I’m pretty convinced of it. I desperately want to believe that such a thing exists, but I’m immediately suspicious whenever people claim to have found it. I think they’re deluding themselves.
Don’t get me wrong. I think love is out there — I’ve gotten to play the game myself a couple of times. I just don’t think love is perfect. It’s not all goodness and light, chickadees and rainbows. Love at first sight — the happy, Davey Jones eye-twinkle, babytalk love — is a crock. It’s lust that somehow manages to make the successful transition to an actual relationship without too much agony along the way. I think love is made up of lots of compromise, patience, friction, and the reluctance to just bag it when the going gets rough.
Even to me, my words sound a little harsh. Although a lot of the last paragraph is paraphrased from the writings of love guru Leo Buscaglia, it nevertheless has the stink of the charred hair of someone who’s been burned. I must be frank — I have been.
I haven’t been burned by love. The couple of times I’ve really felt it, it’s been good. It wasn’t easy, though — not instinctual, not always enough, not meant to last forever. Instead, I’ve been burned by the desperate, incessant search for the elusive perfect love. I’ve been burned by silly romantic notions and the delusions they create. I’ve been burned by my powerful longing to love someone, a longing which usually strips me of rational, critical thought and puts my self-esteem out on the corner to be flattened by a passing bus. I’ve been burned by people who thought we should just be friends (but didn’t mean it); by people who just plain blew me off; and by myself all those times when I saw in someone just the things I wanted to see, only to be soon enough reminded that I filled in too many of the gaps with my own imagination.
Like most Americans, I’ve been crippled by all the fodder that our culture has spewed out on the subject of love. From Shakespeare (or, dare I say, popular misinterpretations of his work) to Big Top Pee-Wee, with stops just about everywhere along the way, we are trained to think that love is easy, to think that conflict and loss are plot complications rather than real dangers that can rip us apart from each other. We’re trained to believe that Lois Lane can truly love a big lunk who rarely has a conversation with her, and that Tony and Maria could love each other truly enough to die together after one dirty dance and a date in a dress shop. How can images like these, and every single notion perpetuated by pop music, possibly prepare normal human beings — man or woman, gay or straight, young or old — for the very real emotional risks and hurdles presented by intimate, romantic interaction? We are trained that love is both chaste and hot, that sex is both our right and our shame, that relationships are both the final goal and the eternal prison, that we should be true to ourselves yet sacrifice our identities to win another’s affection. What are we to believe? How are we supposed to muddle through all this fiction? No person has a team of
scriptwriters to identify the one perfect life mate, and that bites.
I’ve not had a lot of luck with dates and relationships and romance. I freely admit that. I’ve had enough luck, though, to know what I keep missing. Who can say whether it’s been the successes or the recurring snubs that keep my foolish romantic optimism alive? I could see a case for either.
In the past, I’ve been lucky enough to feel the flush of infatuation, the tinglings of burgeoning romance, and the hills and valleys of real love. (“Real love” is a separate entity from “perfect love,” but that’s a diatribe for another day.) I’ve gone into these episodes with my head overflowing with all those visions of domestic bliss by which I’ve been conditioned my whole life. It makes me feel as if I’ve come so close, so why couldn’t there be the possibility that I just haven’t been lucky enough yet? The myth might still exist.
At the same time, I know that I’ve been disappointed or hurt a lot in the past (and certainly will be in the future). At those times, it’s been the notion that something better must be lurking out there, just waiting to finally make me happy again, that keeps me going despite the disappointments. I can be as rational as I want, and keep telling myself that no Prince Charming is really going to charge in on a white steed to whisk me away to dreamland; but it’s a tempting enough fantasy to keep alive when there’s little to keep you company except for the mindcud being churned out of the television set. I’ve needed the myth to exist.
I could probably write a book about all the reasons I’m such a freakish loser when it comes to dating. I could probably write a book about why I think I’m so bad, when I’m probably no more awkward or clueless than anyone else. What it boils down to, though, is mostly the realization that when I’m dealing with another person — with his own feelings, scars, and hopes — I lose control of the situation. In other areas of my life, I’m often a wonder to behold — confident, intelligent, insightful, forward-thinking, and efficient. Put me in the same room with someone, though, tell me it’s a date, and I begin to babble and blather like a moron. I just have no instincts with interpersonal relationships, and that forever puts me at square one in that giant Candyland race for love. It can be hard enough to read other people, but when you have a personal stake in the matter, all the possibilities for disaster are magnified on an often overwhelming, paralyzing scale. I never know whether or not someone finds me attractive, and my instincts fly much further out the window if I’m attracted to that person. If you throw the possibility of real love into the equation, it gets even worse. Despite all the dates in all the situations I’ve had, I don’t know how to act, how to present myself, how to be charming, how to be appropriately frank or coy. If the whole process is a search, then I’m armed with welding goggles and soundproof headphones, the map long since discovered to be a fake.
I keep trying to find love, heaven knows. When you get right down to it, I have entirely too much pluck to give up. As dejected as I get from time to time, I keep looking, and I keep clinging to the notion that I’ll find the right guy one day. Maybe not the perfect man, but that’s okay. Perfection is for movies and television and the simps at American Top 40. I want reality — I just want the good kind. I want to beat Michael Tolliver’s rule and have the great job, the fabulous apartment, and the hot lover all at one time, because I’m worth it, damnit!
