Prof's Progress

My friend (let’s call her A for amiga) and I have been under orders by various friends, uncles, self-help books, and therapists to relax, let things go, practice being self-indulgent, and do Nothing. We were puzzled by this advice: surely, if we stop being vigilant and relentlessly busy, if we excuse ourselves from our self-imposed servitude to the needs of others for a few days, if we stop trying to do Everything, or at least Something, then all manner of bad things will happen. No? And, logistically, HOW does one do Nothing? Where does one go? We reacted to this advice with concern and doubt.

But then I noticed that everyone seems to find time to do Nothing at this time of year. The dance teacher was going on a cruise. Members of my staff were posting pictures online of drinks with umbrellas, served on tropical beaches. Colleagues were off to Costa Rica. Friends at the gym were going to St. Lucia. Uncle D. was going to Florida. The local news magazine had a series on Caribbean getaways. From all of this evidence, I drew a conclusion: when people are oppressed by cold and darkness, and overwhelmed with managing boots, scarves, mittens, and parkas, not to mention their jobs and personal lives—they get on a plane and go somewhere warm.

This is what people do, I told A. She was skeptical. But I persisted—people might know something we don’t, I argued. Maybe we’ll like it if we go, too. We fretted, we gave one another encouragement, we asked our friends for permission (Us: “should we take a holiday somewhere warm?” Friends: “Um, sure, why not…?”). We discussed it with our therapists (Therapist: “Whose voice do you hear telling you that taking a vacation is irresponsible or lazy? how can you talk back to that voice?…What’s the worst thing that could happen if you do what you want?…For the love of Pete, just get on the plane!”).

We realized that the only way a vacation was going to happen was to rely on an old-fashioned travel agent, in whose hands we could place all the arrangements, and our credit cards, and then pretend we had nothing to do with it all. We found our man (A’s cousin), and he was able to do exactly that. We closed our eyes, gave him our account numbers—and the next thing we knew, we were booked for an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic.

The day of our departure, we dressed in layers and packed cleverly, gradually shedding our winter skins during the flight, swapping boots for sandals in the airplane bathroom. When we left the east coast, we were in the middle of a nor-eastern—rain, snow, ice pellets, high winds, cold temperatures. Four hours later, we stepped off the plane into perpetual summer. I felt like a vampire up past her bedtime, as though my mature, pale goth skin was beginning to smolder in the intense late-afternoon sunlight. It felt fantastic. After checking into our hotel room, lathering up with SPF 50+, we headed straight for the water, via the bar, and began what came to be a daily ritual, of walking a couple of miles up and down the beach, barefoot in the warm surf, sipping frozen passion-fruit daiquiris as the tropical sun started to set. Somehow, all our doubts and distress about the perils of doing Nothing started to feel less real, like they belonged to a different version of ourselves.

If we’d wanted to, we could have kept ourselves very busy. We could take a 1/2 day party cruise on a pirate ship, eating, dancing, drinking, and snorkelling (presumably drunk the whole time, which struck us as a bad idea). We could go zip-lining or take a tour of Santo Domingo. We could take a different (sober) snorkelling tour to the reef, and the freshwater cenotes, with a stop a local school—we were meant, apparently, to enjoy the fish, the manta rays, and the children in equal measure. At the resort itself we could do yoga, archery, and—inevitably—zumba; there were cocktail contests and bachata lessons, beach volleyball games, foam parties in the pool, lounge singers in the courtyard at night, a circus show featuring “Circus Show” (the troupe’s name), and, if we’d stayed longer, a magician and karaoke. I’ve been to a resort like this on my own before, and, being me, ended up feeling anxious and stressed trying to manage all the excursions and activities, trying to do Everything. This time, with the mutual reinforcement of A, we committed to declining just about every diversion available (turns out, after one lesson, and a bit of practice at the nightclub, that I do a decent bachata and merengue; and I can never turn up a chance to watch someone juggle fire). Except for our last day, we never set an alarm; we didn’t carry our phones with us and left the laptops at home; we never turned on the tv. After lingering over our cafe con leche and passion fruit and bacon for breakfast, we’d repair to the beach, and begin a cycle of lounging and reading, swimming, and strolling back and forth to the bar and the bathroom, repeating as needed.

Of course, we could also have kept ourselves busy being drunk the whole time. The bars open at 10, with guests ready to go, ordering morning beer and champagne with a mix of adult complacency and adolescent excitement at getting away with something slightly naughty. I suppose it is naughty—very carnivalesque—where people who otherwise put a lot of energy into being responsible adults elsewhere get to step out of those roles as much as they like in a social space set apart from the real world for just this kind of escape. And yet, despite the anonymity of travel, all the privileges we pay for in our vacation package, the advertising that sold us on the trip, which insisted that we can express every facet of our wild, adventurous, “lust for life”—most everyone’s imagination goes no further than: “I can be buzzed all day without straying 100 feet from this beach chair!” Which is not to suggest that A and I didn’t take advantage—we discovered that somewhat weak, frozen, passion fruit daiquiris can be quite refreshing in the mid-afternoon. But–a confession–we only managed a few drinks a day: in addition to the fact that we were so comfortable lounging in the shade that we were disinclined to go back and forth to the bar with the frequency necessary to sustain a basic level of intoxication, we also found ourselves in an odd puritan bind, concerned to get our money’s worth by drinking as much as we could, and yet not having either the self-indulgence, or the hepatic efficiency, to keep up with our fellow-guests. And yes, we will report back to our therapists that the greatest distress we felt on that holiday was prompted by our inability to get, and stay, drunk.

And as idle as all that sounds, we could have been more idle still. Speaking for myself, I was proud of how well I took to doing Nothing, and yet, while I was physically at rest, I couldn’t keep my mind from working away at Something. The pace of my thoughts slowed noticeably: interestingly, with another person there with me all day as an audience for any banal notion that crossed my mind (“I wonder what they do with the seaweed they rake up off the beach?…I’m surrounded by food, and yet crave barbecue chips…I’m astonished at what that lady is wearing…Hmm, the sunscreen seems to be eating away at my nail polish…”), I had noticeably fewer thoughts than usual piling up on one another. But I just can’t shut those thoughts off all together—wherever I am, the observation, the analysis, and a certain amount of maintenance worrying/planning runs ceaselessly in the background. I noticed, though, that once returned to my regular life, for the first couple of days at least, the mental traffic did seem much more subdued. It didn’t last, but I’m encouraged that that engine of rumination/noise/ratiocination/traffic/clutter is capable of running a few notches below Max/Critical, with sufficient vacation time (we should have stayed away longer).

Maybe A and I stayed more sober than we needed to, maybe we thought a little more than is ever good for us, but we’re smart women, and in pretty short order we figured out how to just give in, and let the resort do its thing. You’d have to be a deeply, stubbornly, unhappy and curmudgeonly person (and I’ve known some, and we’re not) to resist the tranquilizing effect of warm sun, sand, and water during the day, and the equatorial stars and a brilliant full moon lighting up the whole Caribbean sea for you at night; of tropical breezes in the palm trees; of being in an environment, however artificial, specifically engineered to make you feel looked after, sated, and calm. On our last day, we made sure to get up early, to get in one last walk on the beach, one last swim, one last feast on passion fruit, bacon, and mango doughnuts, one last dose of hot sun to last us through what surely has to be the very end of a very long, hard winter. Then we got on the plane, and put all the layers back on—socks, long pants, sweaters, boots, parkas—over top of our rested, sunburned bodies, ready for the descent from Nothing, back to Everything.

So this is what happens:

You meet someone, and you think, he’s cute, he’s interesting, and—because you can’t help yourself—maybe he’ll be the One. Maybe this time will be different, and this will be the start of Something. So you dress yourself carefully, go to the Date, and sit carefully—no chewing of nails, no destruction of straws or sugar packets; legs crossed toward the date; arms never crossed; hands not clenched in your lap, but left lying carelessly on the bar, where they could potentially be brushed or playfully tapped.

And they are. He flatters you, and kisses your hand (in a split second you think, really? then experience giddiness, then irritation at yourself for being gullible, then more giddiness—that nonsense is stupidly effective). He expresses wonder at how beautiful you are. He likes Carol Burnett! You like Carol Burnett! He likes things, and you like things! You like all the same things! Destiny has brought you together! He exclaims over your beauty some more and wonders where you’ve been all his life. He insists that he’ll languish in the hours and days until your next date.

You’ll never hear from him again.

Or: You ask open-ended questions that allow the other person to say clever and witty things. He doesn’t. He stares at his shoes, chews his nails, and destroys sugar packets.

Or: He’s lively. He talks in excruciating detail about his bathroom renovation, or his favorite typeface; he reveals that he has some kind of thrill-seeking death wish that requires him to spend every weekend careening down muddy hillsides or getting electrocuted for charity on obstacle-courses; he reveals (in the first 15 minutes) that he has 14% body fat, and suspects his divorce was due, in part, to his wife’s being depressed that she wasn’t aging as well as he was (oh yes, I’m sure that’s exactly why she left, you think); he assures you that he was only at that glam party because his friend dragged him and that wasn’t his scene at all—not that there’s anything wrong with gay men of course, but he just doesn’t know what he’d do if one of them hit on him or something (and you, noting his attempt at being edgy by wearing his shirt untucked over jeans, with black slip-on shoes that you know are his only pair aside from sneakers, think: if he’s expressing an unconscious desire to get hit on, he’s going to have to start dressing very differently…); he offers his views on what “you women” think, or do, or believe, and expresses dismay at how bossy, or crazy, or high-maintenance his other dates and relationships have been—and of course, you’d never be like that (oh, you think, just give me a reason…); he alludes, provocatively, to having done things, and seen things, that he’ll tell you about some other time but which, in the meantime, are supposed to make you think he’s Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know. Which is why he’s still living with roommates and doesn’t think he needs health insurance. He says, apropos of you’re-not-sure-what, that he’s not autistic—he took the quiz. Maybe I should take the quiz too, you offer. He is incurious about that remark.

And still he’s talking, about theatre lighting, or buddhism, or bicycles, or Literature, or how you don’t need to go to university to be educated, you can be a graduate of the school of Life. Hours of your life have passed, and he hasn’t asked you a single question about yourself. You suspect that he’s not as amusing as you are. Your belief that he’s the One is wavering. But then you think of the Greek chorus which has been telling you your whole life that you’re spoiled or too fussy, from your grandmother when you were 6, to Snowy Owl at Brownie Camp when you were 8, to an interfering friend last week, to all of pop culture yesterday, and decide to make an effort to be tolerant and open-minded. Relationships take work, you remember, and since you’re working pretty hard right now, perhaps that means you’re starting a relationship. Look at you being an optimist!

He offers to drive you home, so you think, what the hell, he’s cute and surely he’ll stop talking at some point—and do the requisite coy thing with your head, look knowingly over the top of your glasses, and demurely agree. Some attempt at romance ensues, which could be better, but could also be worse. He insists he’s eager to see you again. The Greek chorus telling you not to be fussy prevails, and you’re back to hoping he’s the One. You wait the appropriate interval then spend a couple of hours composing a text in which you thank him for the evening, make a flirty remark alluding to his last attempt at witticism, punctuated by a few emoji calculated to be the right mix of cool-but-inviting:🍸🏆🔬😈. He texts back right away with enthusiastic punctuation and winky faces. You’re confident: he’s definitely the One.

You never hear from him again.

Over the next 24 hours you go from feeling rejected, to indignant, to irritated with yourself for bothering to be idealistic, positive, optimistic, or hopeful. You compose brilliantly-devastating critiques of the state of contemporary gender relations in North American culture. You have lengthy internal arguments with the Greek chorus, telling them that they what they call “fussy” you call “having standards” and order them to keep out of your business from henceforth because they’re really not helping. They fail to heed you, as Greek choruses are wont to do.

You threaten to swear off dating all together (again—just like you swore you’d never go back to grad school, twice). You work out. You read the self-help books all your single friends are reading, which tell you to dare greatly, to accept radically, to eat/pray/love (managing one out of three so far, thanks), to let You be You. You turn the experience into a bit that your friends seem to find entertaining. The coupled friends (who never seem to know any single men, anywhere, and who really need to get out more) go home and say to one another, with a mixture of relief and self-satisfaction, “Thank god we’re not single!” (you know they do, because you’ve done it yourself). You decide that you’re a strong independent woman who will work on her own happiness. You will focus on your career (you will binge-watch Game of Thrones).

You go out to some event somewhere or get an invitation in your dating inbox, and end up with another date. And you think, he’s cute, he’s interesting, and—because you can’t help yourself—maybe he’ll be the One. Maybe this time will be different, and this will be the start of Something…

LORD POLONIUS:       ….since brevity is the soul of wit,
                And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
                I will be brief…

QUEEN GERTRUDE: More matter, with less art.
(Hamlet II.ii)

In what was doubtless an attempt to get a bunch of taciturn teens to learn the pleasure and usefulness of writing in real life, our 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. K, had us all sign up for an international pen-pal exchange. You filled out a form, and could select as many different countries as you wanted pen-pals from; Mrs. K mailed the forms off, and then you’d get the names and addresses of all your new correspondents, and in turn your information would be sent out to people your age who wanted to write to someone living in a small town in western Canada.

I wanted to write to everybody, everywhere. I started off with close to a dozen pen-pals around the world—girls whose names I’ve since forgotten, in Athens, Tokyo, Quezon City in the Philippines, small towns in Ireland, France, Denmark, England, Australia. I’d look their towns up in the atlas, all of them seeming impressively abstract, just dots on colored maps representing a world I’d seen very little of.

I was in awe of the girls who had managed to learn how to write not just in more than one language, but for the Greek and Japanese girls, in multiple alphabets. I delighted in puzzling through their dictionary and phrase-book vocabulary, their often-confusing transliterations; writing to my French pen pal kept me humble (then as now, my written French has all the eloquence of a well-intentioned but badly-educated 3rd grader). Even the English and Australian girls presented challenges, taking for granted that, in the Commonwealth, we must all call things by the same names; that school, and home, and social lives would be organized the same in every country. French high school was (and still is) completely mysterious to me, and I have only a vague idea of what forms are in the British system; according to the girls in Ireland and Australia, the drinking age was 13, though I was pretty sure their tales of ending up passed out in fields while their mates drove around with some older blokes were, in real life, no more glamourous than the Canadian equivalent; and while most of the girls I was corresponding with lived lives pretty comparable to mine in terms of middle-class comforts, I think I might have suspected that, without MuchMusic AND MTV, they were somehow 3 or 4 decades behind Canadian culture. It took me years before I figured out that, when my English friend J. said her family was living in a caravan while her parents built their house, she was talking about a trailer and was not, in fact, living amongst gypsies.

Most of the girls wrote to me on airmail envelopes—each letter was one sheet of thin blue paper with adhesive flaps, that folded into an envelope marked importantly: “AIRMAIL PAR AVION.”  You could only write as much as you could fit onto one and two-thirds sides of the paper—many of the girls had tidy, compact hand-writing, the letters shaped differently from the way we’d been taught, the Europeans putting lines through their 7s, the Japanese girl’s careful romaji (roman alphabet) retaining the calligraphic look of kanji.

We had airmail envelopes in Canada, but it seems to me that they didn’t save all that much in postage; more importantly, I tried one once and didn’t like the constraints–only one and two-thirds of a page! So I used the stationery sets that used to be supplied by grandmothers to ensure their grandchildren would write to them regularly. Each set included 12 sheets of pastel-coloured paper with patterns, 12 matching plain sheets, and 12 envelopes. I’d always end up running out of paper with half a dozen envelopes to spare—never mind the constraints of the airmail envelope, never mind the limited conversation of teen-age girls, I had a LOT to say, to every single one of those girls, and I yearned for them to say a lot back to me.

I’d ask them about school, and music, and their neighborhoods and friends. I’d ask them about the tv or movies they’d seen, or books they’d read. I’d ask about their ambitions for university and careers. I’d ask about French/Japanese/Greek boys (Irish/English/Australian lads). And with only minimal prompting, or none, I’d supply the corresponding information about myself. It was a bit daunting to keep up with so many correspondents, but, not having a terribly full social calendar, I had the time.

Long before we could have imagined such things as email, of Facebook or Instagram (or whatever the next thing will be), all of those blue AIRMAIL PAR AVION envelopes held out the promise of epistolary friendship, somehow transcending all the pitfalls of more immediate social interactions in the hallways of my school. My pen pals couldn’t know how popular I was or wasn’t; they weren’t there, in the school, absorbing the tacit, unconscious communication about who ranked how in the social hierarchy; they couldn’t know anything about me, other than what I told them (and of course, the fact that I had the time to write pages and pages to them about all kinds of things other than parties and boys probably told many of them all they needed to know about my social status).

I think, without meaning too, that I might have overwhelmed some of my pen pals with all my questions, comments on their answers, descriptions of my own situation. And it’s equally possible that most of those girls had the kind of full social calendars I didn’t, and just had better things to do with their time. I have to remind myself that not everyone likes to express herself as much I do. Eventually, by 12th grade, they’d dwindled down to just a couple, the girls in England and Australia (both made it to British Columbia to visit while we were all at “uni,” and while the Australian went her own way soon after, I’ve stayed in touch with J. ever since, and manage to see her every few years when I’m in the UK. J’s kids find her letters quaintly old-fashioned).

But it didn’t matter how many pen pals I had—as their numbers fluctuated over the years, I’d fill any surplus time by writing to myself. I’ve got a box somewhere of about 20 journals, most of them covered in chinoiserie brocade bought in Chinatown gift shops in Vancouver, filled with pages and pages of my adolescent confusion and emotional turmoil and social triumphs and defeats (I keep a journal still. Whoever ends up Max Brod to my Kafka—seriously, if someone says “burn my stuff when I’m gone” and it’s their teenage diaries—get out the gasoline and matches*). Plus I had a writing notebook for creative work (mostly embarrassingly-maudlin poetry). And of course there were the essays I wrote for school, reports on Morocco, or Egyptian burial practices, mostly copied, in exhaustively plagiarized detail, from the library encyclopedias; poetry explications; French compositions; science reports on leprosy and the technology of cassette tapes.

I had a lot to say, and would—will—say it just about anywhere, in any written medium. Speaking directly to other humans has always been fraught with peril—It has always been so much easier to express myself through writing, rummaging through my vocabulary, my repertoire of expressions and sentence patterns and punctuation marks, arranging and rearranging them like table settings for elaborate dinner parties (ironically, I failed table-setting in Brownies). When I’m writing, I can hear when something is right and accurate, I can feel how the rhythm of a sentence or paragraph has to go in order to be complete—in a way I just can’t do when I’m talking. All I have to do is focus on the letters appearing on the page or the screen, without having to simultaneously, and warily, study the body language and tone of voice of the other person.

I still do have a lot to say, all the workings of my creative (good day!) and anxious (trying day!) mind building up (more of those pesky log jams), spilling over in sometimes disciplined, sometimes overwrought prose, in emails, texts, facebook posts, my long-suffering journal, and now—congratulations—here in this blog.

So today’s point is this: apparently, blog posts ought to be brief. You don’t want to task readers with too many words, too much detail, too many confessions, and revelations, and views.

You don’t want to, but you just can’t help yourself.

This is me trying to rein it all in, trying not to overwhelm my gentle readers with too much writing, too much me. And who are we kidding?: I kind of just don’t want to be concise. There’s too much going on, too much thinking and feeling, too much to do–to just boil it, and water it, and break it all down to 160 measly characters. I concede that there are nuances of where and when that I may never really grasp; nevertheless–there are unquestionably things that must be said (aren’t there?) and I just can’t stop myself from saying them.

So this is me trying for brevity, and (accidentally on purpose) not quite getting it.

*Kafka wrote: “Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread”

Now that I’m in the thick of things at work, I’m finding it harder and harder to write for fun. I said to someone recently that it’s like my work is a bunch of chaotic, slimy sticks damming up the stream of my clear liquid creativity. Followed by the thought: no kidding—I’ve read better similes on the side of cereal boxes. Sad.

So instead of writing the clever, profound, erudite meditation on Virtue and Propriety that is still only sluggishly working its way through the log jam of my brain—I figured, why not start cataloguing my dates over the last few years? Surely I can spare a few brief paragraphs for them…?

Because I’m me, I keep a scorecard. Don’t worry guys, I’m not objectifying you or reducing you to mere numbers. But when I hit the 20-date mark I realized that 1) I might want to write about the experience some day; 2) at the rate things were going, there was no way I’d remember my dates’ names, and allowing them to become one giant male blur in my mind would be a form of objectification I didn’t want to fall prey to; and 3) when I lament that I’ve dated everybody under the age of 60 in the Northeast, and still can’t find Prince Charming, and people say, oh Prof’s Progress, you’re just too picky, or you don’t know what you really want, I can, like a good administrator, produce my DATA, my evidence that, in point of objective, empirical fact, trying to establish a new relationship completely from scratch in one’s adulthood is a nightmare on multiple levels.
 
Since 2010, I’ve gone on dates with 43 different men (and for the reassurance of my friends, parents, and doctor, that’s just the number of dates, and nothing close to resembling my Number). Eleven have been men I’ve met the old fashioned way—in bars, at parties, at events, in my kitchen (my landlord, hitting on me while I signed my lease)—all the rest were shopped for and negotiated with through internet dating.

Because I was mercifully sheltered from a lot of dating for most of my adult life, I’ve learned things about the process—late, and occasionally the hard way— that any 25-year-old could tell you. From the start, I was struck by how crucial, and viscerally discernible, chemistry is. Like many women, I keep lists of desirable and undesirable criteria, and believe firmly in their theoretical validity. And I’m always bemused by how often those criteria go right out the window in actual practice. I’ve gone out with men who are great (like last weekend’s date)—attractive, personally and professionally well-put together—and have felt completely unmoved by them. I’ve ended up very attracted to men who don’t meet my physical criteria, but whose personalities and intellects have been very compelling. I’ve had to exert self-control not to gaze with foolish idolatry at guys who captivate me. I’ve watched other men fall for me in the course of one cup of coffee or one bowl of noodles—you really can see it happening—and have felt badly for not feeling the same in return. And I’ve been on the other end too—starting with my very first internet date, who sized me up, resignedly joined me for coffee, pointedly put his phone down within view so he could keep an eye on the time, and after exactly 30 minutes, leapt up, perfunctorily thanked me, and was out the door.

Having been treated badly a few times, I try to be much more polite than this with someone who’s taken the risk to meet someone new, no matter how quickly I conclude that he’s not the one for me. I’ve gone on more than one date with very sweet men, hoping that I’d warm to them, but then having to delicately excuse myself when it became obvious that it would take much more than time to light any fires there.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty, as though I should be more willing to settle. There’s this whole concept of one’s league—that is, one must know one’s place and quality as a date, and never have the temerity to pursue someone out of one’s league. But of course, until the day we all have chip implants where we can be assessed and ranked as we walk down the street (a prescient detail in Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story), one has no real idea of what one’s league is—so we all, rashly, irrationally, go after the people we’re attracted to, regardless of whether we’re worthy of them or not, cruelly overlooking those in the league below us, and always plagued by the worry that our own league is much lower than we like to think it is, and that we’re just consistently humiliating ourselves in this whole process.

Did I mention that adult dating is overwhelming nightmarish?

But since we’re on the subject of leagues, or suitability, or whatever it is that promotes matches in one case, and absolutely nixes them in others, here’s a short taxonomy of some of the men I’ve had to reject after 0-2 dates:

• The Hapless, whose dating profiles and messages are illiterate, improbably unflattering, and, in some cases menacing. I’d been looking forward to dating the pastry chef at the Capitol Grille—until he ordered me to show up wearing black stiletto heels and, when I demurred, accused me of being a few unprintable things (I blocked and reported him). I’m trying to decide if I want to accept a date from a journalist who can’t figure out that the basic concept of the dating site “How About We…?” is that you complete the sentence grammatically (“How about we….food? How about we…Red Sox?”)
• The Landlord, for so many, many reasons, not the least of which is that I won’t go out with someone who already has keys to my apartment and doesn’t know what a sump pump is for.
• The Low-Talker. I smiled and laughed, and nodded encouragement throughout our conversation in the courtyard of the Public Library, even though I heard about 30% of what he murmured wanly about himself. Every once in a while the wind would shift, and his voice would carry better—when I’d discover he’d been talking about slow-cooker recipes the whole time.
• The Newly Divorced Dads, completely surprised and traumatized by the experience, trying to “get out there” because their friends or sisters prodded them into it, having no clue how to talk to a woman not their wife, beyond confessing their utter exhaustion working 12 hour days in some tech job while trying to adapt to an unsatisfactory custody schedule. Too terrified.
• The Unfortunates, hit hard by the economic downturn. It might not have been their fault, it might just have been a temporary setback, but being 40, unemployed, and living with their parents makes men feel too badly about themselves, too helpless to be dating.
• The Chiropractor with the skin condition, who also had a finger-picking habit—which I’m in no position to judge harshly, except that if I were him, before the date I’d wash the blood off and bandage some of that damage up, for fear of invoking the cuticle-tearing scene from Black Swan (Then the Chiropractor offered to give me an adjustment. “I can fix you right up!” he insisted. I replied, “I bet you can, but perhaps you can refer me to a colleague instead?”)
• The Defeated Politician, who had given up his job with the state to run for office, lost badly, got divorced, and was now living with his parents, but taking turns with his ex to stay with their four children in the shared family home.
• The Talking-Heads guy. I was on the sidewalk looking out for my date, when instead I saw an apparition flapping and lurching towards me. This fellow, it turned out, was extremely bright, and after inventing something really important and profitable for aviation 20 years ago, had apparently left the house about 4 times since, and was getting his dating clothes from a deceased relative who had left behind a closet full of zoot suits, several sizes too large. He was one of the very sweet ones, very solicitous, insisting on getting me some soup, but whose social awkwardness made it impossible for me to feel at ease with him.
• The Belgian who, when I mentioned a slight affection for Star Wars, said he’d never seen it. I took a deep breath, for patience, and said, I beg your pardon? Yeah, he replied, I don’t really like those movies. I don’t really like stories with characters.
• The Spaniard, in Boston on a banking contract, who was clearly bright, and cultured, whose profile was full of poetry and song lyrics, who pursued me energetically—and who was very obviously homesick, suffering from what seemed like manic-depression, and self-medicating with large quantities of marijuana (which I wouldn’t have a problem with except it really wasn’t helping).
• The Body-Worker—health conscious and fit, he worked for some kind of therapeutic stretching studio in the Back Bay. He seemed fine, for the first half hour. Then he confessed to being a raw-foodist; then he started to enthuse about his boss, his mentor, who was not only brilliant on the subject of exercise physiology, but was in fact a rare example of the next stage in human evolution, a superman who would lead the rest of us ordinary folk into a brighter tomorrow.
• The Sound Engineer who is cute and kind, likes to hike, plays guitar—but whose mind works at a much, much slower pace than mine. I’m no genius, but I’ve got a lot going on in here (clear liquid and log jams, remember?), and need someone who can keep up. Plus, throughout our date, he worked his way through a giant plate of nachos, opening his mouth wide to pop in one salsa-cheese-and-bean-dipped-chip after another and kept it open, smiling like a contented but uncivilized 4 year old…is this making me sound horrible and snobbish? Too bad, it was a ghastly sight.
• The Salsa Dancer who smelled like the grave. Turns out I have an extremely keen sense of smell (maybe I’m a member of the more evolved overlord species too…?) and I’m easily put off by indifferent dental hygiene. Some men smell like hours-old coffee, which to me smells like sewage. Some men smell like spoiled milk (why?? what are they doing to smell like spoiled milk??) Some well-intentioned colognes are so strong and cloying they make my airway seize up. And sometimes people can’t or won’t go to a dentist, and this guy was one of them. After what I confess was a somewhat tipsy evening of rather familiar latin dancing—but in a well-ventilated club—I ended up with the smell of death, decay, and corruption about me for hours. I still shudder at the thought (and yes, have learned several lessons from that encounter)

Then there were a couple of guys with control issues; the sociopath; the appallingly flaky drama professor; the adorable but elusive Pocket Square; the museum curator; the other salsa teacher; the union organizer; the guy who ended up in jail; and Apollo at the dive shop on Grand Cayman…but I can save those stories for future posts.

Why so many dates? you might very well ask. Believe me, I ask the same question often. Sooner or later, we single people invariably receive advice from our coupled friends, suggesting either that we’re just too picky, or that there must be something off in our selection criteria—as though we have some unresolved emotional issues that drive us to go out with unsuitable people, or, ever-so-much-more-consolingly, that we somehow exude unsuitability ourselves and drive away all reasonable prospects. To which we single people think to ourselves, thank you for suggesting that the person you are currently choosing to hang out with is crazy and horrible. And then say out loud, ooh, that must be it! Thank you for that insight! 

The real reasons are, as I’ve described elsewhere, that adult life just makes it hard to meet new people in a natural, gradual, way that allows you to get to know and like someone before you complicate and intensify things by dating. Plus, when it comes to online “match-making,” many—if not most—people (men and women) lie to varying degrees: about their height, their age, their appearance, their overall ability to look after themselves, their biases and prejudices—and you just don’t know how they’ll really be until you meet them face to face (begging the question—what do they think will happen when they show up and are very obviously shorter, older, less fit, and/or less sane than they marketed themselves as?).  Finally, you can have the most optimal match in the world with someone, on paper, and yet just feel nothing for them in person—and at a certain stage in one’s life, you don’t need to make yourself feel anything either.

On top of all that, what accounts for my personally…impressive? …daunting? …alarming? dating stats is an unfortunate synergy of characteristics: 1) I’m genuinely curious about people—the variety of human nature that I’ve crossed paths with really captivates me. 2) I have friends who have been single as long as I am (and are all just fine, thanks) but who have neither the energy, nor patience, nor mulish, compulsive stubbornness—that keeps me investigating every option that presents himself. I, however, get just a wee bit obsessive about problem-solving, and comparison-shopping. It’s not just dates—if I’m planning a vacation, I have to look at every flight itinerary, or bed and breakfast, or restaurant review. If I’m buying shoes or a sofa or soap, I have to look at all the options. Yes, it’s all as exhausting as it sounds. 3) I’m either vain, or irrationally optimistic. I can’t help believing that since I’m not living in a box in an alley, or obsessed with my slow cooker; since I can chew with my mouth closed (and floss religiously); since I can feed, clothe, and dress myself and occasionally find time to read stories with characters—that I deserve someone with a similarly modest set of accomplishments.

Plus, my mother has been saying, since I was in middle school, that all the boys are just intimidated by my beauty and intelligence. That’s the explanation I like the best.

I’ve been condo-shopping in a desultory way for almost two years, with no luck. Aside from the fact that there’s very little inventory right now—all the good ones are taken, everything else either costs way too much or is “charming” and “original” and “just needs a little TLC”—I’m also aware of a certain amount of inertia (or inertness) on my part. While my present situation is sometimes frustrating, even oppressive and confined, there are also plenty of good things about it (convenience, simplicity, comfort)—enough that I just don’t have sufficient motivation to expend the time, energy, and resources to make a change.

I realized yesterday that you could take out “condo-shopping” in the above paragraph and insert “dating,” and the meaning would remain exactly the same.

Over the weekend, I went on a couple of dates with someone who should have been Mr. Right—good looking, apparently well-adjusted, conversable, courteous, attentive, well-educated, and—so important—not living in a squat with his ex-girlfriend and a couple of bats (yes, that happened). This fellow and I both think about retiring to the South of France; we value education and agree that the youth don’t know enough about literature and history; he’s actually heard of, and likes, one of my favorite Canadian bands from the 80s (Platinum Blonde, very awfulicious if you’re curious). There’s absolutely nothing wrong with him, or with me. Each of us should have been so carried away by the absolute suitability of the other that we’d’ve eloped, or something, before the weekend was over. And yet, by the end of the afternoon yesterday we agreed to have our assistants email one another a couple of articles we’d been discussing, hugged goodbye, and went our separate ways.

My first impulse was to feel rather slighted—shouldn’t he have been more enthusiastic about me? But then I reflected that, set aside my expectations about how he ought to feel—maybe I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about him either. And that’s when the condo-shopping analogy came to mind. Both of us might really like to be in a new situation, but neither of us needs to be—each of us has a pleasant, rewarding life; we’re self-sufficient; we have plenty of wonderful people around us; everything is currently convenient, simple, and comfortable enough that there’s no incentive, no necessity, no exigency to expend the time, energy, or resources to make a change.

Well, I thought, that’s kind of a drag. Whatever.

What the man thought of this experience, I can’t say. (The mind of any given date is just one giant black box which may or may not contain Schrodinger’s Cat, for all I know.) But for my part, what provokes a near-paralyzing torpor and ennui is the effort it takes to get to know someone in our current dating culture.

The process of searching for matches using complex databases and algorithms fosters an uncomfortably materialistic, consumeristic, and dehumanizing mindset. When you are flipping through profiles in the same way that you flip through shoes on Zappos or real estate listings on MLS, you forget that those profiles are meant to represent human beings, and the people on the other end forget that about you. You’re shopping for them; they’re shopping for you. You’re looking for the thing, the object, the property that will gratify you, as long as the price and delivery terms are reasonable (only without the customer reviews—I’d at least like to know what other users have thought of something before I order one for myself. Or, to work the condo analogy, I’d like the dating equivalent of a building inspection before signing the P+S). And of course, all the while you’re selling yourself, creating glowing, but careful marketing copy which appeals to everyone (yoga! surfing!) and puts off no-one (don’t mention karaoke or multiple cats). Once you’ve sorted through the available inventory, you make the necessary arrangements to spend your weekends trooping through one another’s open houses, all the rooms cunningly staged, and see what kind of offers you get (this is giving me the idea that dating would be a lot more efficient if we had the equivalent of realtors nudging us through the process…).

The set of transactions that now constitute meeting people has become artificial, often strained, and dispiritingly unromantic. Moreover, while online dating services do make it possible to meet greater numbers of people than you might do in the course of your day, research has found that 1) there’s no way to really anticipate attraction or compatibility—you just have to meet the other person—which means that the dating apps’ algorithms really don’t help much beyond putting you in contact with people you’d otherwise be too busy or backward to meet; but 2) the time you spend sitting on the couch in ratty pyjamas sorting through online catalogues of pictures, profiles, and messages, is time that you’re NOT out in the world doing the things that make you happy, let alone putting yourself in the way of other happy human beings. Online dating can be fun, of course (she insists with forced and brittle positivity), but it’s fun dependent on a lot of luck, patience, and a certain amount of risk-taking—all of which consumes what turns out to be a finite amount of psychic energy. By the time you end up on a date with someone who might be really wonderful, you’re both so tired and jaded by the experience of getting there that the actual encounter seems like more trouble than it’s worth. 

Remember how when we used to meet people that meant that we were in the same place because of shared interests, shared values, shared friends and family? These conditions came in with built-in filters (you wouldn’t both be at the university pub unless you both had roughly comparable life skills; you wouldn’t meet at the peace rally unless you both cared about social issues). Seeing someone regularly in a socially-defined space, for particular reasons that might have nothing to do with dating, would allow you to observe the other person a bit. Not only were you seeing that person and not a photoshopped 10-year old avatar, but you were also able to get a glimpse of their character, personality, social skills, intellect, manners—you know: all the things that actually make a person attractive or not.

When I told my mother about the weekend’s date, she asked, very reasonably, if this guy is so great, why does he need to do this internet dating business? (that this question indicts me as well, I left alone). I told her, honestly, that I don’t know: I don’t know why the paths of two supposedly great people, who know lots of other great people, just don’t cross in contemporary urban life.

Maybe we’re too lazy, or too selfish. Maybe we’re just too busy running around on our hamster wheels of jobs and gyms. Maybe there’s a nefarious conspiracy to make human mating rituals dependent on algorithms as some kind of prelude to our becoming enslaved by the machines when they take over the planet (I need to think that one through a bit more carefully). Or—I could go on at length about my theory that heterosexual women, acting under orders from every source of advice in popular culture to get out there! be your best self! do what makes you happy! —are so energized and improved by our immersion in activities that heterosexual men (wrongly) shun, that we’re going to evolve into a new, enlightened zumba-dancing species of human that propagates through asexual reproduction. (I’ll think that one through a bit more too…)

Really, I think the simplest answer is that we’ve all just been deeply, traumatically conditioned by middle school dances to be utterly terrified of being rejected, of looking desperate, or weird (or, poor guys, menacing)—of taking a chance and being badly, badly hurt. Much easier to endure the comfort and familiarity of single-hood than risk the alternatives. Faced with a choice between 1) yet another date where the two of you carefully interview one another, watching vigilantly for any signs of maladjustment issues, listening attentively for the slightest hint that the other person is living in his car, or just got out of jail (yeah, that happened too); or 2) spending time with your friends at one of those ghastly, gynocentric, but wine-fueled, painting parties before going home to watch House of Cards in your ratty pyjamas while consuming medicinal cake…it’s a tough call, but (2) is looking pretty tempting today.

Unless you happen to know a nice single law professor who likes to cook, and travel, and has a really cute chocolate lab…Arrange a showing, and I’ll take a quick look.

So because January lasted forever, and the dark and cold of winter seem never-ending and tedious, I decided to try online dating again.

I know.

I figured this time around, I’d try multiple sites, with the resolution to avoid the ones that require elaborate questionnaires and profiles and epic epistolary exchanges before you can even get decently stood up in a ghastly bar somewhere in the Financial District. Because I actually enjoy writing, and because I have just a smidgen of obsessive-compulsiveness, I find that all the apparatus of those more complex sites just makes me crazy—I end up writing and revising profiles and messages in my head, perseverating exhaustively over what I’d like to say, then scratching it out to say what I’m supposed to say to game the system in my favor (because finding your happily-ever-after soul-mate should obviously start with the bloodless strategizing of a high-stakes card game, or the amoral spin and manipulation of an adulterous politician’s come-back campaign). I figured this time around, I’d keep things simple.

So I started with the  most profile-free “dating” app of them all,Tinder. In this case, I’m using “dating” in a very loose sense of the word (and “loose” however you want). Tinder is a descendant of Grindr, an app made popular among gay men for facilitating dates and hookups; Tinder (as you can tell by the inclusion of the “e”) is supposed to be for everyone, I guess, and the company insists that its primary function is not to arrange casual sexual encounters, but rather to find fun new dates, or even true love. That latter option seems really unlikely, and I’m not all that optimistic about the middle one either.

If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of trying the app for yourself, this is how Tinder works—you’re out drinking Bloody Marys over brunch, and someone checks their Tinder account and passes their phone around so you can vet their matches and exclaim over the occasional, stupidly-explicit messages and photos they’ve been sent by people with very, very questionable judgment. Then your friends peer-pressure you into joining, and sending a flirtatious message to the complete stranger whose photo is captioned with “lifes to short lol” but who seems to own a very nice boat and an adorable chocolate lab. Complete Stranger then promptly messages you back to invite you to his house 20 miles up the coast for a live, in-person viewing of his most prized possession, the grotesquely-foreshortened private parts he’s depicted in the accompanying photo, which you’re now passing around a table to all of your gleefully-horrified friends.

And then I have no idea what you’re supposed to do with the thing (I mean the app, obviously…). You “play” Tinder by liking or dismissing the photos people post, then if they also “like” you on the basis of your photos, the app declares you a match, and you can then message one another. But to do what, exactly…? I’ve heard of friends of friends who met on Tinder (whole long months ago) and have been happy ever since. But how people are supposed to negotiate an initial date, never mind actually establishing relationships, through this medium is beyond me. You have the option of adding a bit (500 characters) of information about yourself, but most people don’t bother. I’ve been matched with several men and I have nothing in particular to say to them, nor they to me. Sure, I could lead off with, “great photo” or “love the boat” or “what a cute dog!” and add a 😉 —but I can’t believe that my soul mate is the man on the other end of such complete banality. Plus, I’ve tried it, and it goes nowhere: “hey, how’s your day going?” “Great thanks, and yours?” “Fine thank you. Looks like more snow today! ;-)” and, having had vastly more scintillating conversation with the receptionist at the dentist’s office, that’s as far as we get.

Besides, from what I understand, most of the people on the site are just there to get lucky. To which I say: define luck.

I must not appear to be very wanton in my (completely clothed) photos because I haven’t yet been overtly propositioned, as some of my friends have been. This is like being the girl the construction workers don’t make catcalls at. Should I feel relieved, or overlooked? How should my more proposition-worthy friends feel?

To be clear, if a person wants simply to hook up, there’s anything at all wrong with that. Like I said, January was really long, and there’s only so much gratification to be had from shoveling out your car. But call me old-fashioned: wouldn’t it be better to go to a bar and let your friends peer-pressure you into picking up someone there, where you can assess their looks and personality and general hygiene in person while your friends surreptitiously take a photo they can use in any subsequent police reports? Obviously, you still don’t really know what you’re getting into, but one of the many problems with initiating any kind of…connection with someone on Tinder is that you have no way of knowing if the person’s face, body, or selected parts even belong to them, until you see the whole ensemble in the, um, flesh—if that’s what you might even be inclined to agree to.

But who would be so inclined? Even if you were after a hookup, for the sake of safety and aesthetic choice, you’d meet your candidate somewhere neutral first, surely. Apparently, it’s very common for men to follow up an initial match on Tinder (and other dating sites) by sending women photos of themselves—often headless, because their face, identity, or humanity are apparently not important to us?—with the focus on what they have to offer you. Except for two things: 1) the photos are, shall we say, static. A picture of a sledgehammer, or a bicycle pump, or whatever tool you want for this analogy, is not proof that the sender knows how to wield the thing; it’s not even proof of ownership. 2) Who, upon receipt of such photos and accompanying suggestions for service, declares, “Rightee-o,” promptly drops her knitting, says goodbye to her cat, and heads out into the night? Because someone must have done, once, in legend, to have established the idea amongst a certain class of man that this could happen again if they’re just persistent enough.

Again (and I’m trying not to take this personally), I have to base these observations mostly on friends’ Tinder experiences, as I’ve yet to get past the third-grade postcard stage (hi, how are you? I am fine) of messaging. From their photos, my matches all look decent—relatively handsome and fit, out hiking and skiing with their chocolate labs—but there’s no way for me to get any sense of their compatibility, including shared motives. And these so-called, alleged matches, are the ones who made the cut—I’d estimate my “acceptance” rate at less than 10%. In lots of cases, I’ve dismissed a man because he clearly doesn’t fit my physical preferences—someone who’s quite possibly wonderful, but who I’ll probably never know because the app gives me no choice but to make the kind of snap, superficial, selfish judgements that I like to think I would resist if I met someone in real-life.

For many of these dismissals, though, I’ve just got to blame the man (of course, women are doubtless doing all sorts of awful things on dating apps, but I’ve only got so much free time to work with here).

In a Jane Austen novel, the man worthy of the heroine’s attention would be very conscious of how his person and address would interest the regard of others, whose favour he desired; he would be sensible of his position and reputation in the world, and would be mortified at the prospect of endangering that through misrepresenting himself, or through making his audience experience the briefest moment of discomfort or mortification for him.

As I’m reminded often throughout the day, we are not living in a Jane Austen novel. 

Online dating—like just about everything social that people do—is what we call a rhetorical situation, where one person shapes their communicative strategy to elicit a particular response from their audience. Successful rhetorical strategy requires the sender to be capable of understanding his own communicative needs as well as those of his audience. As I’ve suggested in a previous post—one dysfunctional response to this rhetorical situation is to fret anxiously over what others might (but probably aren’t) thinking about you all the time—a terrible constraint to live under. Excessive self-consciousness is self-imposed unkindness, a self-absorption that makes it harder to appreciate ourselves for ourselves, and consequently, to connect with others. But the opposite dysfunctional response, and what I see everywhere in online dating, happens when people aren’t conscious enough about what they’re doing. In their construction of an online persona—the photos they post, the messages they send—what they communicate most effectively is that, while they might care a great deal about what their audience thinks about them, they can’t, or won’t—they just don’t—understand either what they’re saying about themselves, or how it’s being received on the other end.

Guys, here’s what I see:

Many of you have no photo at all, or just cartoon images, or blurry, grainy shots that seem obviously scanned from 15-year old photo albums. If you have more than one photo of yourself, at least one will show you holding a can, cup, or bottle of beer. Many other guys will have photos where someone else has obviously been cropped out, often a woman. The photo is sometimes very obviously from a wedding. Or you’re posing with your arms around one or more women. Are these meant to be my predecessors? my competition? my colleagues? Many of you are posing with little children. It’s good to be up front about the fact that you have kids, and that you clearly love them and enjoy spending time with them speaks well of your character. But do you really want people on Tinder, many of whom are just trawling for sex, to see your children? Worse, do you think it’s reasonable to exploit them for their sentimental value in order to impress women, when you yourselves are trawling to get sex? Because: ick.

Then there are the body builders in their tank tops, or the guy in fancy sunglasses, or the guy reclining shirtless on the beach or riding shirtless on a horse—wait, now I’m describing Vladimir Putin… I can’t speak for all single women, but just as a matter of personal preference: the self-centered, arrogant, posturing popular amongst autocrats and known violators of all human rights prompts some other response in me than attraction. I don’t see confidence and self-respect, I see narcissism, and that doesn’t bode well for respect for me, or anyone else.

And then you have your selfies—all the horrible, horrible selfies, the stuff of nightmares. Many are your best duck-faced Blue Steel look from Zoolander—we can forgive those—but you’ve seen and understood that movie, right? Others are taken from a foot away (how long are your arms?)—you’re in what seems to be a gloomy basement, unshaven, wearing a baseball cap, unsmiling. The rest of you are looking down into your laptop webcam, or your dash-mounted cell-phone, again unsmiling. Which begs these questions: 1) What else are you watching on the laptop that prompted you to take your photo at that moment? 2) Alternatively, why do you think that being stuck in traffic is the best way to represent yourself? I can think of no answer to (1) or (2) that will make me want to go out with you. 3) Have you shown these pictures to friends or family members? Someone needs to tell you that that blank, expressionless, slightly slack-jawed look makes you seem as though you’re contemplating how to dispose of my feet once you’ve separated them from my body.

The women I know are not drawn to shame, dishonesty, vanity, or disrespect (to us, to your children, to yourselves). I don’t think you are either—or you shouldn’t be. When what you’re proposing is a relationship—and whether for a couple of hours or a couple of decades, if there’s two or more people involved, each with his or her own needs and interests, then it’s a relationship—you need to demonstrate that you’re considerate of the other person. This is not about being a conformist, about sacrificing your individuality, about slavishly giving up your own identity to please some selfish other—it’s about being as pleasing, and pleasant, as you’d like us to be in return. And about not looking like a serial killer.

Again, these profiles are not just photos—they represent a set of choices a person has made about how to represent himself to others for the purposes of physical, and perhaps emotional intimacy. These photos range from the ridiculous to the off-putting to the seriously creepy; but what disturbs me most is that all of these hapless fellows seem to be missing not only self-awareness, but any semblance of meaningful social connectedness. How come the only pictures they have are out-of-date, or creepy selfies, or so unflattering? How come they don’t have people to do things with? How come they don’t have anyone to tell them this?: “Dude, this is the picture of a guy who’s about to have his back yard dug up by a team of crime-scene investigators.”

Being a heterosexual man in today’s society comes with a lot of real challenges that we’ve yet to collectively deal with, including the fact that unattached men can end up very badly adrift. In moments of compassion, I feel badly for these men, and the loneliness and isolation they’re all trying, in their various hapless ways, to overcome on a dating app like Tinder. And yet. My friends and I are neither lonely, isolated, nor hapless. Women: none of us ever needs to risk our emotional, immunological, or physical well-being for Naked Selfie Man or Basement Serial Killer Man. Men: put some (clean, tailored) clothes on, call someone who could be a friend to you, and go out and do something, not for the sake of any real or imagined woman, or your stupid Tinder profile, but simply for yourself.

I was stood up last night.

First of all: OMG, WTF? Who does that?? Does he not know who he’s dealing with?

Secondly: As someone who is compulsively, neurotically, prompt, hyper-vigilant, and plagued with an exaggerated sense of responsibility for everything and everyone, I have a very, very hard time understanding what would have to happen in a person’s mind and soul to make it all right to stand someone up.

It’s interesting the way we use the word “stand.” You can stand firm, stand your ground, stand up for your beliefs, stand up against oppression and bullying, stand up and be counted. You can refuse to stand for some imposition, or burden. It may be that you can’t stand liver, or the sound of someone chewing gum, or people who are habitually late. You can stand by someone in a time of need or crisis. You can stand by and wait for instructions. You can be an innocent bystander, or an incurious bystander who saw and heard nothing. You can stand and deliver. You can find yourself in a standoff. You can be standoffish. You can stand around and get in everyone’s way: don’t just stand there, do something!

To “stand” means, in general, to remain motionless. When you feel like you have nothing to do, where there is nothing to be done, when the other person lets you down and doesn’t show up, then just standing around becomes a purgatorial condition of helpless endurance. To stand can mean to accept or tolerate—perhaps with passive suffering, or passive complicity. But standing can also be assertive, an act of resistance. When you won’t stand for something, when you can’t stand it anymore, you’re refusing to be patient and accepting, you’ve reached your limit, your line in the sand—this is where you’ll make your stand, this far and no farther. When you stand up for something, or for someone, you’re acting on (presumably) good principles of justice and fairness.

When one person stands up another, the passive and active, resistant and stubborn connotations of “stand” all come into play at once, without any of the good, mitigating principles. Where most standing is, in its many conditions, something one experiences oneself, to stand someone up is to misconstrue the positive conditions within oneself, and impose the negative conditions on another: “I’m going to stand up for my own selfishness, I’m taking a stand against social obligations and courtesy, I’m not going to stand for one more moment of potential discomfort. Therefore, I’ll make the other person stand around pointlessly; the other person will have to stand being treated with disrespect and indifference; the other person can be an insignificant bystander to my own breathtaking act of egotism.”

That’s all by way of saying—just to be clear—that standing someone up is a completely unjustifiable, antisocial act of impropriety.

There are grand, romantic stories in the past of missed connections, of one person, waiting in fervent, loving hope for another who never comes—death, accident, cruel intervention by a scheming rival, unlikely but melodramatic plot machination that irrationally but suspensefully keeps our heroine waiting in vain. In real-life 21st century social situations, this almost never happens. Trying to get to the other person and being thwarted—by traffic or weather, or unromantic bosses or airline ticket agents—that happens. But sooner or later, the one held back finds her way to the one who waits (and texts from the airport or the snowstorm-induced gridlock when she has a chance).

But standing someone up is not about two people being thwarted—it’s about one person deliberately thwarting the other. The prosaic scenario of standing someone up is always the same—two people agree to meet. One person’s vanity, and a belief or expectation about some better opportunity takes precedence over the needs or interests of another. Sometimes the person concocts a flimsy or elaborate excuse—a lie—sent by text to defy proof or investigation or confrontation. Sometimes the person simply fails to show up, and the one who waits, waits; she stands around for a certain amount of time, feeling foolish, then gives up and goes home and reads Milton: “they also serve who only stand and wait.”

Why start something you can’t stand to finish? I’ve tried to imagine what semblance of rationalization goes on in the mind of the one who stands up another and—really, it’s an irrational mess in there. To have learned (is this learning, or the absence of learning?) to be indifferent to the feelings of others, you must have had others be indifferent to your feelings, a lot. You must have seen a lot of people treating others with indifference, and come to think: “this is what people do, they act as though there’s no such thing as ‘people,’ there’s only ‘me’ and things that I find gratifying or tedious, things that I stand up for, things I can’t be expected to stand, and things I just stand up.” Such a worldview is a product of mutually-imposed suffering, wherein you perpetuators of suffering are completely unaware that all you need to do to stop it all is just stop: take a stand, and start treating others the way you’d want to be treated yourselves. You might get stood up a little in the process (not very pleasant, is it?), but stand firm, stand and deliver, make a stand. Don’t just stand there, do something.

When I was at my indoor cycling class yesterday, I started to notice some agitated motion in my field of vision—which is a bit unusual, since the bikes are stationary and we’re furiously pedaling nowhere, against no real obstacles or headwinds. The bizarre but effective point of this artificial environment is that it creates the conditions for pure work; nevertheless, while you don’t need balance or quick reflexes for the class, there is a certain technique to it, which good instructors remind us of over and over again. And to my constant surprise, lots of the people who take these classes either just don’t care about the technique, or—my real suspicion—they’re just not capable of learning it.

This drives me crazy.

I used to take any old bike in the studio, but in recent years I’ve found that I have to be in the front row, where I can see the rest of the class in the mirror if I want to look around, but can really just focus on the instructor and my own feet going round and round on the pedals—just so I don’t have to look at the other people in the room, seated awkwardly either too high or low, draping all their weight on the handlebars, riding bow-legged, doing the prancing aerobics move circa 1996 called a standing run, grinding through one pedal stroke after another with an alarming and unattractive pelvic movement, or otherwise flinging themselves awkwardly around the bike—which, as I mentioned, is stationary and has no call for flinging.

I mean, all of this really drives me crazy.

The source of the agitated motion I noticed yesterday was a man lurching back and and forth on his bike, right behind me, where I couldn’t avoid seeing him in the mirror. I tried not to look, but my attention kept being pulled back to what, to me, was awkward, grotesque movement. To the man, I suppose, the movement must have felt…good? natural? I think, in fact, he was carried away with the rhythm of the music—he would lurch back and forth, then his whole upper body would inscribe a circle in one direction for a couple of 8-counts, then revolve in the other direction for another 8, then repeat. He seemed to be having a really good, if strikingly ungainly workout. I was horrified, aghast, repelled.

My automatic thought was—several simultaneous thoughts: What’s wrong with you?? why are you doing that?? why can’t you ride like a normal person?? why can’t you do what the instructor says? why can’t you observe what other exemplary people like me are doing and do likewise? why don’t you know or care that your technique is awful and weird and wrong and you’re not doing it like I am??

And then I thought of these lines from Robert Burns’ poem, “To a Louse”: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!” (If only some power would give us the gift to see ourselves as ourselves see us!). I was thinking in a satisfied way that these lines represented the situation perfectly: if only that poor ungainly fellow could understand just how freakish he looks, as determined by my indisputable aesthetic and social standards. But, while I may be super-judgey, I’m also a conscientious scholar, so once I got home from the gym, I read the whole poem (below), and realized that I was taking my favorite lines slightly out of context.

The poet’s in church, watching a louse crawl over a fine lady’s bonnet in the pew in front of him. He curses the little creature, and suggests it belongs better in a beggar’s hovel. And yet, the louse, of course, doesn’t care—we’re all the same to it. No matter how we’re able to dress ourselves up, no matter how fancy we might be, we’re all the same, all just bodies—no matter how fine or noble we want to appear, the lowliest vermin knows we’re all just the same, all alike in that decay and death await us all. In other words, the poem’s teasing us all about our silly displays of vanity:
  
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
    To see oursels as ithers see us!
    It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
    An’ foolish notion:
    What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
    An’ ev’n devotion!

(“If only some power would give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us! It would free us from many a blunder, and, foolish notion: we’d be forced to see the falseness of our affectations in dress and manner”)

Huh, I thought. That doesn’t help at all. Instead of helping me make the argument for the importance of not looking ridiculous, Burns is asking me: why does it all matter so much?

Never mind poor ungainly man—because he really seems perfectly content to do his thing on that bike. Why am I so bothered by, and censorious of, his behavior, when it has nothing to do with me, or anyone?

I have always been exhaustively, exhaustedly self-conscious. As a child and teen-ager, I suffered agonies, believing that I looked and acted inexcusably differently than my peers, especially the popular ones: too shy, too many big words, too big, too quiet when I should be loud, too slow, too formal, too weird. Whatever the situation, I always had the feeling that there was some set of rules that everyone else knew, except for me. I was always doing it wrong. So that, if I could gain positive attention for doing something right, then I went after that thing full-on, obsessively, and dogmatically—rarely taking risks, always preferring the most reliable path to praise: school work, household chores, obedience to authority (I was well into university before I realized that you could cut classes and nothing would happen—I really had no idea it could be done). The one exception was fashion and music—in the midst of pastels, Tiffany, and Michael Jackson, I chose New Wave, and neon and lamé, and yards of black fabric and layers of black eyeliner. After all, being a good student would definitely get me adult approval, whereas it didn’t seem to matter whether I wore pink pants or fishnets, because either way I’d be standing alone in a corner at school dances.

In my adult life, I’ve worked hard—self-conscious about my own self-consciousness—to get over a lot of that childhood insecurity. But of course it’s still there (do we ever get over the trauma of summer camp and the rejections of high school dances?), if perhaps in an altered, refined form. Expect me to work my way into a conversation cluster at a cocktail party, and you’ll soon find me standing alone in my safe little corner, edging toward the door—but I’ll knock small children and elderly ladies out of the way for the chance to talk to 100 people in a lecture hall. Keeping people’s attention is a requirement of my job, and, conveniently, when I’m the one making the rules for a captive audience, it’s a lot more fun and less risky than making small talk over mini-quiche and stuffed mushroom caps.

And the obsessiveness with getting attention for things I’ve done well affects a lot of my behavior, to the point that I’ve become downright exhibitionistic in some ways, particularly at the gym. I was fantastically un-athletic when I was younger; but by grad school, I’d become something of a jock—turns out, my once ungainly germanic body is actually pretty strong, flexible, and coordinated. I have excellent form, exemplary technique. I always stand in the front row. Because I paid my ungainly, unfit, ugly-duckling dues for so many painful years, I feel justified in the satisfaction that my athleticism brings me. It has also made me just the slightest bit vain. And, apparently, just the slightest bit judgmental of anyone who does not take his or her vanity as seriously as I do, like the blissfully unself-conscious ungainly man in my cycling class.

And there it is, at the core of my judgement of him—it is not, in fact, that man, or anyone else around me (all of us pedaling frantically to nowhere) that drives me crazy—it’s all my insecurity, my vanity. I don’t know this man at all—not his name, what he does, where he’s from. I don’t know what, if anything, makes him self-conscious, or what his petty vanities are. I also don’t know what makes him happy, or in what ways he brings happiness to the people in his life whom he loves, and who love him. I don’t know him, other than as a provocation for a strong, negative, unfair response. That is, I’m doing exactly what I most fear other people are doing in response to me—judging me, condemning me, rejecting me, without ever knowing me. Self-consciousness, vanity, self-absorption—all our “airs in dress an’ gait” —these are all ingrained defenses that we acquire, to protect ourselves against pain and rejection; and in the process they become the mechanism for hurting and rejecting others.

Of course, the lessons I’m drawing from this experience—about the cost of vanity, the real value of compassion, kindness, and respect for one’s neighbors—aren’t new ones. They’ve been around for quite some time. But I imagine that when Burns watched the louse scale the lady’s bonnet, with no regard for human vanity whatsoever, it might have occurred to him, as it does to me now, that the venerability and familiarity of these lessons tend to make them into abstractions, things that we all know and think we believe, but that we might not actually get in the midst of our relatively comfortable, privileged, self-satisfied lives. In fact, these lessons are—like Burns’ little louse—at once more simple, humble, and immediate than we think; they’re right there in front of us, if we’re ready to see them.

Just paying attention to my own—let’s be honest here—mean response in the last week has made me a little more self-conscious about where that meanness comes from, and in the process, makes me a feel a little more compassionately towards myself, as well as towards a man I don’t even know. Thank you, ungainly cycling man: do whatever it takes to be happy as we all pedal furiously to nowhere—and I’ll try to do the same.

Robert Burns
“To A Louse, On Seeing One On A Lady’s Bonnet, At Church,” 1786

    Ha! whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?
    Your impudence protects you sairly;
    I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
    Owre gauze and lace;
    Tho’, faith! I fear ye dine but sparely
    On sic a place.

    Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
    Detested, shunn’d by saunt an’ sinner,
    How daur ye set your fit upon her-
    Sae fine a lady?
    Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner
    On some poor body.

    Swith! in some beggar’s haffet squattle;
    There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle,
    Wi’ ither kindred, jumping cattle,
    In shoals and nations;
    Whaur horn nor bane ne’er daur unsettle
    Your thick plantations.

    Now haud you there, ye’re out o’ sight,
    Below the fatt’rels, snug and tight;
    Na, faith ye yet! ye’ll no be right,
    Till ye’ve got on it-
    The verra tapmost, tow’rin height
    O’ Miss’ bonnet.

    My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose out,
    As plump an’ grey as ony groset:
    O for some rank, mercurial rozet,
    Or fell, red smeddum,
    I’d gie you sic a hearty dose o’t,
    Wad dress your droddum.

    I wad na been surpris’d to spy
    You on an auld wife’s flainen toy;
    Or aiblins some bit dubbie boy,
    On’s wyliecoat;
    But Miss’ fine Lunardi! fye!
    How daur ye do’t?

    O Jeany, dinna toss your head,
    An’ set your beauties a’ abread!
    Ye little ken what cursed speed
    The blastie’s makin:
    Thae winks an’ finger-ends, I dread,
    Are notice takin.

    O wad some Power the giftie gie us
    To see oursels as ithers see us!
    It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
    An’ foolish notion:
    What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
    An’ ev’n devotion!

The other day, Jodi Kantor, in the New York Times, suggested that feminists no longer need to worry about how women are portrayed in magazines (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/business/media/debate-on-photo-retouching-flares-online-with-roles-reversed.html). This was in response to Jezebel.com offering a $10,000 bounty for unretouched photos of Lena Dunham’s recent shoot for Vogue. Admittedly, the photos of Dunham weren’t the most egregriously-altered images to ever appear in that magazine—Dunham has been very thorough in displaying her body in the media, very self-consciously defying expectations about how an actress larger than a size 2 ought to (un)clothe her body and the Vogue editors surely knew they’d be under scrutiny for trying to make her look like Kate Winslett. Who was deemed too hefty to appear unretouched and had to be photoshopped to look like Kate Moss. Nevertheless, the magazine did alter Dunham’s photos considerably, not just to make her look better (whatever that means), but, specifically, thinner and less “flawed”—assuming that looking at all like herself would be to look unacceptable. Did Jezebel pursue the “wrong target,” as Kantor suggests? Are “feminists…finally…able to declare victory — or, at least, celebrate major milestones — in their longstanding fight against such magazines?”

First of all, Dunham’s not the target, the magazine is, and not just for the Dunham shoot;  secondly, I think we’re a very long way from being able to congratulate Vogue or any woman’s magazine for accurate representations of the full range of women’s beauty, let alone women’s experiences. Take a look at whatever’s currently in the racks at the gym, from Vogue to Women’s Health, from Elle to Self to Oprah—much has changed since the feminist occupation of the Ladies’ Home Journal offices in 1970, in both the magazines and the lives of their readers. But much remains dishearteningly the same.

Consider just these few examples, which have all struck me in the last week:

1. In the same week that Dunham was on the cover of Vogue, she also had this “question” from reporter Tim Molloy in a press conference for the launch of the third season of Girls: “I don’t get the purpose of all the nudity on the show. By you particularly. I feel like I’m walking into a trap where you say no one complains about the nudity on Game of Thrones, but I get why they’re doing it. They’re doing it to be salacious. To titillate people. And your character is often naked at random times for no reason.” If you watch Girls, you know Dunham’s often naked under the same conditions that women are naked in most shows—during sex scenes, and to titillate. Except that because Dunham doesn’t look like many of the women who are generally paid to appear naked in TV or film, and more like the average woman who occasionally gets naked with the very average man—a reporter can say, to her face, that her nakedness is not titillating, just random (and by implication, unwelcome). Dunham’s reply: “Yeah. It’s because it’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive, I think, and I totally get it. If you are not into me, that’s your problem.”  (http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/01/10/nudity_in_girls_television_critic_tim_molloy_doesn_t_get_why_lena_dunham.html)
2. After a years’ long campaign using ads shot by Terry Richardson—a photographer known for using a porn aesthetic in much of his work, and, allegedly, life—my gym has moved on to something new. Instead of being inspired by young, underwear-clad models doing nothing fitness related, in the “Equinox made me do it” campaign, we’re meant to be inspired—somehow—by images of young models with bruised faces, sitting in ice baths, standing around in their underwear, or running naked from the camera—and still not doing anything fitness related. These ads really don’t tell us much about the gym, about fitness, or health. And importantly—no differently than the Richardson campaign—they don’t do anything to capture the experience of fitness of the people who actually use the gym. Wait, that’s not quite true—the ads don’t capture the positive reasons I and fellow members have for working out, which encompass health, the acquisition of skill and improved feelings of self-efficacy, relief from stress, and camaraderie. Insofar as the ads say anything (because this particular campaign is trying so hard to be edgy, that it’s just absurd and oblique), they do evoke—or provoke—all the negative reasons we have for being there: vanity, self-consciousness, obsession with youth, mindless conformity to constructs of “beauty” and “sex” that have nothing to do with beauty and sex, or “realistic expression[s] of what it’s like to be alive.”
3. And: in the last couple of days Fb friends have posted on the new, “healthier” direction that we’re heading in for women’s fitness—“strong is the new sexy”. Have you heard? Being attractive now is not about being skinny, it’s about being super-fit. And, incidentally, being very skinny, and very hungry. (Kevin Moore, at the Good Men Project, has a nice take-down of the sinister subtext of this “fitspiration” aesthetic: http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/brand-the-6-most-shockingly-irresponsible-fitspiration-photos/). 

I know lots of amazing people—women and men—who possess many great qualities, which include, but are not limited to, impressive fitness and commitment to wellness. None of them look like the fitspiration models in magazines and print ads. The people I’ve known who come closest to the ideals of these extremes of “strength” have only managed it through self-denial and obsession, which occasionally spills over into unwelcome proselytizing. And that’s not me being judgey—I’m including myself there. I started dieting when I was about 11 or 12, and exercising compulsively when I was about 13, and spent long years of my life thinking miserably about what I’d eaten, what I wanted to eat, what I would have to eat (or not eat) instead, and when I’d next make it to the gym to work off the calories from whatever I’d over-eaten. As hard as I tried to look like the photos in the magazines (and not the fashion spreads, either—no, I was always committed to health! always trying to be leaner and more cut) I was never very successful, because I never had the self-discipline to become a serious anorexic, which would have been the only way I could get my germanic body anywhere close to small enough to match the ideals that I was subscribing to. But I spent—wasted—long, long hours talking and thinking about how to get skinnier; and I know, from spending a lot of time with people similarly-obsessed in those days, that the shared mindset is not, in fact, about discipline and strength, and health, and self-respect. It’s often about self-revulsion, and a desire to control that revulsion through constant, grinding judgement of oneself and others.

If I’ve become one of the queen bees at my gym (that’s not just my imagination, right…?), I’m there now because of hard-earned lessons about balance and limits and gratitude for what my body does and how it looks—lessons I wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t been motivated almost exclusively by hate and frustration with my non-ideal body that haunted me for far too many years when I was younger (I can tell the story of how I got over the hatred and most of the self-doubt in another post. Short version: therapy, France, over-training myself into such a state of injury that I just had to stop, growing up).
 
Now, it makes me very sad to hear strong, healthy, beautiful friends publicly berating themselves for being too fat, and too lazy, and swearing that they’re going to just stop eating tomorrow, after they take 3 fitness classes in a row;  to witness male reporters thoughtlessly telling talented actresses that they should put some clothes on because they’re just not pretty and skinny enough to look at naked; to have to end a relationship upon discovering that the other party is so vain and controlling that he thinks he’s being helpful in telling me that I’d look better if my waist were smaller; to see younger women going through elaborate contortions to keep themselves covered by clothes and towels in the changing room because they’re so self-conscious about not looking “fit” and “strong” on their way to the damned shower…The ads for our gym, the fitness magazines that everyone reads at the gym, tv, movies, social media, the occasional date, and voices within ourselves are all telling us that if we live full lives nourished by work, culture, friends, family, travel, dance, and the occasional really, really delicious meal—that we’re not being committed or disciplined or deprived enough to be beautiful.

Ought the collective self-esteem of relatively privileged North Americans to be the top priority for feminists, in the grand scheme of things? No—and yes. Of course, the pressure I feel to “have a better beach body by May!” is minor compared to the systemic discrimination that women still encounter in western culture, and absolutely nothing compared to the lack of legal and social protections women in many developing cultures have. But: the choices made by publishers and marketers to sell fitness by selling insecurity and self-doubt about our appearance only work because our society still places so much value on our adherence to certain expectations about what we can and can’t do with our bodies. While a bit of subtle retouching there or very overt fat-shaming here might seem trivial, it’s all part of a larger system of values that undermine girls and women throughout their lives. When a young woman can’t stop thinking about how un-beautiful she is (because, I can assure you, that happens, a lot)—what is that doing to her developing sense of herself in every other facet of life, as a student, a professional, a leader, a lover, a mother? Nothing good.

So no, I’m not sure we feminists are ready to declare victory over the magazines just yet. Kantor cites an editor at Glamour who argues that “Women changed and our culture changed in general…The front lines right now are not women’s magazines.” Perhaps—but conflicts aren’t won solely through open combat (such nice imagery). As any resistance fighter knows, propaganda, control of information and images, can make all the difference in keeping a population cowed, disorganized, and neutralized—or inspired, organized, and brave enough to push back against oppression. Keep that in mind the next time you pick up a magazine, or fret about your thigh gap, or complain about your cellulite—who’s telling you you’re the wrong size, the wrong shape? What power do they have do decide that? (Hint: none, unless we let them).

*and PS—of course, men are harmed by these images, and by systemic sexism, too, no question. Check out the Good Men Project for more analysis. I’ve written elsewhere about the positive work that wellness magazines can do for male and female readers:

• http://www.genders.org/g45/g45_farkas.html
• http://pcasacas.org/SiPC/33.1/Farkas.pdf

**The Dove Real Beauty campaign does some very positive work in trying to teach young women how to re-assert control over constructions of “beauty”—we need a lot more projects like it.

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