Do Not Try To Shrink Me, Gypsy

I've somehow managed to avoid getting sucked up into the Great Charlie Sheen Popular Culture Vocabulary Takeover of 2011. It's been a lucky thing too as it seems to be particularly virulent among males of my age group. I credit my immune system of iron with the happy fact that nary a "Duh! Winning!" has escaped my lips, nor have I mused in any way, idle or otherwise, about tiger blood, Adonis DNA or warlocks of any type, up to and including the Vatican Assassin variety. It seems remarkable, but remember, I'm the same guy who got all the way out of the mid-2000s never having attempted an Austin Powers impression.

I won't dare to claim I came through the Borat business entirely unscathed, but what do you want from me? I'm not made of stone.

While I have been able to keep my lexicon free of the inky, cottonmouth flavor of Sheen taint, I won't say I've been entirely able to avoid exposure. This has less to do with the robustness of my constitution and more to do with the fact that I own a television, a computer, a radio, etc. Ubiquity is ubiquity. We are the tenuous, unclean Mediterranean world and media are the Chinese junks approaching harbor, promising unheard-of spices but delivering only plaguey rat-fleas of Sheen to ravage us.

What I did notice is that someone got around to asking his dad, former pretend President Ramón Gerardo Antonio Estévez Sr., about the situation and he said:

"You know, Charlie’s 45 years old. He’s not a kid. Emotionally he still is. Because when you’re addicted, you don’t grow emotionally. So when you get clean and sober you’re starting at the moment you started using drugs or alcohol. You’re emotionally crippled."

Which made me wonder (and you knew this would be about me eventually, didn't you?) if the same were true about married people. Now, I'm not suggesting being married is the same as being chemically dependent on narcotics. One is clearly more destructive and unnatural a state. But it has occurred to me--and this is a staggering bit of insight I managed completely without the guidance of a trained professional--that I am not 21 years old.

OK, that was more mathematic than epiphanic, but it still counts as insight. What I mean is, emotional development of some kind is going to happen, whether we're trying for it or not. You can go the Charlie Sheen Permanent Blotto route and develop to the point where, on the sliding scale of social fitness, you're looking up at the Asperger's kids. Development isn't always positive.

When you're married, you develop and yes, I get there is more than one route within this route to go. But if you find yourself single again, is it necessarily true that you come back to the social scene as you were when you left it, like the addict does when he finds sobriety?

I was 21 when I started dating the woman I married. A person roughly my age who remained single through that same period is going to have a quantifiably different life-experience curriculum vitae to show for his trouble. He'd be somewhat less self-conscious buying prophylactics, for a start. And he'd certainly know how to make less than 10 pounds of food every time he cooked something. If he ever cooked anything.

I wonder if having been out of the scene, as it were, for a decade and a half puts me at an automatic competitive disadvantage with men my age and at an interpersonal disadvantage with unfamilied single women. I can say certainly that I don't feel 21. By that I mean sometimes I fall asleep in the middle of an afternoon for no apparent reason and that a large majority of my erections now are both purposeful and impermanent.

Maybe that's the point. Efficiency. I haven't learned anything about how to plow through stacks of first dates really or a whole lot about coffee bar etiquette or the strictures dating in the context of fourth-wave feminism. It's been over a year now since I've been out there and, even though I've started behind, I'm comfortable at least in the knowledge that that stuff is learnable.

What I have from being married that an unmarried bloke might not have is a razor-sharp idea of what it is I want. Not from geometrical guesswork or through the sludgy, wet fog of unformable Hope, but marriage (if you do it right) is a laboratory setting for interpersonal relationships. The safety goggles of committment may not be 100% effective, but as long as they work, you can try out an awful lot of shit to find out what is Dr. Phil sloganeering and what is actually useful.

Sometimes in the lab, yes, you get unintended consequences and you spend a certain period of time with tweezers and a magnifying glass picking bits of melted safety gear out of your charred flesh. But the eyebrows grow back eventually and, again if you've done it right, you may stagger out of the wreckage with some basic truths proved in the Newtonian method sticking haphazardly from your vinyl-protected pockets.

The permanently single dude is faster, more agile maybe, somewhat more adept with a tail-feather display. But I know what I want. Specifically because I can say, categorically, what it is I don't want. Because I've tried it.

The best way I can think to put it: I'm pretty sure I'm a lot better off than Charlie Sheen.