‘What the hell am I doing here?’ is the thought I have to defeat as I take a seat at this high-end surf and turf kind of place, with a square shaped bar that helps people check each other out. They pour large, expensive drinks, which also helps.
A woman sings and plays piano, and a few people dance in a small space to one side of the bar. For some reason, it’s a scene, although what constitutes a scene I couldn’t quite say. What the hell am I doing here? There is no woman in the bar I find attractive who is not accompanied by a man. So I sit and sip my very large tequila and soda and try not to think too much.
To live with and love a woman for 27 years is to know nothing of love and women, I’ve found out. On date after date, I learn the story of love and women is a story of going without. I am new to this, and they are not. I’m driven by libidinous grief, and they are driven by a checklist of what they want and do not want in me. This seems so calculated, until I realize later, that for most of them, love and injury are almost indivisible. They don’t trust their eyes, much less their heart, and they sure as shit don’t trust me.
This leaves their checklist, like some basic if/then algorithm they’re relying on to navigate to something better. My own agenda is unclear. I lost the love of my life to cancer. I have friends, great friends, among them women who introduce me to women I go on dates with. What do I want from them—fun, sex, love? What are they offering? I think I’m waiting for someone to see me, which is, after all, what I’ve lost. But the truth is they don’t, they can’t.
Whatever feminism has accomplished in the real world, in the dating world it feels like it never happened. The man reaches out. The man picks the place. The man expresses the interest, and makes the advances based on said interest. The man pays both in compliments and in money. The man follows up. And the woman receives, or not. How very biological. Not every time, but in my experience let’s say eight out of ten.
Where are the smart, strong women who supposedly want a man who isn’t threatened by their success? I barely get a whiff of that. These women have careers. Some have built businesses and are well off. But in the presence of the man, they want to meet his strength, such as it is, with their form of feminine meekness.
Almost all these women have children, more than one, and a sense of humor. One woman, bright, a very lean workout queen and a good listener, has five. Five children. The conversation eventually warms sufficiently for me to ask her why five children? She pauses a moment and says, she thinks it’s the only thing she enjoyed about her marriage. In her fifties, she’s been divorced five years; marriage was the mistake of her life.
Another demographic trend: reincarnation. Many of these women not only believe in it, but have fully populated pantheons of who and where they’ve been. One, a naturopathic doctor, was unfortunately burned at the stake as a witch some time back. She seems difficult to get close to.
Another, an engineer, is from the Pleiades, a star cluster located in the constellation Taurus, 400 light years away. Wow, I’m just an immortalist who thinks that between new science and our own intention we should be able to live forever. She’s very kind and open, but believes the planet is going to switch poles sometime in the next three years, which will decimate most of the population. I met her in this same bar and she told me she’s on the spectrum for autism, which I thought was a remarkable thing to say. We had a laugh about her ADD tendencies, which were quite apparent. Later she told me about her ten-date rule (before sex) and I knew we’d never make it.
Going from loving a woman for decades to just meeting women is, of course, jarring. I’m not accustomed to the reticence required. I give away way too much about myself, assuming that transparency will be attractive.
It isn’t.
I’m an immortalist and an artist. My love was much older than me. I share a home with other adults. No, they don’t share their bed with me. I don’t believe in marriage. I don’t believe in any of the conventional God forms. Whose list would these items check off?
My own idea of what I’m doing alters weekly as I try to get some bearing on what the hell it is I’m doing. The lack of candid response from women too guarded to give it is somewhat disorienting. I decide I’m not going to go out with anyone for a while. Or not with women from North Scottsdale who may or may not be too conventional for me.
I decide I’m going to just try to get laid. This feels more practical, though I’ve gone without for so long that the body of a woman intimate seems like a distant land I used to know. But at least sex gives me a cause and reason to pursue.
In lieu of trusting their own senses, pursuit is something women look for as signifying seriousness. One woman who engaged me on an app, a former ballerina, admitted that a man was pursuing her so much she had to lay off me to see where it would go with him. She said nothing about being attracted to him.
My pursuit game has been admittedly weak. When women back off, or don’t respond, I move on. Sometimes I am guessing they probably want me to come after them, but we’ve just met and they haven’t given me any reason to as of yet. I’m like some suitor out of Jane Austen who’s supposed to have ardent feelings for a person I barely know. And it involves a lot of texting.
Now, at the bar, a woman in one of those round western hats smiles at me. Or maybe I smile at her. She was dancing with a man, an older man, so I’m surprised when she comes over and sits in the chair beside me. She’s pretty drunk, which makes us both stumble for words. Somehow we manage to talk about writing because I’m a writer. She tells me an idea for a TV series, which she’s been thinking about, and it’s actually funny. And we kiss.
Something always happens at this bar, so I’ve taken to calling it the Vortex. One night I sat sipping a drink, when a woman rolled in and sat right in the seat to my left. Hot pink short dress and lipstick, surgically rounded boobs, bleached blond hair, and a little girl’s voice. She moved here from Las Vegas. Angry, but at no one, she seemed exhausted by her own sweetness.
If I’d been focused on sex that night, then who know? But a more wholesome looking woman, with brighter eyes, sat down immediately to my right. She sold real estate, had triplets and mentioned Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins, almost as ubiquitous as reincarnation, is what women talk about when I talk about the spirit of longevity and the potentiality of the unknown. Mostly, Robbins just helps talk people who want to make more money into doing it, but you can almost think you have common ground.
You have to make the right choice in such moments, and I chose Ms. Motivated Real Estate who never returned my texts over Ms. Vegas Burnout, who might have gone to bed with me directly. So with cowboy hat girl, I’m eager to get it right. I have to ask about the guy she was hanging out with because he is talking to a couple of guys wearing suits and ties with a certain criminal menace. She says they are just friends, looking out for each other, which is confusing to me but maybe plausible.
We touch and talk more, and she brings up the subject of sex that night, making my heart race. We manage to talk more. We are working up to leaving together when she stops, as if she suddenly remembers something a friend or therapist told her to remember in just such a situation. “Wait,” she says. “I’m tired of guys who have no values. What are your values?”
I may struggle with small talk, and bring up too much of my own threateningly interesting story, but I can talk about my values. Especially most of the way through a mega tequila and soda. I tell her how I value human connection, of which I believe longevity is the key. If you want to change human behavior, you have to change the human condition. We have to get out of the anxiety of survival to truly love one another. Clearly, I’m going to get some tonight.
Indeed, she kisses me in approval and goes to tell her friend she’s leaving with me. The friend comes over, looks me in the eyes and says: Take care of her. I tell him in full sincerity that I will.
We leave together, which is great, but I’m logistically nervous. I live a half hour out of town in the desert. Do I take her there and then bring her back? Go to her place, which is probably closer? Are we really doing this?
On the way to my car, we stop and kiss and kiss some more, as I have not done in over two years. Kissing with the purpose or possibility of having sex is totally different and I have really missed it. At my car, she hesitates, says something about going dancing. I’m sort of fine with that—this is all already a win for me, but then she drops the idea of dancing, and we drive.
She is almost half my age, wants to move to Europe, and loves her dog. I love my dogs too. I explain where I live and propose we go to where she lives, but she’s not having that. So I head towards home. Meanwhile, she is somehow naked from the waist down in the passenger seat. I touch her as I drive. I figure this is getting serious, so I pull over intending to call my housemates and give them a heads up, but instead give her my full attention.
My first collective impression of the women I’ve encountered is how tradition-bound they are. How defaulted to their inherited roles. I’m critical and frustrated, because I’m after something else, and submissiveness has always set me off. But at some point, I start to glimpse the almost impossible complexity women face.
Equality? Women hardly feel safe. They are almost always physically smaller, often emotionally more vulnerable, usually less financially secure, often through no fault of their own, and typically more taxed with raising the children. No wonder many are drawn toward protection—they need it.
My partner was a revolutionary, a woman who made no concession to male dominance in public or in private, and refused to be contained in the traditional female roles of wife and mother. She rightly questioned who would want to, or even could, live forever bound by such limitation. I loved her for it, which was my way of protecting her. If I didn’t love her, I’m sure she would still have held those values and lived them, but I shielded her from paying too high a price, if by nothing else but enjoying her.
In a sense, women are equal when the men around them allow it. What sort of equality is that? Especially when you are trying to be attractive to men. Is equality even the right metric? Or just a default in place of some deeper sense of receiving, respect, and connection between men and women that utterly eludes us as a society.
Some women forgo the efforts of attraction almost entirely. One showed up for a first date in what looked like frumpy pajamas, as if we were old friends meeting at the dog park Sunday morning. Others search for more real reciprocation but with only their hard-earned experience to navigate by, which maps much to steer clear of and little to steer towards. Yes, many play the old game seemingly without a second thought, but how many men in their forties and beyond are challenging age-old societal norms, or the flawed expectations and responses to intimacy programmed into them over generations?
Patriarchy is a bitch, but evolution is the ultimate oppressor. We can moralize about power structures and how men and women ought to be equal so long that we confuse normalizing the conversation with making it so. But what about survival? All the liberal minded talk in the world can’t touch that.
The survival instinct tells women to watch out, tone it down, be pleasing while keeping your guard up, defer to dominance while limiting access, select for strength to help you survive, avoid the unfamiliar even when what’s familiar has brought only disappointment.
I know it’s highbrow of me, but I think of Tolstoy and that of course, of his two major novels, one of them is Anna Karenina, because the constraint of women in the world is a topic of endless complexity. More than that, it reveals all of our subjugation to the agendas of evolution. If one is the protected, the other must be the protector, yet no one is ever safe. Tolstoy’s characters seek to transcend this bind with Christian spirituality and why not? The so-called progressive outlooks we’re supposed to believe in can’t alter the evolutionary equation in the end. This is why bigotries and injustices of all sorts seem eternal. In evolution, a system driven by death, the anxiety of survival will always compromise higher ideals of connection and caring.
This is why longevity is essential to sustained social justice. We have to get out from under the threat of mortality and the anxiety of survival to live our humanity. This is why I’m an immortalist, right now an immortalist who is trying to get laid.
We are driving again, north, towards my house, and I still haven’t contacted my housemates, Jim and Lana, who often wait up for me in the kitchen to hear how dates go. I sometimes convey excitement about a first date, and when the second or third date fizzles out they are disappointed. They can get more attached than I do. For some reason now, I’m nervous about bringing this girl home.
At a red light, I lean over to kiss her, and our desire forces us to pull off again into a dark office block parking lot. She looks at me wistfully and says once I have sex with her, I’ll lose interest. I say, “Why? I’ll want to have sex with you again”, which satisfies her. With a kind of resigned shrug, like she knows we’ll never get to my house, she leans back the seat and invites me on top of her.
Not schooled in the psychology of hookups, I can’t speculate on her motivations, but I’m full of lust and loss and longing for the witnessing of a lover. But it’s just been me with myself for nearly three years, I don’t know exactly how long, so I’m not ready for her. Indeed, my body is perhaps confused by her presence in this intimate moment. What’s she doing here?
Maybe I should feel embarrassed, but I don’t. Trying to keep my beloved alive, I accompanied her to the doorstep of death. Let my manhood be measured by the constancy of that stand. The body can’t help but record the desolation of death and something in my chest is still clutched tight as a frozen fist. If my arousal isn’t quite there, what of it?
I tell her how long it has been for me and the timeframe startles her. That long? I guess she took me for a player, which is hilarious. But by my own hand, my body starts to respond as it’s accustomed to. With a certain generous grace, she kneels in the passenger seat and the long drought is over for me.
I don’t know how many resurrections my road back from death may require, but out in these suburban streets after midnight with this wild-child whom I’ll never see again, I feel a certain careless joy, like a teenager who thinks he’s discovering life, and it doesn’t really matter where it goes.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
