The Biggest Weirdo

This story about coming to terms with the fact that I am a dysfunctional moron who has been doing it all wrong is a clichéd narrative but a potent one. I’d fallen in love so many times that I was beginning to suspect that I was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary: falling. Just falling.

My epiphany relies on a logic so foreign, I still feel a little bit disoriented. Taking a deep dive into my shadow was no stroll in the park but seems to always unearth gold. It’s scary to think how little I understood about what drove my attachments and motivated my relationships prior to this. And even scarier to discover how much I’d underestimated the effect we can have on another human being.

The question of how and more importantly why there are such great discrepancies in the way we see, experience and respond to the world and each other continues to plague me. I’d always had a vague awareness that I was doing it a little funny – seeing things from a very skewed perspective, rushing through experiences without being fully present or engaged, and reacting in very bizarre and extreme ways.

In my quest for answers, I’ve turned to Math equations, theories on personality types, our own self-perception, and even ideas about reincarnation. My tired mind insists that it’s outlandish for a person to have his or her paradigm shaken and reframed twice daily, but it’s been said in the bible that there is no rest for the wicked so we trudged on. And slowly but surely, the pieces seem to be coming together.

In an effort to not be dramatic, I will be frank: Ainsworth and Bowlby’s Attachment Theory is a long but worthwhile read, particularly if you find yourself unable to connect with other human beings in a healthy and balanced way.

The longing for emotional connectedness is the most powerful drive in each and every one of us. It’s a survival drive, a primary instinct, and a basic human need. No man is an island and a stable, loving relationship is rumoured to be the absolute cornerstone of human happiness, personal fulfillment, and general well-being.

Our interaction with others is an intricate dance of connection and disconnection, wired in our brains to be recognized as safety and danger. Our brain interprets disconnection from those we depend on as a threat, and the ways in which we deal with these moments of distress are governed by our attachment style, which according to the theory is shaped by the bond we shared with our first caregiver.

Even though I’d been blessed with what could only be described as a blissful and easy childhood, I’ve still somehow managed to blossom into a full-fledged weirdo, prone – desperate, even – to forming fantasy bonds instead of developing truly intimate and trusting relationships.

Perhaps the endless teasing about being picked up from the dustbin or being called an ‘accident baby’ gave me the absurd idea of overcompensating as a means to prove my worth. Perhaps having been made the butt of one too many jokes laid the groundwork for a lifetime of idealizing others while belittling myself. What I’m learning is that my tendency to give too much of myself, which I’d always thought of as pretty darn noble, comes from a dark, dark place of unworthiness and a desire to please others for validation.

But wait, there’s more. Such as my need for constant touch and reassurance, my preoccupation with monitoring my partner’s emotions and jumping to catastrophic conclusions the moment I sense a change, my immense fear of losing the attention or affection of my partner, blah blah blah. I’m just a weirdo, basically.

N-E-way, I’m struggling to ignore my bleak reality now that it’s become apparent.

Some days I’m convinced that it’s too difficult, that I’m doomed to grow old with nine cats and then be buried with only forgetfulness when I die. But other days I feel inspired and determined to process and unlearn my fears – of being unworthy, of rejection, of abandonment – despite how deep they may seem to run. The more I grow, the smaller everything and everyone else seems.

The End

I could write more words about how different we are, but I won’t. The way we processed the world around us, the way we functioned, the way we expressed ourselves was just the tip of the iceberg. And frankly, acknowledging our differences had always been the easiest part of this game.

Still, our differences have had taken some getting used to. This seeming to be the one who desires rather than the one who is desired. Seeming to be the one to extend the goodnight kiss beyond sweet dreams and into let me hold you. The one who thinks in the middle of it, my god, you are handsome. The one who sometimes whispers, thank you, I'm so lucky. The one who, though smaller, afterwards makes up the outside part of the spoon.

I used to think that falling in love was something that just happened to us. My younger self likened it to getting hit by a magnificent force – like say, a school bus – something that was beyond our control and dependent on the stars. But what I'm beginning to understand is that love is an action we take. It is a decision we make to put in the effort to know someone, to bother to understand someone, while simultaneously letting that someone into our own life.

It's a feeling like no other when you want to know someone so quickly and so exhaustively and so urgently that you wish you could do it via osmosis. You want to give of yourself and be given to, freely and equally. Because all there really is at the core of any relationship is what you offer up and what you get back.

Being the highly individualistic people that we are, most of us move at our own speed. One evening before falling asleep, I was asking Guillaume about his favourite childhood memory, what his parents were like, the different countries he’d visited, and so on, when he said something very strange. “Stop trying to figure me out,” he sighed. Surprised by his request, which I took as an unforgivable affront to my honour, I wanted to scream. But my voice was too quiet, it didn’t leave my head.

That was the moment our relationship stalled. It became apparent that the sharing was no longer mutual, and our differences began bubbling to the surface. Someone (Guillaume) at some point revealed himself or herself (himself, really) to be a withholder, and the rejection stung (owwwww).

People – even the wrong ones, or rather, especially the wrong ones – come into our lives to teach us the lessons we can’t learn on our own. And it's not our place to kick up a fuss about it. We just have to sit down, listen, nod occasionally, let their words seep into our pores, and then get the hell out before everything bursts into flames. And often it's only in hindsight that you realize people put up walls around themselves perhaps because they are terrified of being known. (Or perhaps they simply wish to keep you out cuz you disrupt their sleep and irritate them to no end.)

I hope I don't just speak for myself when I say this, but I'd like to believe we held a mirror up to each other and saw ourselves and the world in a more dimensional way that enhanced our understanding of the meaning of life. (Deep stuff...) Our character defects – such as my inability to manage my emotions and impulses, and his blatant disregard for and avoidance of his own emotions – became alarmingly clear.

Then came the test, an opportunity to face my demons and overcome them for personal growth, which I dodged and subsequently flunked. I succumbed to my feelings of anger, hurt, and sadness, by going down the cowardice path and opting for short-term relief. The hardest but right thing to do was reach towards him, the very person who erected a barrier between us, and ask for more understanding, acceptance, and appreciation. Asking and listening is a craft that takes precise cultivation, effort, and some trial and error because of the variances in our wiring. But when you’re with someone you truly love, it’s worth taking the time to figure out. As long as you lovebirds share similar values, being with someone vastly different from your own person can be a very eye-opening and nourishing experience.

The best policy is to never leave someone for someone else. Only end relationships because they have stopped fulfilling their purpose, not because you think someone else seems like a better fit. News to no one: nobody is a better fit. That oasis in the distance? A mirage, my friend. But like every valuable lesson I have ever learnt, I had to live it to learn it. Side note: I’m quite certain I did something horrible in a past life, like drown bunnies just for laughs. Or am I just really fucking stubborn?

This narrative of mucking something up on my first attempt is a recurring theme I have grown used to after years of testing boundaries, pushing buttons, playing with fire, and walking along the edge. Sometimes, I get another chance to make it right. Other times, I don’t. Life is a big experiment. Isn’t it funny? No it’s not. But you’re a scientist, goddamnit, Guillaume. You know this.

So, there. This is what the end looks like. And that’s all right because happiness comes from staring your mistakes dead in the eye and owning them. Happiness comes from knowing that it’s beautiful and worthwhile to take that leap of faith anyway. Happiness comes from trying to be brave, to always choose the potential for growth over the fear of getting hurt. Happiness comes from realizing that you're strong enough to survive it, strong enough to change from it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t – the outcome is irrelevant. What matters is your belief that even as a quirky entity with major design flaws, you are still someone who deserves everything under the sun. This is how you keep the love alive – with or without a boyfriend. Once you embrace exactly who you are and figure out what you want from this life, you ignite a fire within you that no one can put out.

It takes a certain kind of audacity to believe in happiness, to believe in love, to believe that you are special. This is no small feat for intelligent people in particular. If you’re not someone who can bop along while foolishly metabolizing the world’s superficial jingles and then regurgitate them in a signature brand of empty cheer ("Let go and let God," "c'est la vie," "everything happens for a reason!"), you'll know this is not an easy thing to buy into. It is not a modest decision to prioritise happiness and ask for love. Quite the opposite, it is bold and greedy. And it is embarrassing to try and fail. And I give props to anyone who tries and fails. And then tries and then fails. Again. Over and over.

Just Be Dumb

Just be dumb while you're young. Cuz you can. And cuz it makes mathematical sense. 

Hello again. Did you miss me?

Rhetorical question.

I’ve been hit with some cold, hard truths in the last couple of months and as patron saint of disillusioned and neurotic weirdos everywhere, it only feels right that they are shared with the sisterhood of the single. I’m leaving out some of the more obvious lessons here because, like please, just do yourself a favour and ditch anyone who isn’t treating you with 100,000% respect. I sincerely hope some of these small but significant lessons I’ve had to learn the hard (ha ha, pun!) way, which I will try to bequeath to you over the coming weeks/months – depending on my commitment to typing on the keyboard – can lighten your load and help ease some of those dating woes.

But first, I'd like to address something that's been grinding my gears. After subjecting an unsuspecting friend to yet another one of my longwinded rants when yet another man had driven me into the pit of despair – this happens every other day – the advice doled out was that "perhaps if this doesn't work out, you could actually try not to always be on the look out for something? I dunno. Just be. Instead of always actively meeting new guys even if it's to just hang. Just be. Things could still happen in ordinary situations."

I would take a (metaphorical) bullet for this girl, but I swear 2 G. "Just be." LOL. Whut? (I love you, Bel. I do.)

We’re told to adopt a go-getter attitude in order to get what we want from life, but ironically encouraged to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide when it comes to our love life. Is it just me or do we value people who take initiative and put in hard work to succeed in life, but prefer to leave things up to chance and/or divine intervention and/or magic when it comes to love?

This approach bewilders me because even when I use the rational side of my brain to do the math, the number of years we stick with our spouse comes up to be much longer than those we spend at our jobs. Please suspend all opinions on divorce because “till death do us part.” And I mean, “it’s a known fact that lobsters fall in love and mate for life. You can actually see old lobster couples walking around their tank, holding claws.” #fact #Buffay

If I – hypothetically speaking, of course – charted out a detailed plan of action to find a life partner, logged my progress, and organized data about my dates in a spreadsheet – which I most definitely do not do because I have zero knowledge of working Excel, ok?????? – by society’s standards, I’m A) an over-rational robot, B) desperate, C) way too concerned about this, and D) a huge weirdo.

Then comes the stigma associated with intelligently expanding our search for potential partners. Or, simply expanding our search because sometimes it’s more fun to do things unintelligently, such as loitering around bars and creating an OkCupid profile.

In a study on what governs our dating choices more, our preferences or current opportunities, opportunities wins hands down – our dating choices are “98% a response to market conditions and just 2% immutable desires.” This implies that our intentions to date tall, short, fat, thin, blonde, brunette, European, Asian, professional, clerical, educated, uneducated people are largely determined by what’s on offer that fateful night.

Despite such compelling evidence, most of us still believe that the respectable way to meet our life partner is by sheer dumb luck, at work, bumping into them randomly in the cheese section of the supermarket, or being introduced to them from within our little pool. If like me, all your friends are girls because you went to a single-sex convent school for most of your life, you prefer not to shit where you eat and work in an industry dominated by women and gays anyway, your mom picks up the groceries so you rarely have to spend more than 5 minutes at the supermarket, you’ve already dated your schoolmate’s brother, your neighbour, and your best friend’s boyfriends’s best friend, U R FCKD.

That’s not to say I think chasing your dream job is the same as chasing your dream life partner is the same as a dog chasing its tail. Oh, wait – it is. That’s exactly what I’m saying. #pointless. No, of course not. All I’m saying – or rather, all I’m asking – is that why are so many of us so ready to just go with the flow, comfortable with relying on fate, and crossing our fingers while hoping for the best when we are capable beings who can totally and SHOULD TOTALLY play an active role in all aspects of our own lives? Whether it's about an ice-cream cone, a career opportunity, a prospective life partner, next season's hottest handbag...

I dunno. I kinda like getting exactly what I want.

And going after what I want seems to exponentially increase the likelihood of me actually getting what I want. As compared to “just being,” which I’m not entirely sure encompasses what specifically. Even when I fall short of what I’d set out to achieve, usually the fact that I’d tried gives me repose (and several anecdotes). Conveniently ignoring the fact that I’m a lil restless piece of shit as it works against the argument I’m trying to make right now, all I know is fear keeps us safe. But sometimes it holds us back. To quote a certain Canadian athlete, "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take." So you do the math and work that one out. 

Sunday Kind Of Love

Wives saying goodbye to their loved ones in the Navy, 1963. The reality of love and marriage continues to ruin my life.

When it comes to matters of the heart, it seems that I’m not just old-fashioned. Apparently, I’m very nearly prehistoric. I’ve always depended on my parents’ enduring marriage as the barometer of true love. On one hand, I feel extremely blessed to have such a solid example of love and marriage existing under the same roof as myself to aspire after. But as I venture further out into the wilderness, the fog is beginning to lift. And it is scary, you guys.

According to data published in 2011, the average length of an American marriage is 8.8 years and more than 5,000 couples were getting divorced each day in China that same year. Professor David Popenoe of Rutgers University mentions in an article that some 40% of American children are living apart from their biological fathers, and majority of these children aren’t in the habit of seeing their fathers regularly or often, if at all. Worse still, a third of children are now born out-of-wedlock, many of who grow up without ever knowing their fathers.

It’s become painstakingly clear to me, marrying your childhood sweetheart at a young age and staying by each other’s side even after 40 years, is not a common occurrence in the real world even if I may be coming home to it every single day. I repeat; it’s a complete fluke. Back then, if you found someone you could stand who could stand you, you’d hold on to him or her for dear life because meeting someone new wasn’t so easy.

Today, we’re just a swipe, like, retweet or click away from someone better because any social media app or website can be used as Tinder/OkCupid if you’re good looking. It’s distressing how similar the Internet algorithms for ordering mini skirts on ASOS and finding a life partner are. By trying to emulate my parents’ relationship all these years, I’ve basically set myself up for failure and condemned myself to envisioning life as a hopeless romantic.

Mind you, it isn’t just the concept of love that this wonderful bubble I’ve been living in has sugarcoated – it’s the concept of life. Allegedly, dresses aren’t just pressed, foie gras at brunch isn’t just served, and gallivanting around Europe for several months doesn’t just happen. How far removed from reality have I been all this while? That deserves an essay all to itself.

Dating is just trial and error after all, isn’t it? We actively seek out people we’re interested in, we try these people out for a bit and see how they fit into our lives, we learn about ourselves and grow from the relationship, we bounce once we’ve had enough or discovered it’s not for us, and then we start over again and slowly figure out what it is we do and do not want. This operation does get tiring and disheartening at times, but I’ve found that by just appreciating the honesty and simply moving on, we can avoid becoming blasé. As the Japanese proverb goes, "fall down seven times, stand up eight."

Double Dare 2014

The one where I make at least 3 major mistakes. And about 23746873 minor ones. Completely sober 

After we basically dared each other to go on another date by having a really hot post-cycle shag – is that magnificent or fucked up? I honestly can’t tell – it was my turn to be creative about what we could do next Saturday.

Mother (this one is actually you, Mazzy) has always warned me against putting all my eggs in one basket. It’s common sense, really, and a good rule to live by, especially when applied to dating and hedge funds. But, as one would’ve guessed, I’ve never been able to effectively adopt this policy into my life, choosing instead to act in favour of my all-or-nothing extremist – I prefer the term avant-garde, but don’t want to come off too pompous; I need you to like me – tendencies.

What I should’ve done was to take up Tom’s offer to grab dinner some time. Or Pete’s offer for coffee, or even Alex’s offer to teach me how to shoot hoops. But what I did was suggest a hike through the forest. And I wasn’t joking. (Really creative, tell me about it.) Thankfully, it stormed. In the spirit of adventure, Sean decided that we would go to the theatre for A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

As is usual, I was a bit dazed during the play. C’mon, you guys, I don’t even know what’s going on in Modern Family half the time. (Are Mitchell and Cameron gay?) Granted, I wasn’t paying full attention to the stage because I was admiring Sean’s face every ten minutes. But they had me at act I, scene i, line 1 with their Shakespearean English (gibberish), that was way too fast and lost in thick accents.

What I did manage to take away from the play was the comforting fact that with the help of fairies and some magic, we can make anyone fall in love with us. (Phew!) And what I found more comforting yet, was the fact that even in the mid-1590s, love was just as erratic, incomprehensible and exceptionally powerful as it is today. Love didn’t evolve over the centuries to become this monster due to our rising carbon emissions or whatever it is we do as humans to ruin beautiful things. It did and continues to inspire people to behave ludicrously; it’s been a monster all along, nobody has been spared.

Hand to God, I haven’t woken up in enough morning-afters to know what the proper etiquette is. I considered pulling an Irish Goodbye, which I’ve done once thinking it would be to my benefit, but I actually felt worse believe or not. So I decided to just wing it at the other extreme by hiding under the covers and pretending to be asleep while Sean went about his morning routine.

Maybe if I lay very still, he’d forget that I’m even here. Or maybe if I closed my eyes and hugged my knees tight enough, I’d wake up back in my own bed. Is there an app for this already? There should be, pretty big market I think. Teleport of Shame, I’d call it. Then he collapsed back into bed saying, “Do you want to get some breakfast? I’m starving.” Despite experiencing a near fatal aneurism while dressing myself, I managed to crack the worst joke ever along the lines of how it was really sweet of him to take his hooker out for Eggs Benedict. Do not do this. Please. Just… No.