The Method of Modern

I don't really worry that I don't have the capacity to love or for love. If I think about it for more than, like, 30 seconds, I can come up with an awful lot of stuff I love. Peanut butter. Walking too fast. Los Angeles. Some (but not all) mountains. Tilda Swinton.* Lasers. Other people's cats. Wind. Sage.** The middle-8 of just about any Beatles song with a middle-8. Not going to the beach. Mattresses. Clotted cream. Boxing gloves. Most bridges. All the iterations of The Lord of the Rings. Perspective. Genuine compromise. Honey Bunches of Oats...

I could obviously go on and the list is not--could not be--exhaustive. My kids, for example, didn't garner a mention, but having a list of stuff you love that includes your children undermines the whole proposition with triteness bordering on tautology. I'm either seriously trying to make a point or I'm trying to cover my ass and/or waste your time, which I take seriously even though at this point "you," dear visitor to this page, statistically likely means a Russian web-trawling spam bot. If they're going to make the effort to show up here, scoop up my contact information and shoot me an email about an immediate danger to my Amazon account or the imminent cancellation(!) of my Social Security number, I have to take their time seriously as well.

With apologies to the great people I've dated here and there in the intervening time, I've been effectively single for about four years now. The longest I've dated anyone in that time has been I think 6-7 months, which definitely counts as a real relationship, but doesn't quite tick over all the way to "long term" in the same way other ones have I've that have been, like, 18 months or 5 years or that one time I was married for a decade and a half.

If you run through enough 1-to-6 month relationships in a row, you can (if you have a questioning disposition defined by emotional curiosity and a sneaking suspicion that you've always been self-deceiving horror-man invisible to everyone but yourself) begin to suspect maybe that it really is not them, it's you.

Numerically speaking, given how many people are on dating apps and the size of the greater metropolitan area I inhabit (there's only one larger one in the whole country, you guys!), it would stand to reason that I'd even accidentally cross paths with someone for whom everything at least seems to work for a while. Enough repetition of times when it doesn't and, being a human with a brain conditioned to see order whether it exists or not, you start to become convinced of the existence of a pattern. A real, practiced narcissist would probably conclude pretty quickly that it's the fault of a series of women who are way easier to blame now that they aren't around to point out how far your head is stuck up your own ass.

The neurotic on the other hand (oh, hello!) is more prone to the reasonable conclusion that they are, and possibly always have been, disqualified from participating in love as either a concept or a human practice because of an ultimately unknowable (and therefore unfixable) defect in character. With the help of therapy and the blessedly continued existence in my life of people I have dated in the past, in a non-dating capacity marked by a deep and abiding love differing only in kind, I have never quite been able to 100% convince myself of that particular self-inflicted mindfuck. Other ones, certainly, but not quite that one.

I can say that I love plenty and plenty loves me back.*** It's a non-esoteric, shudderingly non-abstract comfort when you can, say, spend an afternoon/evening with moons in your eyes talking to one of our favorite people, with whom the romantic question has been an asked and answered a full decade hence, still getting to marvel at all the things that made you love them in the first place but in a full, grown-up form with a whole other brand of intimacy and support altered in focus and intent, but diminished not a mote. It's possible to spend a day in love and in the presence of love and still be (separately) a slightly frustrated single person. It's even extra special if none of it has to involve your kids. They can go find their own.

---

*in her professional capacity. I would not otherwise presume.

**to eat, not to, like, burn or whatever the fuck hippies and witches do with it.

***I'm looking at you, peanut butter.