Be Yourself. Really?

Dating advisors will tell you: for dating success Be Yourself.

Worst. Advice. Ever.

You, like me, are a sloppy mess of insecurities, half-understandings, moldy old baggage, soiled laundry and fear. A delightful and sexy melange of those elements, but still, we're all rocky road muffins.

I hardly need warn you about revealing too much of the truth about yourself on a date. Dating isn't based on truth; dating's based on outfitting our dates with our fantasies. Ignoring non-compliant data allows us to dream the dream.

However, matters can progress. Date the right person long enough and you'll find that they've either figured out the stuff you've been avoiding, or they're ready to hear it. In either case it's a milestone to know that:

a.) There's no need to withhold any more, and

b.) Someone still thinks well enough of you despite them knowing the awful truth.

That's the time you'll find yourself being yourself without being conscious of it. 







Bottoms Up, Flawed Ones.

Mini-Breaks and Major Breakdowns: Dating and Travel.

Inevitably, when a relationship reaches a certain point, the idea of travelling somewhere together hauls itself into view. Travel is to relationships as derivatives trading is to your retirement account - when it works it's great, but when it doesn't, everything blows up.

Yes, I'm wary of the first-time trip. Having been through a few of these cycles, I'm acutely aware of their approach. I can smell impending mini-break from six weeks out, so attuned are my senses to the signals. Michigan deer in hunting season are less sensitive than I am to the sound of "romantic getaway" being Googled on my girlfriend's Galaxy. So good am I at sniffing "long weekend" in the air, that I can predict both the kind of travel she's contemplating AND the cost of room service once we get there.

And I can do this for any woman, once I've known her for a month. It's a gift.

The reason I'm skittish about travelling for the first time is the unpredictability factor. Travel can be exhausting, exasperating, boring, scary, disillusioning, intrusive, stressful and challenging. And that's just the ride to the airport. In day-to-day non-travel dating, we avoid almost all of the above reactions, so that if some unexpected emotions arise, there's always a way out - either party can just go home.

When you're away on a trip, that option is eliminated. You must deal with the moments as they occur, no matter what else is going on. The pressure here is that travel puts you at the whim of other people and a universe that delights in creating mazes for those far from home. Regular life is all about us controlling the environment, to steal a military term. Travel life is all about reacting to the environment, as well as to your companion.

My advice to men is to always be ahead of this curve. Don't wait until she suggests a weekend leaf-peeping in New Hampshire, or a mid-week tryst on South Beach. Make sure that you have a plan and pre-empt her ideas. When you figure she's on the verge of suggesting a trip, surprise her, and present it as a package that you have organized completely. She need do nothing but pack.

The reasons for doing this are many, but boil down to a couple of points. One, you must control the length of your travel. To start with, shorter is always better. Two, you must figure out a place that she will like, but that fits you. This really only applies to the first and perhaps second time away, because it will become clear very early in the process if she's a good traveller or not. Being in a place, doing things that you have had time to pre-think will make you less stressed. You are minimizing the unexpected. In turn, that will allow your lady to sense your mastery of this travel biz, and remain non-frazzled accordingly.

Which brings us to the important part. Because travel will face you both with having to figure out stuff without being able to run away, it's a great test. Even the most benign Saturday night away at a small hotel somewhere is a concentrated slice of a future life together. If there is a future with this woman, the way she handles everything from the TSA drone to the fact that she forgot her phone charger will tell you much about the real person behind the dating persona.


A good-humoured, calm travelling partner, I posit, will make a great life partner.




Bottoms Up, Caravanerais.

Your Fear of Rationality Makes Me Uncomfortable.

Is it possible that we've just gone too far? Have we invested our relationships with so much emotion that we've lost track of the purpose of dating and being with someone? What's going on here?

Like lots o' folks, I don't handle conflict particularly well, especially with the women, and more so when I'm "with" a woman. Painful as they are to face, breakups are moments of high stress, even if we're only a few dates in. However, why should it be a matter of tears or anger or recrimination or harsh words when the truth is spoken?:

Sorry, Lena, this just isn't working for me.

In the moment, I get that some emotion is right and fair. But that's why we date, to discover if there's more to "us" than a shared initial superficial attraction. When it becomes clear to one or the other things aren't working, the right/only/mandatory thing to do is to call "time" and do it in as nice a way as possible.


If you're on the receiving end of this, your job is to look beyond your emotion. When someone's being open and truthful, accept it as an act of real friendship. Only bums and losers continue on in something by pretending to themselves and others. False affection is the ultimate betrayal; another word for people like that is sociopath.

At root, this is about figuring out why we find ourselves in a place were emotion is the centre of all relationships. Look around: in boyfriend/girlfriend situations, in parent/child relationships, even at work, it's how you feel that counts. Of course, emotions are important, but should they supersede logic, intellect, practicality and clear-headedness?

I think not.

Fear, in my opinion, is the driver of all this reliance on the emotional response. We fear not ever finding the right person; we fear that the one we thought was the right person will leave; we fear how we look to the outside world. Of course, this more or less proves my point, because fear itself (in this sphere of thought) is the most irrational emotion, and allowing it to drive anything related to abstracts like relationships is the height of illogicality. We've translated fear of physical harm into fear of emotional harm - trust me, there's no bottom to our emotional pool. If you lose some emotion today, you can always turn on the spigot tomorrow.



Bottoms Up, Calm and Rational Exes.

Cerealization

Finding the right person can be a chore or a delight, depending upon how you look at it. Yes, first dates can be energy-sapping. Yes, meeting so many incompatibles is dispiriting. Yes, you will question your will to live. Too often you'll wonder how so many weird, self-absorbed, boring, ill and frankly unappealing people think they might have a future with your bright, optimistic, balanced, gorgeous self. But we must endure.

I compare the process to deciding upon a breakfast cereal - in a world of infinite choice, start by precluding huge swathes. For instance, anyone over the age of ten should consider avoiding any cereal with an animal or super-hero mascot. Then there are the key words 'pops', 'frosted', 'loops', and 'smacks', all of which tell you that nutrition can be found in the box, but only inasmuch as you think cups of sugar are good for you.

The big-picture dating prospects to avoid IMO are folks with an untreated depressive illness; those who have any kind of addictive partiality; anyone with unresolved parental or family difficulties; and anyone who doesn't floss.

Shoot me, but I believe in immaculate oral hygiene.

Given that first dates - or a bunch of them strung together - are exhausting, we can filter a lot of maybes beforehand by figuring if any of the big deal-breakers (above) pertain. You can get pretty good at ferreting out the info you need with well-timed pre-date questions, eg:

So, are you an alcoholic?

or

I'm on anti-depressants myself. You too?

See how I did that without alerting them?

Once it looks as if they're not Froot Loops or Cap'n Crunch, then a first date is worth a shot. Still and all, low expectations will keep you mentally upright, because even the best filters are only a start.


Bottoms Up, Shoppers.

Crazy Motherfucking Bitch

 Miss W pic credit.

There is no pleasing this woman.* She looks at you and observes potential unfulfilled, possibilities unattained. There's no way around it - she sees you as a compromise, a worthy non-profit cause goofy enough to love, not smart enough to admire. We muddle through, chatting up an acceptance storm, nibbling on settling-brand cheese, drinking best-I-can-get wine. Who cares, it's approximately where everyone else is at, right?

It's a downer scenario. There are plenty around like it; indeed, I've been in at least one affair like this. But I'd like to offer some optimism. There is hope if we recognize the following:

1. Love is waking up every morning wanting nothing more than to make the other person's day better.

The difference between dalliance and to-die-for is motivation. 






*Obviously I am not impugning the fetching Miss W, shown. She's a paragon of selflessness.

Bottoms Up, Upward Managers.

Man 1.0

Photo credit. 

Civilization depends in large part upon men curbing their instincts. Restraint, self-discipline, filtering, gratification denial; call it what you like, it's all about out-thinking the first reaction.

In a monogamous relationship, it's natural for a woman to want to see a little (or, umm, a lot?) of the unrestricted male. I don't mean violence, of course. That's where trust comes in. But for everyone's benefit, raising the gate on a few more basic instincts leads to a happier experience. How many times have I heard women ask:

How do you really feel?

or

Just let go!

or variations thereof.

Not so easy. Curtailing the civilization software and (temporarily) re-installing Man 1.0 requires practice and understanding. My practice and your understanding.

Now. Where are those 5 1/4" floppy disks?



Bottoms Up, Coders.

Sex With Attitude

Repellent thought that it is, I guess that our parents build the foundations of our attitude to sex. Inbuilt drives to reproduce work on one level, obviously, but as anyone who has ever asked a complete stranger for sex knows, drive needs a driver - or a chauffeur, really, to get where it wants to go. Smoothing out the rough edges of animalism helps us accommodate that inner beastie, and is partially the reason parents exist; to tell us how.

In other words, our parents give us the architecture by which we think about and approach sex.

Let's contemplate that for a minute or two: Your parents create the framework for your sex life. By sex life, I am not talking about the reproductive blarney. I'm talking about how you feel about your feelings, how you deal with the irrationality of attraction, or how you resolve conflicts around fidelity or abstinence.

The problem that I see is that we entrust this very important job to two amateurs who are probably embarrassed to even consider their darling sixteen-year-old fucking like a minx. Which is probably why in the end we learn more about what sex means - or should mean - from our peers and media. That starts in one's teenage years and they hardly seem better choices. At least our peers provide a kind of library of sex-facts, a sort of TeenBonkWiki. None of the information is likely any good, but at least one can pick and choose from all the foolish notions out there in the school quadrangle.

In the end, most of us rely on the time-honoured methods: experience, advertisements and porn, although I guess someone has 'rents who rocked at telling it like it is.




Happy family from here. [link] Don't bother reading the article.

Edited for too many partiallys, a word of which I am apparently partial.

Emotional Baggage

I didn't answer Meg when she asked if new relationships are held back by the way we made previous relationships work. Do we sabotage fresh love with the baggage and duct tape of those gone before?

The unavoidable answer is yes.

There is a glimmer of hope, however. I believe that simple acknowledgment of the fact of good and bad in life, aka experience, means that in future we can choose better ways of behaving. That will allow for better relationships.

Furthermore, I believe that approaching people with the open, innocent view of the child makes a difference. Even people we know intimately seem different when we consciously drop the history we have with them. Human mental file-keeping is terrible, especially when it comes to others. We make god-awful eyewitnesses.

So my answer to Meg is that although experience cannot be unwound, it need not bind us. If we look upon the world and everyone anew each day, it might make the difference we're looking for.