who is plugged into
that on her own level that we can each share and support each other over the
long haul, as a subtext to the realities of daily life. I will fight like hell
to have that in my life, even if it is just a sniff at what might be. To me the
idea of having a career, a house and just going through the motions misses the
point of life.
Sometimes in dating, the words I choose or my focus is off
from traditional expectations and the most common reaction I get is distance. I
get back a startled uncertainty of where to even begin to respond to me because
I am usually starting further down the line in terms of what I consider
small-talk than what others are accustomed. It is often my own doing and not
always wise.
I tend to speak an old language. I get personal and universal.
I think the universal is found through the internal. I sometimes talk of
existential quandaries, how people think, and modern macroeconomic concerns
entwined with a man living a simple life. In my home I am silly, dancing,
cooking, cheering or ranting, but all of that is founded on the layered-older
construction of human that I treasure. It is Miles Davis, Bob Dylan with the
revolution of Joe Strummer and Chuck D. It is why Woody Guthrie was awesome.
It’s why Kierkegaard kicked the door down to open minds. It is why Bukowski’s
Chinaski is my version of an indulgent reality-show.
I have this saying I repeat before meals and when I
meditate. It is pretty simple. It goes, “Peace, Love, We are all
interconnected.” So that is what I wish to you, whoever you are. That probably
sounds strange or disingenuous, but you made me think this past week.
Every date I have been on in the last eight months, I just
haven’t been into it. Nice women, smart, pretty, just not a good fit for me at
the end of the day or me for them probably. I don’t know if you would have
seemed any different than that or if I would have been at all a good fit for
you, but I do know I felt a certain trigger of excitement the other day when
you texted me for some reason that I have not felt in a very long time.
But when you called me thirty times in one day, that really
creeped me out. There are better ways to get my attention like skywriting. Try
that next time or one of those door-to-door costumed singers that dress-up like
UPS employees, but break out into a-cappella versions of eighties songs.
(Anything off London Calling or Off the Wall and you’ve got a fighting chance.
Going old school Sam Cooke also works.)
In all seriousness, I am just looking for somebody a bit
different. I thought maybe you got a glimpse of me and saw something reflecting
that on a core level registered and that is why somebody moving back to the
city like you did would seek me out and make the effort. I thought you probably
know yourself very well and maybe some of the same frustrations you were having
in the dating world mirrored my own. Then again logic tells me I am overthinking
and this is just randomly nothing.
In a relationship, I don’t want to feel like I have to hold
a preponderance of my personality behind my back or over in a corner, because
there is this large portion of who I am, what I like to talk about from time to
time that my partner just cannot relate to very well.
A career is one thing. Couples have divergent careers with
little if any overlap all the time. That’s fine, but in terms of core
personality for some people writing a poem, hell reading a poem would be like
asking someone who has never played guitar to pick it up and start jamming with
their friend. It’s possible to learn, but if that isn’t in you, if the urge to
explore what makes people tick or existential stuff just isn’t there, then
there is a gap.
For a lot of people it is entirely irrelevant beyond a
passing peek every once in a while. For me it is something I spend at least a
small portion of my day thinking about, not most of it, but something. I have
opinions. I would like my partner to have hers and we can share and grow.
Basically in my gut, I want to respect my partner’s mind.
Plain and simple, if I don’t respect the depth of a person’s thought process, I
probably will not end up being close friends. In a partner what a woman
considers and contemplates is an act of intimacy. It is sexy to me on a
fundamental level. It is so much easier for me to be around someone who does
not get caught up in the trivial-surface speed-bumps of life when I know she is
able to work through emotional intimacy with long -range potential. It is a
very foundational thing.
I try my best to be open minded to give people a chance,
but I am just a complex man. I cannot help having all these moving parts and
being analytical and creative. Hell what I do a lot of days is sort out a
hundred different financial variables for risk and accuracy. I ensure that the
big picture of the puzzle is where it probably should be with no one to give me
a straight answer. I have to consider qualitative and quantitative variables
and do the root work while always considering how piece C affects piece Q.
In my writing I think about the universe, humanity, global
economics, healthcare, love, loneliness, God, politics and the pathos of
existence. It is just a different form of puzzle. I do not shy away. I dive in.
I like diving in and I want someone to challenge me as I challenge them. I also
cook, take care of my household, my daughter and enjoy other hobbies, but the
creativity thing, the thinking thing, is the constant.
So why ever you decided to not push forward with even
meeting me that is your call. I don’t take it personally. We don’t even know
each other so I have no platform for offense. However I am letdown that I will
never know what might have been. Even starting the conversation where someone
usually can relate to what the hell I am talking about after minute
twenty-seven is infinitely more cohesive and mutually fulfilling when the other
person’s natural rhythms flow in at least a somewhat similar current.
I have never felt the urge to write a letter like this to
someone I have never met. I hope you find it as a sign of respect for who I
thought you might be. Without that consideration on my end, I would not waste
my time. Maybe you just caught me at a good loquacious window or bad depending
on your view of lengthy emails from strangers you came across on the internet.
I hope this surfeit of words has done an adequate measure of explaining why
this email exists.
Thank you for the existential intersection, however
unintentional. As a poet sometimes all we need are sentiments to fuel our core.
Reality can often be more disappointing then an idea. I often write poems as if
surfing the wave of a sentiment in a single sit-down of writing from beginning
to end, so now you have a hulking-email. As a writer you can probably
empathize. Sometimes I just start typing and two hours later I haven’t stopped.
So cheers to bringing those thoughts to me.
I also do not give up easily. I accept reality, boundaries,
free will in its iterations. However, I also believe in going after ones
happiness in a direct manner with consideration to the boundaries of others
through a respectful paradigm. If my past email or this one made you uneasy, I
apologize for the confusion; I will not contact you again, your silence was
clear.
Thank you for your time and reading my words,
Peace, love, we are all interconnected.
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