After having a French meal for the first time with a new friend I had just met on the internet, we wandered into the East Village while talking about working as women in finance. It was mature and felt like I was with my tribe. We talked about how women leave the workplace after getting pregnant but men do not feel the need nor the pressure to. We talked about the soft skills women bring to the job that men very often lack, and the toxic workplace standards men set as a result. We talked about the challenging work that we both pole-vaulted into and were champions of.
Exactly the privileged, young professional talk you would expect to be a part of at a gastronomic, “rightly” expensive French restaurant in the middle of the most expensive cities on Earth that was within the gravitational pull of capitalism, a mere mile from Wall Street. The most far from real work can be seen from the rest of the country in its exploitation of labor and a pandemic of homelessness. This was where my new friend lived and I worked.
It was after this dinner at a local bar in the East Village, with its ping pong tables, tap beer, and live funk band of no-doubt high school math teachers whose students knew they were cool but weren’t able to put their finger on why.
As my friend and I played ping pong with other friends I met on Reddit, two guys approached us, striking up small talk and undoubtedly trying to pick us up when the new guy who played as my partner asked what I did. And I asked him.
There was a bit of a dance of avoiding the question, as young professionals do.
But over the rifts of the funky bass, I heard him say Google. And for a moment, I thought to myself:
“Maybe this guy is good enough for me.”
Only on our first date did I realize that I had misheard him while playing ping pong. We had just come out of the pandemic and through the vaccine rollout, so the world was re-learning how to socialize in person again.
He worked at a much lesser startup, but one that paid well.
But in thinking that he might have measured up, I told him what I did. And he had the same reaction that I did (because I thought he worked at Google). One of both surprise and fear that one was not good enough for the other. After a moment, at a different time, he replied to my occupation within investment banking with “I-banking.” Transplants always coining new phrases from the place they are from that somehow also does not fit where they now are.
I laughed because I didn’t know how to deal with someone thinking I was better than them because of where I worked or what I did.
I never had.
Over the next few weeks, the new guy would become the old guy who I dated but never connected with. The one who nonchalantly trauma dumped on me, but if I was honest, I still cannot know if he did that because it was me, or because I was someone. I don’t know if I ever will.
He was the type of guy who thought taking a girl on dates would give her the emotional fulfillment she needed to not feel as bad about having meaningless sex with him.
I’ve met many guys like him. Those who think that sex will fill the emptiness they feel. Ones who think that sexual satisfaction can be converted to emotional fulfillment.
After I realized that no, those things are not the same. It is not kinetic energy that can be converted to potential energy from the ride of the orgasm up to the sadness life is so often associated with as the rollercoaster comes down. And when we sat in his bed where he would later find an unknown species of centipede in his bed, no doubt because he slept with two other women a week after I told him that we weren’t going out anymore. Things got deep. Deeper than I’d imagine it ever would if we had gone on dates and had started a relationship together. Where we talked about each other’s faults, in a frank but thoughtful way. Eventually, he tells me this:
“Every time I have sex, it feels good, and then I feel empty.”
And for me, who always felt used, and being a straight woman, by men. I always vilified the other side. Men, with their inability to get pregnant because they were coerced into having unprotected sex. By men who think that sex is just sex. But it isn’t. Men are not the heartless animals we write them out to be. They, too, have unresolved trauma. And unresolved psychological and emotional wounds. But they are silenced when they bring it up.
Maybe that is why the guy trauma dumped on me. Because though we were not meant for each other. He felt safe saying things to me that he would be attacked for if he said to someone else.
Men are painted as emotionless creatures. But where is the support when they finally show us their underbelly? I guess when he told me that he felt empty after meaningless sex, it was the moment that I saw myself in him.
Many months later, we still sent each other memes with one-word responses. One Tik Tok video I shared with him, showed a humorous albeit sad retelling of seeing a friend who will fuck anything that moves to feel something.
The guy responded with a Spiderman meme where they both pointed at each other:
“This you?”.
With a LOL and an “I meant you!” in response, I couldn’t help but laugh. Was I looking into a reflection of myself?
Science says that if you were to ever meet yourself on the street, you wouldn’t be able to recognize yourself. Because a mirror shows the flipped view of your body and your face. Everyone’s walk, posture, and mannerisms are unique too.
If you’ve never met yourself in real life, you wouldn’t know it was you.
How would you respond to them and what would you learn from them? And would you even know that they were you?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Jason Goodman on Unsplash
