With Apologies to the Estate of Emmy Noether

Any time I start talking about science, it automatically counts as a mistake. It's not that I'm not interested in science, it's just that science is not interested in being meaningfully comprehensible to me. I've made myself available over and over again, but it continues to stubbornly refuse to integrate itself into my intellectual make-up the same way I've seamlessly taken on other subjects I'm interested in like modern German philosophical hermeneutics, the instances and context of recusancy in 16th century Wales and ThunderCats. Sure, dismiss the last one if you want to, but go back and watch it. The first episode is about apocalyptic cataclysm and genocide on a planetary scale. It deserves your brain-space.

I've been thinking lately about the amount of living that's occurred right here in and around the ole animated meat-rack I call my human body. It's not really living in the traditional midlife-crisis sense of lots of travel and searching and finding and knowing, with cycles of educational debauchery driven and corrected by a perpetual, perpetuating cycle of rum and penicillin. That's all well and good, making for great stories for a way, way better blog than this one. But you've either stumbled across or dedicated several years to following the exploits of a sedentary teetotal prone to introversion and sometimes paralyzing anxiety. This is the internet. You know full well you could be watching a twelve-minute video of a monkey eating a mango instead at any time. You make your own bed, mate.

I didn't really date before I started going out with the woman I eventually fathered children with over a 14-year relationship. And I say "didn't really" as a puzzlingly inaccurate euphemism for "never once at all." Kind people would use the term "late bloomer," whereas I will refer you to the preceding paragraph, the bit that starts with "sedentary" and ends with "anxiety." Unless a woman was going to independently and unbidden find her way into my room to watch me play The Bard's Tale with the lights off, odds of meeting a partner were low. Like Dennis Haysbert playing Paul Robeson in a biopic low. Like way down on levels at which only elephant are conversant. I'm saying they weren't high.

That relationship ran its mostly smooth course, except for right at the end where it got as un-smooth as a relationship might, what with the no-longer-continuing and all. That was 2010, where I found myself coincidentally both single and socially functional for the first time in my 35+ years of living. I wanted to meet people, I just had to figure out how to do it. Luckily technology had ripened exactly enough for online dating to have become a thing. Finally, the ability to craft the seeming shade of a personality in the cloaking penumbra of a text-based social system. Finally, all my years of disguising self-loathing as self-deprecation would pay off in a format that rewarded the non-threatening.

The sometimes horrifying result was success, where I had to figure out how to be not only in proximity to other people with matching romantic curiosity or intentions, but how to actually be in relationships with them on the off chance one of our meet-ups didn't flame out in an awkward handshake and a silent agreement to forget to text each other later.

Obviously, like all other non-delusional* humans, I know I've met with varying degrees of success in subsequent couplings. This has meant learning moving on, something utterly foreign to someone whose primary basic relationship model was: try once, get married. Dumping other people or being dumped** is a life skill no different than shoe-tying, operating a barbecue or karate: things we never give much thought to but we know we'll have to get around to it eventually if we mean to be well-rounded*** people.

But how do you un-love a person? Where does the investment go, of time and energy and emotional life, when one or both of you decide it has to be over? I think I've come to understand, almost certainly incorrectly, that relationships function with essentially the same rules as physics. It's absurd to think of the act of simply turning off when such strong feelings (real or imagined) existed at some point in probably the very manageably remember-able past. That's the locus of a lot of the shock of pain in a breakup, the dizzy incoherency of "OK, what the fuck just happened?" that lingers and wobbles when you're supposed to be planting your feet and recovering.

But I think I've come to believe in a law of the conservation of energy with regard to emotional life. Nothing new is either created or destroyed, it's just that the interchangeability of matter and energy means it simply alters itself into another state. The most common example given for how this works is dynamite, where chemical energy simply converts very very quickly indeed into kinetic energy when the thing explodes. If you're lucky, this is not too closely an operating metaphor for any of your own relationships.

How else does it make any sense that a deep, long-standing love can turn so readily into a venomous, eye-crossing hatred between the same two people? It has to be that the depth of feeling had to be there first, the energy in one direction had to exist in one state in order to convert so hotly into the next.

The tricky bit is that all of this material, in whatever quantity, is combustible, maybe fissile even. Even the briefest of encounters can ash in sudden flame given the right accelerant of callousness, carelessness or just mismatched timing. I'm friends with some exes, or at least I try to be, but there's no clear half-life for when the volatility decreases and transformation can be made into something more settled, more settling, more suitable for building on.

I don't know. Like I said, it's science, man. All you can really do is spring for decent eye protection and make sure you're working in an environment with a fume cabinet and a safety shower.

---

*I still maintain that Fall Out Boy are a pretty good band. Assess the rest of me as you will.

**Yes, I've done both and no, I have no preference. Unless one of the options is being stabbed in the face with a trowel. Then I choose that.

***Or well-round-housed, am I right? Tell me I'm not right.