Вереск sent me an "icebreaker" message on okCupid. I rarely got unsolicited messages from women, and almost never got ones longer than a phrase like "hi there," so I paid attention. We hit the chat console and talked almost entirely about bike riding, with a detour into comic books. I'd never met a woman with a sizable comic book collection, so I had curious questions. Classic Wonder Woman and Catwoman were her favorites.
We met a week later for a morning bike ride. A tall woman in casual cycling clothes, with long black hair, about my age. Again, the pictures were a little too flattering - she needed to lose over 25 pounds if she wanted to look like that profile - but I didn't care by this point. I was going to have a nice day no matter what.
We biked over to Alameda and set up on a picnic blanket near the beach, in the same park Моника had taken me walking through half a dozen times in the past. The weather was perfect, and teenagers and pets romped in the park behind us. We talked for over an hour, sitting near each other but not too close, and then went for a walk in the sand. The tiny waves off the bay lapped quietly alongside us. It might have been romantic except we were both in the same heavy mental space: We were unburdening ourselves, with someone who would lend a kind ear. Recent history loomed over us so completely that there was no ground for anything new.
Вереск had left a real downer of a relationship a few months ago. That, after two back-to-back seven-year ones. The guy she dumped had been a drug addict, and constantly lied to her face about big and small things to conceal the extent of his habit. When he "slipped up" - either in his lies or by overdoing his self-medication to the point where it was completely impossible to act normal - she would get upset and tell him she couldn't stand it, and beg him to change. But he was an expert at telling her exactly what she wanted to hear to calm her down and keep her on his side. This cycle repeated, and repeated, until she was emotionally crushed.
"It was the lying, really," she said. "I mean, I can understand addiction. Or maybe I just thought I did. I thought for a long time that if he would just be completely honest about what he was doing, I could manage it somehow. Like, manage to live with it. Because it would be hard, but it would be a known thing I could prepare for, right?"
I said nothing. I had my own experience with this, and it wasn't good.
"If I knew he was going to just be out of his mind for an entire day, and I knew he was safe somewhere, maybe I could arrange my schedule so I wasn't stuck waiting for him, and I wouldn't need to be disappointed and worried and ask him all these questions that he would just lie about. Or, if he was honest enough to tell me he really couldn't drive because he'd been drinking since eight in the morning, it would be a lot better than him smashing my car into a parking barrier and making up some weird story about a guy threatening him with a gun, then making excuses for why he never called a cop or even filed a police report, and then forgetting he made up the story at all and just saying his foot slipped, and there was no guy with a gun -- like, what are you talking about? Guy with a gun? When did I say that?"
She sighed. "In the end, I had to cut him off. I said I never wanted to see or hear from him again. And it was true. I mean, it had to be true. I can comfort myself with the idea that maybe it woke him up enough to make some real change. But if that happens, I won't know about it, because I can't ... care either way. Caring was how I kept getting pulled back in. So... Yeah."
After that imploded, she had taken six months off from all romance.
"At first it was all work. Healing from trauma is good for my job." She laughed. "I got so much done. My apartment is totally redecorated. It looks great."
She revealed that I was the first person she had seen, breaking the hiatus. I felt honored. We continued to talk, and I told her my traumatic stories from earlier in the year. As I spooled out the words to a willing audience, I blundered into a fresh perspective. We were technically on a date, which compelled me to tell the story in a way that sounded more settled, like I'd learned from it and done some kind of moving on - which I hadn't, at least not yet - because if I came across like I was stuck in the past, I would look like a jerk for even asking her on a date at all. Why would I do that, if she was just going to witness me moping for an afternoon? Of course, we were both doing some of that now, so...
Anyway, the thing I realized was, I had been using sex to feel more intensely connected to someone than I otherwise could be. I'd been doing that with Кэрол for months. And when things got complicated and her physical attention was split among several people, I felt deprived and nervous. The bigger pool of negative feelings demanded a bigger supply of positive ones to balance it out, making waves inside me that crashed back and forth, getting bigger and bigger until I couldn't stand it.
Some of the problem had been the huge pool of negative feelings from the rest of my life. Work stress, the end of my long relationship with Шеррила, the unfamiliar new house... But the problem was also Кэрол: We weren't actually a good match. Her lifestyle, her social circle, her priorities, her future plans, didn't mesh with mine at all. And worse yet, to get an emotional connection going with her I had to draw it out, almost from scratch every time we got together. What kept me coming back of course was the sex.
Yeah we talked a lot; we did social things; we shared some pretty legitimate romantic moments. But the actual point was the sex, because that's what it took to flush the physiological toilet in my head, draining all those negative feelings out: Pairing up with someone who didn't match me in a bunch of important ways but did match me in this one way, extremely well. Кэрол tore my fucking head off in bed, night after night, and that kept me from drowning in waves of anguish and disorientation.
This was mostly a rehash of things I'd already learned, but what struck me that day was the parallel with Моника: She had been using me exactly the same way I had been using Кэрол. By the time she met me, she had already broken up with her ex -- was already drowning in need. And when my commitment to Шеррила blocked her access to me, she felt the same despair, and tried various things to compensate, which failed.
The parallel came to me while I was describing it out loud to Вереск, and she nodded and told me it made sense.
"I think my six month break was me trying to avoid that, honestly," she said. "I mean, no judgement here. We all find a way to cope, right? But for me, after this last guy... The idea of going on even a single date felt terrifying. And you know, again, it was the lying. The idea of being lied to again just made my heart shrivel up."
"That sounds horrible," I said.
"It was! But I'm glad to be here," she said. "You seem nice. And hey, thanks for listening to this."
"Hey, likewise," I said.
Вереск wanted to set up a second date. I told her I would get in touch with her when I'd found a good time, though I doubted I would. I got on my bike and rode back home feeling triumphant, like I had reached a milestone in understanding. I don't think Вереск realized the depth of my ongoing obsession with Моника, and I was barely willing to admit it to myself, but because of it, I had wasted Вереск's time. I had no idea what she came away from our date thinking, and I was callous enough to not even care. I never contacted her again, and she never contacted me.
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Welcome back to Whatcha Reading! Here’s how we’re kicking off August:
We can try to reach intelligent aliens with radio waves or lasers or similar, but the dialogue would still be too slow.
It concerned a middle-school girls' basketball team, who had won some kind of vacation in a contest and was going around a tropical island solving a mystery. But in every scene, the entire team took part. Usually the dialogue started with whichever girl arrived in the room first, and continued as other girls streamed into the room until it was almost full. Whoever they were interrogating would always refer to them collectively, as “you girls”, and when they discussed the case amongst themselves they would never use each other’s names, and just pick another girl indiscriminately to have dialogue with.
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This Rec League was sent in by Anne:
Welcome back to Wednesday Links! (Is it Wednesday?)