Saturday's Correspondence: The Dating World

As many of you know from reading my blog, I've had my fair share of bad, depressing issues and experiences with dating and am incredibly relieved to be experiencing some of the better aspects of the dating world. A handful of my close friends have recently complained of their struggles in finding Mr./Mrs. Right and my nieces are in the process of entering this very ominous world, so I thought I would start my "Saturday's Correspondence" with a letter to the dating community...

Dear dating community,

Dating, falling in and out of love, and finding and losing companionship almost cost me my life! Since my late elementary school interest in girls, I’ve always used love, or the dream of love, as a way to hide the bad wiring in my brain, which in turn made me the quarter-ton man that I was. I actually thought that love could fix all problems. “All you need is love,” right? I even got to the point that when women stopped loving me, I would actually love them more to make up for the deficit. I can now admit that this vicious cycle became so awful that it caused me to weigh the value of my own life on a number of occasions, followed by the indescribable hell of deciding if I had the nerve to put my pain to an ultimate end.

That said, I have loved and still love dating, especially first dates. There is nothing better than meeting a person on some intimate level and having the opportunity to share a little piece of you with someone else. It is an opportunity to sell yourself, learn new and interesting things, and share thoughts and feelings that wouldn’t normally be shared in a group setting. Because so much information is being exchanged, every date is an incredible opportunity to learn something new about yourself. There is nothing more refreshing than shining a light on some aspect of your identity which puts you one step closer to definitively stating who you are as an individual.

With my love for the "art of seduction" in mind, I have to say that I’m a big fan of yours! You have so many incredible qualities that make you special. Because of my “fan-ness,” it would mean so much to see you find happiness. You see, I have a great deal of experience in this department because both my parents could be considered “serial-re-marriers!” Somewhere along the line, my parents lost sight of the emotional driving force behind their instinct for companionship. I think something happened to each of them that caused them to date in an attempt to fill self-perceived holes in their individual identities. At that point, they dated and married in an attempt to make themselves whole, which just doesn’t work. The only person that can fill the “holes in your soul (Aerosmith)” is you!

So, in dating, one should be more interested in finding someone that is a compliment to their existing life instead of somebody to make their life complete. Because if you date for the latter, you aren’t being fair to the person you’re seeing and more importantly, yourself. If you’re dating to compliment, instead of complete, it is going to be much easier to find that sufficient somebody and increase your chances of making the relationship work.

Now granted, there are a lot of duds out there and I would never suggest settling for anybody. Instead of seeing this as a chore, see it as an opportunity to expand your horizons. You have the opportunity to share your true self with a number of different people. This opportunity can be emotionally fulfilling and tremendously gratifying. It isn’t until you start sharing something with other people that you can determine its true value. Even though this transaction is so fulfilling, you must always be mindful of people that try to take less than they offer. Don’t take this personally; just know that it’s one of the driving forces behind the human experience and something that only you can control!

A concept that used to terrify me was the idea that every time you have an intimate moment with someone (doesn’t have to be sexually) that you leave a piece of yourself with that person, as they do with you. What I also didn’t realize at that time is that you don’t always need a partner to find intimacy. It turns out the most common form of intimacy is what we’ll call personal intimacy. Now, I’m not talking masturbation here, but if you stop and think, you experience intimate moments almost every day! The Buddhists call this moment nirvana, or an escape from suffering. Nirvana is that moment when your mind, body, and soul are completely at one and happens to be the ultimate goal of Buddhism. Through my education on Buddhism, I understood nirvana to be this ultimate life goal through meditation, but I was wrong. You don’t practice meditation in an attempt to bring your soul into alignment, but to heighten your awareness to a point that you have the ability to recognize those moments of nirvana in your daily life. Also, when you become aware of this flash of personal intimacy, how long can you live in that single moment of joy and ecstasy. Personal intimacy (nirvana) can come from playing or even listening to a piece of music, from creating art, from getting a good grade or positive performance evaluation, from meeting a goal, or from resting your head on your pillow with the belief that you did your absolute best!

I used to believe that if intimacy left parts of me behind, that I could actually give so much of myself that eventually there wouldn’t be anything left of me to share; the prostitute/porn star effect. My life got so out of control because I was only aware of partnered intimacy and I felt that every tiny piece of my soul was costing me increasingly more than I could afford. So, I closed off my heart, walled up my apartment with newspapers and pizza boxes, and shared the only aspect of intimacy that I had left, food and alcohol, with the only person I thought I could trust.

What I have learned from later experiences and reflections on those dark, dark days absolutely blew my mind. Who you are has nothing to do with how much of your soul you have left, but an evaluation of where and how much of your identity that you’ve left behind. It isn’t about what is inside of you, but of the circumstances surrounding those moments of nirvana and how long you managed to live in those particular moments. Now, living in one particular moment for too long can be detrimental, just ask the 40-year-old, self-proclaimed high school hero, but that is a different discussion for a different day.

In all aspects of life, including dating, you must remember that the only person that can love you indiscriminately is yourself. After that, everything and everybody else is just icing on the cake.

“Your best friend is you. I’m my best friend too. We share the same views and hardly ever argue. Eat spam from a can, watch late night C-SPAN, and rock out to old school Duran, Duran!” Jimmy “Pop” Ali; the Bloodhound Gang

Expressions like “love at first sight” or “fall head over heels in love” are expressions used by people that are trying to hide their perceived faults and insecurities with the companionship of another person. Take it from a self-professed, chronic “love at first sight” guy. People fall immediately in love when they don’t have love for themselves. I used see a lot of truth behind the expression, “behind every great man is a greater woman that supports him.” I thought that if a woman that I loved and respected was holding on to one of my hands, that I could successfully reach for the stars with the other. I’ve said it before, but what I’ve come to discover is that if you first find your star and tightly grasp it with both hands, then you soul’s compliment will be the person that just so happens to be tightly grasping that very same star!

Best wishes and enjoy the journey,

Andy

Winnie Cooper, where have you gone?

So, I'm on campus today and I keep seeing this girl that looks so familiar. She walks by, I stare and smile, she smiles, and we go our separate ways. Two hours later, we pass each other in the hall, and I could just swear that I know this girl. I mean, this is a beautiful woman. Long, flowing black hair, great smile, petite figure, a face that looked like an expensive porcelain doll, and she looks like somebody I've seen at least a million times. At this point, I almost say something, but I’m hesitant because she doesn’t seem to recognize me, and I’ve got one of those faces that everybody recognizes. I wish I was just being arrogant, but not a week goes by that somebody doesn’t ask me if they know me, or did I go to school in Terre Haute, or didn’t you get arrested once in…… As I’m sitting in the lunch plaza, this girl walks past me again and by this point it’s driving me crazy.

“Excuse me miss, do I know you from somewhere?” She stops looks around and asks, “Me?”

“Yes, you. I swear you look so familiar and it is absolutely driving me bananas!”

“Bananas, huh…. That’s a funny expression. I’m sorry, but you just don’t look familiar. Sorry.”

I thanked her for her time and she found a table to sit and eat. I finished my lunch and was in the process of throwing my tray away when it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I ran over to her table, which was full of about twelve, 18 to 21 year old women that looked like the cast of 90210 and I exclaimed, “Holy shit! You’re Winnie Cooper! You look just like Winnie Cooper! I’m sure guys tell you that all the time!”

“Who?” she asks…. If you only saw the look on her face, you’d swear I had been speaking Vietnamese or told her about a cowboy that rode into town on Tuesday, stayed two days, and left on Tuesday!

“That’s Samantha….. What the hell are you talking about?” asks another one of the lost dozen.

“Winnie Cooper, she was a character on the Wonder Years….. She was Kevin’s dream girl….. She was everybody’s dream girl! You know; from the TV show…. Not ringing a bell?”

As I’m staring at 12 zombies, I fade off with a, “yeah, I think her real name is Danica Mackellar or something.”

“Oh, you mean Danica Patrick? She’s super hot! Are you trying to tell Samantha that she’s hot? Are you asking her out? Who are you?”

I put my head down and walked away with a “sorry to bother you” and “enjoy your lunch.”

I don’t generally get embarrassed, but that encounter left me at least a little anxious, to say the least. So I threw away the rest of my lunch and headed off to my next meeting. After the meeting, I’m walking down the hall and I don’t believe it; I’m crossing paths with Winnie Cooper, or Samantha whomever, for a fifth time today! I keep my head down as I pass, but she puts her hand on my shoulder and stops me.

“Hey…. I wanted to thank you…. That girl, Winnie whatever, she’s like really pretty. That was a really nice thing to say, and you don’t even know me. I’m touched.”

I just about jumped out of my skin. It wasn’t because of the hand on my shoulder, or her level of attractiveness, but because somebody actually understood what I was saying! I kept my bone structure inside my skin, washed all emotion from my face, cleared my throat (unsuccessfully I might add), and responded in this raspy, emphysema type voice and said, “Oh… (throat clear; this time successful) you do know what show I was talking about.”

“Oh no….. I’m sorry,” she replied. I looked up the Wonder Years on IMDB and that girl is really pretty, but uh….. Maybe I’ll watch that show sometime.”

“You know,” I responded, “I wouldn’t bother. The show was pretty terrible and Fred Savage hasn’t been in anything good since The Princess Bride (again, blank stare), but that Winnie Cooper was something spectacular.”

And as I was walking away, something occurred to me….. Where have all the dream girls gone?

By dream girls, I mean the type of women guys would fall in love with on network TV and resent their girlfriends for not being as hot and cool as those Thursday night beauties. You know, the beautiful dream of some poor sap’s life that was so unattainable that she could be considered the antagonist of the show. The match that wouldn’t ever happen in a million years, but as the show’s final episode would premiere, this hapless son of a bitch gets the girl and America celebrates in joy and relief as Kevin and Winnie ride off into the sunset or Ross and Rachel finally make it work!

I used to all but pray to see that moment when I was growing up. If Ross could end up with Rachel, then maybe there was a hope with the girl I was smitten with on the cheerleading squad or even the girl in the science club. And in the final months of my long trip down to the bottom of the barrel, as I lived “protected” from the world by my piles of pizza boxes, empty liquor bottles, and newspapers from the floor to the ceiling, I was inconsolable as Dr. Shepherd left Meredith Grey to get back together with his wife. Meredith was heartbroken, and I’m ashamed to say so was I. I thought he could see past her dysfunction and love her no matter what, and as my weight climbed to one quarter of a ton, and the depression continued to sedate the neurons in my brain, I too was losing faith in that dream girl to save me.

I will clarify by saying that I was no doubt extremely drunk, but the general trauma stuck with me for weeks. Why would Meredith (me in this case) go on living if she didn’t have anybody that understood her?

And the problem was that these protagonists, in my mind, we’re totally deserving of the glory. Of that group of friends, Ross was the smartest and most successful. Kevin’s determination was admirable, to say the least. Ed was an accomplished lawyer, handsome, charming, and charismatic as he perused after Carol Vesey. Meredith was a surgeon from a famous family, but season after season, America would scowl together as asshole after asshole joined the show and didn’t appreciate the gift of America’s dream girl as our hopeless little hero would be devestated before trying to find new ways to steal away her heart. For me, it was just too close to real life, but there I was, looking for the instance that broke the rule.

Now all of this talk no doubt seems pretty irrational, but that's just it. I was absolutely irrational! I was operating under a very misguided set of ideals. I was emotionally ill.

What’s funny is that type of show doesn’t even have an ounce of my interest for me anymore. If it isn’t Entourage or Heroes, then it isn’t even worth my time. I just don’t care if “Grey and McDreamy” get back together and I think Scrubs is over and I don’t even want to know what happened to “JD and Elliott,” because the truth is, I found my dream girl. She’ll be the first to admit that she doesn’t look like Jennifer Anniston or Sarah Chalke, but through episode after episode, she’s got me inspired to overcome and endure whatever obstacles arise to bring about a happy resolution at the end of the day. I find her absolutely irresistable. She is my happy ending. She is my best friend.

I wasn’t intending this to be so sappy, but my “Queen” has been out of town for the last few days helping a good friend who is being treated for breast cancer that has metastasized to one of her lungs. I couldn’t believe just how lost I was when she was gone. Not to mention that when I was presented with the opportunity of doing just about anything I wanted with my free time, I watched a few movies, caught up on some sleep, did some laundry, straightened up the house, and read a little. This beer swilling, overindulgent, life of the party has finally found his life’s center. I have finally found home.

Thinking back about all of my dream girls, both from television and friendships in the past, I don’t think that I really wanted them, but I wanted to be good enough to deserve them. I wanted to have the appearance, skill set, and confidence to be somebody that the “top girls” wanted to be with. It’s almost as if it was a way for me to imagine that my inabilities and insecurities didn’t exist. That would also mean that these issues have been developing inside me since I was in junior high school! I wanted to be Ross, Kevin, Ed, JD, and Dr. Grey because I was going to mixers and running away from girls that asked me to dance!

"All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone
tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were
often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking
for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I,
could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my
expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born
with: that I am nobody but myself."~Ralph Ellison, “Battle Royale”

I can’t believe it, but I finally found me! It took me almost 27 years, 507 pounds (less my 165), countless trips to Taco Bell, pounds and pounds of skittles, more beers than I’d like to admit, a few recreational drugs, and a minor arrest or two, but I found my center; my peace. With this knowledge in my back pocket, it is only upward from here. Sure, there will be the occasional bump in the road, there always is, but as long as I stay true to who I am, happiness and peace will be close by for the rest of my days. What’s funny is that I actually planned on having it all figured out by now. Since I was 14, I had it all planned to be done with graduate school, get married at 27, and to live out my days in peace, harmony, and bliss. So, I’m not married and I’ve broken just about every moral absolute I grew up with, but as I see it, I’m right where I wanted to be, when I wanted to be it. I thought I was lost. It turns out that I’m right on track!

"Objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are..."

My life has been plagued with bad relationships. Until recently, I lacked the confidence to demand that I be treated properly so it allowed women to walk all over me. I never thought I was good enough for the relationships that I was in and they used it to their advantage.

The other day, my girlfriend and I were eating dinner and she asked me how much of my thinking and behavior is affected by previous relationships. I struggled to come up with the first one, but since then I realize that I'm a fucking mess with all sorts of baggage clogging my way of thinking. It amazes me that I expect the worst from an absolutely incredible woman because every other woman I dated treated me like garbage. I'm a smart, level-headed man, but when it comes to relationships I'm neurotic bordering on insanity.

I've been conditioned to expect my partner to do and think the exact opposite of what I think and feel and when I find a woman that I match up with so well, I'm nervous that it's just some elaborate ruse. I know in my mind the truth about her, but these ne-jerk reactions are a tremendous inconvenience and could potentially ruin a really healthy relationship. It's been so long that I can hardly see their faces anymore, but the affects of those bad relationships still remain.

Meat Loaf once wrote, "I hear that ugly, coarse, and battered voice and he's right behind me now and he's gaining ground.... But it was long ago and it was far away, oh god, it seems so very far; and if life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car...."

I was scared to make improvements in my life because I knew that the daemons from my past would haunt me wherever I ventured and that they would cause me to fall further the higher I got in life. Because it isn't where you end up that is painful; it's how far you fall. That's the problem with life. "Objects in the rear view mirror appear closer than they are." If I'm not careful, I'll be so focused on the pain in the rear-view and I'll crash into something catastrophic. Every day is new. Every day is different. Addicts in recovery say that "today is the first day of the rest of my life." I need to pay better attention to those words.

My past sucks, but today was one of the best days of my life. Nothing really special happened except I worked on improving my life, I woke up and will go to sleep next to the woman of my dreams, and I got to cook for my family. I've spent my whole life looking backwards and missed the joy right in front of my face. Life will be so much different without starring at that rear-view mirror. I think I'll figure it out though. Besides, most cars in Indiana don't have rear-view windows anyway..... ;)

What to do when words don't seem to help....

As I continue to get older, it seems that the effectiveness of my words seems to becoming less and less. I'm a very genuine, honest person and in the past, people in need of an emotional boost would flock to me because I was always there with a compliment. If you have nice eyes, I'm going to tell you that you have nice eyes. If you've lost weight, generally, I'm going to notice and compliment you on your hard work. It seems that as I continue to age, and my peer group continues to age, the world has taken it's toll on people. Now, those same compliments seem to go unnoticed.

My lady friend, whom I refer to as "rockstar" on this blog, is the most incredible woman that I've ever met. She is fun to be around. She is full of life and energy. She is sooo seductive and absolutely sexy. I literally worship the ground that she walks on. I compliment her all the time, not because I'm trying to get somewhere, but because she has no many things that are so right that I just feel compelled to list all of her positive qualities. I will admit that sometimes I'll tell her how pretty her smile is when she isn't smiling just to get her to smile. Let me tell you, when she smiles it's really as if time stands still. She has such a great heart and soul that just radiates in bright, colorful rays outward when she smiles and it really makes you feel fortunate that you were there to witness it.

Sorry, I got off track. Anyway, it seems that a lot of the compliments that I pay this woman seem to "bounce off." I sometimes get the feeling she doesn't believe the nice things I say about her or maybe she thinks there is some sort of agenda behind them. This is a very common tale. As we get older, words just become lip service (sorry for the bad pun). People have been lied to so much as their lives progress that they get to where the really don't believe half the things we say to each other, even compliments about each other.

So, since words have lost their utility, let me tell you what I'm doing right now. I'm lying on the floor of my bathroom, with one hot pad under my lower back. I've got another hot pad under my upper back. My feet are over the side of the tub soaking in warm water while I've got bags of ice on each of my knees. My laptop, fellow bloggers, is on my stomach and I can see the screen because I have a rolled up towel under the back of my head. I ache in just about every muscle group I have. Why am I in so much pain? Today, I laid 1.6 tons (approximately) in a nice orginized fashion for the final step in the brick sidewalk that I've been putting together for "rockstar." I spent all day with my 360 pound stature hunched over and squatting placing each and every one of the few thousand bricks into their proper location. I would have gotten around to finishing this task earlier in my vacation, but I was busy doing other things for her such as hanging a new front door, fixing some steps, doing yard work, and trying to fix an ice machine. In the last few weeks, if I haven't been eating or sleeping, I've been doing some sort of job for her or researching on the internet how to do the job she needed done.

The funny thing is that she has said more than once that I don't have to do any of these jobs to get laid or for us to maintain our relationship. So why do I do these things for her? If words aren't going to do what they were intended then I'm going to have to try even harder to prove to her how I feel about her and how much I appreciate being with her. She can believe me when I call her amazing maybe 40 percent of the time, but EVERY time she walks out her new front door and along her new brick sidewalk (or even when they're her old front door and old brick sidewalk) she'll remember that I thought she was so amazing that I decided to use my vacation time to struggle and sweat as hard as I possibly could just to put a smile on her face.

Physical contact is great. Kissing makes me feel so special. Sex is absolutely incredible, but there is nothing better that giving a little bit of your time, strength, and maybe even a little of yourself in a selfless way for somebody that you care for very deeply. It's what makes relationships so special. In my opinion, communication in a relationship is very important, but nothing tops the lengths one goes to in an attempt to put a smile on the face of the person they care for so deeply. It's with that in mind that my alarm is set so that I can go over to her house and get some more work done before I have to go to class. I'm such a very fortunate man that I can't even put it into words. I guess you will all have to come by and see the sidewalk to know what a special person she really is.

3:30 am is a great time to start blogging.....

So, where do I begin? I have a final at 10:30 tomorrow morning and I can't sleep. I was a little tired when I started reviewing at 9:30 so I decided to make myself an iced mocha-chino (with sugar-free mocha and skim milk of course) with a triple shot of espresso. I'm not going to see the inside of my eyelids anytime soon. I'm in the process of this huge life change, which I'll elaborate on at a later date, and I've decided that it's time to start writing about my life. That isn't to say that I'm any sort of role model, far from it, but I've made a lot of mistakes and intentionally done some pretty stupid things that just so happen to be hilarious. I intend to use this blog as a way to share some of those stories and to discuss things that are going on in my life right now.

I wish I could tell you that tonight is one of those funny story nights, but I'm really just not in the mood. Maybe that's because my final is in 7 hours and sleep is nowhere in sight. Since I'm in this exhaustion generated philosophical mood, I guess I'll go ahead and ask the question that's been on my mind recently:

What makes sex so special?

It is the most incredible experience, but what about it makes it so special? I used to only have sex in very serious relationships, so I mis-guidedly thought sex was so special because it was an exercise in love. I was mistaken.

Is it the intimacy and vulnerability that a sexual situation involves?

I've been in therapy for a few months now and its been nothing but intimacy and vulnerability. I can honestly say that I'm not desperate to go see my therapist in the middle of the night when I have the most incredible dream.

I know that sex is so very special, but I have a very hard time describing why. That is one very big problem in talking about sex is that there isn't a common vocabulary. It is so hard for somebody to understand what you're saying when everyone uses different words to describe their feelings. Doctors or mechanics have no problem communicating and understanding each other because they were all educated using the same vocabulary. When we talk about sex, we could all be saying the exact same thing, but it makes us (at least me) feel like we're out of touch with the rest of the world.

For me, sex reminds me of the first time I ever kissed a girl. We had been dating for weeks and I think she was about to dump me because I would never make a move. One night I went to kiss her on the cheek to say goodbye and our lips met. It was one of those moments that felt like it lasted forever. It was one of those moments where I felt like nobody else existed in the world, but us. I have had thousands of kisses since then, but no kiss ever compares to that first one. Sex, on the other hand, is very much like that first kiss. When two people are locked in that moment it's almost as if time stands still. As the passionate kisses and incredible motion are followed by this unbelievable euphoria, it gives you the illusion that all of you cares, troubles, worries, and inadequacies have vanished for good.

A very, very good friend of mine, we'll call her "rock star," firmly believes that the world would be a much more peaceful place is we all just had sex with each other. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I do think the world would be a more peaceful place if everybody had more sex. I can tell you that for the two days after sex I'm bouncing off the walls, giggling, and acting like a kid on Christmas morning. Imagine if the whole world felt that very same way.

As it is now 4am and my final is now 6 and a half hours away, I think I'm going to take a shot of tequila and hopefully pass the hell out!