Failure and fallout

The smartest women are inherently goal-setters. We set goals for everything – for our careers, for our family, and for our relationships. And once we’ve gotten to our mid-twenties, we’ve likely seen some achievement of our goals. We’ve established patterns for how we go about meetings our goals, and we’ve figured out how good planning often leads to better results. This goal-setting, planner-filling tendency is one of the reasons why it’s so damn hard for us to not only find a guy, but figure out whether or not the one we’ve found is worth keeping around.

For now, for me, the goal isn’t marriage or kids. It’s just to have a relationship that lasts for more than six months. I’m 26 and I’ve never spent a Valentines Day with a boyfriend. I’ve never brought anyone home for Thanksgiving. I’ve never had a guy I’m dating bring me chicken soup and tissues to ward off a nasty cold.

Which brings me to Peter, my most recent candidate for long-term, chicken-soup cooking, Valentines-Day-Card-Making, parent-meeting boyfriend. The only problem is that he didn’t quite fit “the plan.” Until Peter, I’ve always been attracted to older, more accomplished men. Most older guys don’t have the ego-centricity that men revert to in their 20s. They’re less and less concerned with getting a piece of ass and more concerned with having the same ass in their beds night after night. They are better, more giving lovers.

So when Peter told me he was pushing the tender age of 23, everything else about him became a warning sign of relationship disaster. Peter is so good looking it hurts (flag!). Every part of him is attractive. He could very literally be an underwear model(flag!). He’s smart(flag), ambitious(flag), and close to his family(flag flag).

Normally, these would be good things. I’d love to be dating a hot, smart, moralist. But I’d like that hot, smart, moralist to be at least over the age of 28. And the truth is that I was excited to date him, but I also felt like that cat looking at the steak underneath the primitive box-and-stick trap. I saw the steak. I saw the box. But I didn’t see the connection quite yet.


One night a few weeks into our relationship, he admitted to me that he’s pretty much happy all of the time. This admission came after a particularly bad day I’d had. It was so bad in fact, that it took five calls to my friend Katie and two hours to get out of the house. When I finally saw him that night, I timidly looked for comfort, for some empathy, and I ended up with, “I’m just happy all the time.”

Hardly the get-well card I was hoping for. And of course, fodder for more (perhaps) irrational conclusions about him. Peter had a fantastic upbringing. Not perfect, but filled with a lot of love. He was valedictorian and prom king. He still keeps in touch with seven friends from high school. Everything he’s done professionally has been a success, with the exception of his writing. Peter’s writing professors actually told him he needed to go out and experience the “cruel world” and then pick up the pen (which although that may be a bit harsh, may have some validity to it).
It was immeadiately apparent, at least in my mind, that because Peter had no tragedy, no heartbreak, no darkness in his life to speak of, that he wouldn’t be able to help me out with mine. So although he hugged me and kissed me and told me he was glad to see me, I couldn’t help the raised eyebrow reflex from working overtime.

We continued to have what he later characterized as “great dates.” He would come over and play scrabble. I would go over to his house to watch the Wire. We would go out with friends. And every time these dates ended, he would leave, or I would leave, and all I was ever sent home with was this throbbing sense of doubt.

I couldn’t figure him out. So I turned to the one place where you can’t hide your secrets. That’s right, Google. I googled Peter every which way I possibly could (and just so you know, I got an A in library science, where all we did was learn Boolean operators and how to use metadata), and was rewarded with more of nothing. What kind of person has NO results on Google?

I started to see the sickly green lining to this cloud right around New Years. After returning from his Christmas trip home (during which he called me almost daily), we had three more “great dates” in a very short period of time. During one of these GDs, he told me he had told his co-worker that his “girlfriend” had gotten him this great DVD for Christmas.

Really? I asked him. Yeah, he replied. But I think he was talking more about the story and less about the new pronoun.

Ok! Shit! I thought. Now I’m completely disarmed. Wait, don’t I want him to call me his girlfriend? He’s hot, check. He’s smart, check, He’s ambitious, check, but what the hell else is missing?

For the days of and around New Years, I went up to Lake Arrowhead with a bunch of friends. Peter was supposed to come up the day before New Years, and stay until New Years Day. The day before he was supposed to come, he left me this sad message about how he hated to deliver bad news, and that there was no way he could come up because of work. I was sad, sure, because everyone wants someone to kiss on New Years, and it’s so much better if that person is someone who calls you their girlfriend.

“I’ll call you on New Years Eve,” he said.

New Years Eve came and at 12 am, there were no missed calls on my phone. I called him, and caught him taking a bathroom break.

“Um, Happy New Year,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m downtown at a party, in the bathroom. How are you?” he slurred.
“Great. It’s so wonderful up here. I’m sad you couldn’t make it, but I’m glad you’re celebrating. I thought you were going to call?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re a better dater than I am,” he replied.
“Um, what? Yeah, OK, I guess I am. Anyway happy new year, and I’ll talk to you when I get back,” I said.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

I snapped my phone closed and threw it on the bed. Still not right. Something was still not right. He should have been happy to talk to me, and more importantly, I should have been happy to talk to him. I should have called him not because he didn’t call me, but because I wanted to genuinely wish him a happy year.

From there, things went so far downhill so fast, I thought maybe I'd had a concussion. He didn’t call me on New Years day, or the day after New Years Day, or the day after that. I was starting to make up stories about the cause of the descent almost daily. He found someone else. He gave me an STD and didn’t want to tell me about it. He’d had a traumatic brain injury, and forgot we’d spent time together naked.

After a cancelled date, I attempted to break up with him. If we’re postponing the inevitable, I texted him, better to just get it over with now. No, no, he assured me, it’s not like that. Fine, OK, I thought, not at all reassured.

A week later, I finally saw him. It had been two weeks and a lot of unreturned phone calls since we had had any face to face interaction. We met for drinks, hung out with my friends. For a moment, we were a normal pair. He bought me a drink and played with my hair and talked to my friends. I asked him what he was doing the next night, and he said he’d call so we could meet up after 9.

Well, as you can probably predict, 9 came and went with no phone call. So did 10 and 11 and 12 and actually, the whole of the next day. Finally, on Monday, I called him and left him a message:

“Hi Peter, It’s Amy. I don’t know what happened, but whatever it is I’d really appreciate an explanation. So if you can possibly find it in you to call me, that’d be great. Thanks!”

The next night, his number came up on the phone. Although I spent a lot of time lecturing him on how he needs to maintain his relationships despite the fact that his job keeps him busy, once we got down to the meat of the conversation, all I got was this:

“I thought I was being nice,” he said.
“By not calling me back? You thought you were being nice,” I said, incredulous.
“No, by um, telling you it was work,” he responded.
“Are you kidding me?”

In the end, he wished me luck, I said thanks, and we both decided we’d see each other around. It hurt, sure, the way that all rejections hurt. It’s that hollow feeling that burrows deep in your chest and just aches. It’s the thing that makes you want to give up your plan, and make a new plan, something that doesn’t involve other people. Peter was a mystery, but only in the way that I couldn’t identify him as an asshole right off the bat. I couldn’t figure out whether or not it was me, or it was him, because so much of him seemed to be right.

But I guess the great This American Life epiphany of this whole ordeal is that it’s not really about having a plan, or changing or plan. It’s coming to terms with the fact that this goal, unlike all other goals in your life, is only going to be achieved through incredible, gut-wrenching, heart-punching failure. And the real challenge of it all, especially for us, the ranks of ambitious, smart women, is how we accept this failure as a necessary part of our lives, and not hate ourselves for it in the morning.

Around the sugar water tank

Leave it to the birds

Oh right. The blog.

(I'm almost afraid to admit how much I love the new Shins album.)

Sometimes you forget why you do things. Or maybe, I forget why I do things. For a while, I forgot why I kept this thing. I forgot why I needed to write at all. These days I'm completely surrounded by people who are fantastic writers, and it's intimidating. Why bother, you know? I'm so behind. I'm not anywhere close to being a professional writer like I'd planned, so why maintain something that might indicate mediocrity? So I stopped making an effort, and it fell away.

But then other things quickly bubbled up in it's place. Drawing with cool japanese markers. Biking further and further away from my apartment. Flamenco. And it began to seem like a trifle, just another thing I played at.

Until, there was, ug, I hate to admit that this might be the reason, but a new boy came into my life. And he might not even turn into a romatic relationship, but he bumped something (not literally) that I guess had been dormant for a while. It's like when you move that bookshelf in your room to another corner, and suddenly your room looks totally different. Anyway, I've been really good so far with this one, even though it's only been a few days since our first (questionable) date (or not-date). I haven't sent any cute text messages or acted over-eager. I even jumped out of the car super-quick when he dropped me off after our maybe-date. We have another maybe-date to see the movie in the cemetary this weekend.

I was sooooo close to jumping the gun the other day thought, and the whole incident reminded me why this forum is important for me to keep up. It was a beautiful, hot, sunny Sunday afternoon, and I was super stressed out about work, freaking about things I couldn't control but were my responsibility anyway. I was looking for validation, from someone, anyone, and I thought about texting him. He gave me a few of his films to watch (he's doing a project for me for work, which is how we met), and they're actually good. I was going to text him something funny about his films, and see what his response was. But I didn't! I actually had the fortitude to think critically about the situation, and not mess it up. And I remember what I did with a lot of that nervous energy before, when I was actually dating (or something) people with some frequency. I wrote. A lot.

I've always sort of felt like writing, and likely all art, comes from a bubbling over of some emotional experience. When you can't hold something in your skin or your brain or your heart, it comes out. And it doesn't matter whether it's through the pen, the brush, the guitar string, or the flamenco shoe. It just has to come. Or else we go a little crazy, and our whole world gets thrown off. We stop communicating effectively, we begin looking outside ourselves for relief. And that's backwards you see, because it can't ever come from the other person.

Loose threads

(Tonight I'm listening to the Guillemots. Fantastic album. They're one of those bands I heard on the radio, really liked, and then forgot about. I'm so glad they wandered back to my ears.)

One snag can end an entire dress. A dress you love, a dress that falls on you and looks perfect. And then one day, you lean too close to a wall, and there's a nail there. An old, unassuming, just-barely-sticking-out nail that sticks it's hangnail into a tiny loop you can't even see. And then it all begins to unravel. Maybe you don't notice it the first time you wash it, but the second time you wash it, suddenly it's a hole. And your heart sinks, not really because of the garment, but because of the way it made you feel, even temporarily. You'll never have it again, at least not the same way. It's hard to replace a dress like that.

This is how my brain operates. Like everything will be lovely. I'll be productive and healthy, singing without noticing. And then the rusty nail comes out, and all it takes is one snag. One little thing that I'll do wrong, one thing that maybe I didn't even do wrong, but just think I did wrong, and it'll latch on and unravel all of my happiness. I'm actually starting to notice it more and more as it's happening, which I suppose is progress. The first thing that descends is the exhaustion. I become too tired to complete any of the tasks I assigned to myself, probably because I've spent all my emotional energy worrying about this thing. Then I resort to escapism, usually in the form of a movie or a book. Then I might eat something, not necessarily junk food, but something that makes me feel guilty about eating whatever I'm eating (tonight it was tofu, celery and a soy fudgicle). The lowest point is when I begin stressing about the fat that is clearly going to build up as a result of eating and stressing. It's a vicious cycle, and results in me feeling like a pile of tangled thread at the bottom of a junk drawer.

In addition to this, I've realized that I'll probably never be able to meet and date a man, because I have fucking issues. I hate it when guys throw their game at me. I hate it so much, I've discovered, that I end up turning away perfectly wonderful men. And yes, maybe the perfectly wonderful men were not perfectly wonderful for me, but I never find out, because I get so sick of their cheesy-ass bullshit that I don't give them a second chance. I just want them to be honest with me -- is that too much to ask? To let go of their normal come-to-the-party-in-my-pants lines and just talk to me, like a person who maybe they might like to connect with intellectually, and hey, what a nice bonus it is that we're sexually attracted to each other. Oh, but no, that's too much to ask. Guys seriously, girls know when you're coming onto them -- is subtlety out of the question? Or perhaps, could you for a minute stop undressing me with your eyes and just think about what we're talking about, or how I'm reacting to you? Amazing. I think I might just be actually, completely doomed to spend my life alone.

Sometimes lonliness is a purple blob

Ah, Valentine's day. The single person's day of punishment. As if we're not constantly reminded (see three or four posts ago for a fuller explaination of our reprimand) about how awful and bad it is to be single. There's an entire day devoted to people in love.

Instead of being bitter this year, I'm going to take a lesson from Mrs. Barbara Brodsky. I might even declare tomorrow BB Day. Why? Well, she's freaking smart and connected to some part of the universe that many of us don't wish to acknowledge or don't believe exists. What's interesting about her advice, or the advice that she's asked to pass on, is that it's so perfectly logical. She says that instead of denying that we feel pain, or lonliness or anger, we have to confront those feelings with love. We have to visualize the feelings, understand their role, and let them dissipate.

Something about this reminds me of what I know about AA. After meeting a few AA members and talking to them about their AA experiences, I realized that much of what they do in that group should be common practice. They are allowed to embrace their weaknesses, and ask for forgiveness. They are allowed to acknowledge publicly that they have this terrible part of themselves that leads to self-destruction, and publicly ask for help with that. They make the negative confrontable, and they use love and forgiveness to diffuse that negativity. They don't deny that it's there. Ever. They don't have to, because when they're in the meetings, no one judges, and when they're in public, they're saved by anonymity.

So what would we, the people who's poison is lonliness, do about our affliction? Is there a point where we take refuge in lonliness because it's familiar? Because it's easy? When do we get to stand up and say, hello, my name is ___________ and I'm freaking unbearably lonely. And not lonely because we don't have wonderful people around us as friends or family. But lonely because we're missing that significant other. Lonely because we hope there's one other person out there who can help make this existence slightly less painful.

But let me get back to BB. The thing I really like about BB's philosophies is that they do not allow for the denial of any part of us. The anger, the depression, the self-depricating critic. They're all there. I've been assigning them colors. Anxeity is orange, a seething orange mass that has scribbles around the edges like a supernova threatening to burst. So I think about it, I see it, and I watch it dissipate into a cool blue calm. Anxiety was there, it was present, I accepted it, and let it go. Lonliness is purple, a deep, dark ocean floor purple. It's frosted -- not like the flakes -- more like one of those black ice slicks that meet unfortunate drivers in the middle of winter. Purple gets thawed by a fresh spring green, and wisps away when I can make it.

So that's what I'll be doing tomorrow. Instead of dismissing the holiday, I'll be reclaiming it. Lonliness doesn't have to be bad, and it doesn't have to be destructive. It is one of those things, part of the human experience that just is, no matter who we are, no matter who we're with. I'm not going to fight it anymore.

Wine stains are hard to wash out

This will probably sound trite, and slightly emo. Sorry.

What makes us go to the darkest parts of who we are? What makes us think the worst of ourselves, or of others? What makes us seek validation outside ourselves, when we know everything should be in place? We have the good job, the good people in our lives, and still there's something that pulls us down from that white fur-lined slot called comfortable?

It's Thursday at 8:38, I just got home from a wine tasting with a brilliant group of women, and I feel like that red wine poured down my throat and so deep into my soul that my whole insides are stained a darker red. Either that, or the wine pulled back the thin layer of rational thought that was protecting me from myself.

Is it capitalism? The idea that what we have is never enough, that there's always something else we could have, something else we should have, that leaves us empty even after a perfect social interaction?

And then of course, I attach it to the unattainable. I've started a secret admirer correspondence with someone who has absolutely no idea who I am, which is so completely safe for me, because even if he rejects me, he'll never know who I am. Simultaneously, this supplies me with an outlet for whatever jagged feeling that's stretching out my pores trying to escape. It's like a longing that I want to have, that feels good and awful at the same time. I feel longing and know that whatever semblance of love I feel for this person will go unfulfilled. That's comfortable somehow, because I can control it. I realize now that it's not about finding someone. It's about accepting the fact that finding that someone is completely out of your control, and no matter how I try to manipulate that, it will not get me closer to finding that someone. That someone will find his way here. It will happen, as all things do, in there own time. I'm not advocating fate of course, but just the natural course of things, if those two are different.

And the other weird thing about this feeling is, is that it not only stems from my singledom, it also stems from a feeling like I am in some way intellectually inadequate. I've not felt like that in a long time. But now I am surrounded by writers, brilliant fucking writers, who know exactly how to express themselves with these words, with these letters I so often struggle with. Words that are my friends and enemies all in the same phrase. I want the thing, whatever it is that switches on in these people that makes them see things in words, only I don't want to envy. I just want it to be. I want that part of my brain to switch on, and not to struggle to get out a sentence that I'm proud of.