How’s Your Dating Life?

A course assigment during my sabbatical 2001 Write of Passage writing course was to write a short essay on one question you’re frequently asked.

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This is the one question that I get more than any other.

And fair enough. The question is a curious and natural question to be asked by friends and family who care. An absolutely well-meaning question 🙂

When the question recently came up, this image popped into my head. A splay of four playing cards fanned out in my right hand.

“How’s your dating life?”

I paused. Which card will I pick today?

There’s the bright, glossy card on the left. Next to it, an odd-backed card that didn’t belong in the pack, followed by a card standing taller than the others, as if trying to encourage you to pick that one. Then the last, to the far right, a tired and worn-edged, yellowing card.

Which conversation game will I provoke?

Will I shut the question down with a short answer and then ask to change my hand? Or will I play the card I enjoy on many days, the unfailing-optimist-ever-a-romantic card, that one there in the middle? How about I flip the neutral card: “Oh, it’s fine (that most banal of descriptions for how we’re doing…!) I always enjoy meeting people in life, but I’m doing good being single, too?” Or, on a forlorn day, will I share the fears of fading hope and the nibbling neurosis that being single is some kind of destiny for my life? Or, play the long hand, inviting a soul-searching chat about partnership and the human condition. I always enjoy that style of game. Taking the issue, and the self-consciousness, and toying with how I can re-frame it to dodge the forlorn instinct of ‘it shouldn’t be this way for me.’

An important part of the context. I’m forty-five – nervous smirk. So, this question comes up a lot. And it gets more loaded.

And the question does leave me thinking about what is the true answer for me, behind the card I’ll play in the conversation.

I have a really important philosophy on this that I feel I will never let go. I believe that the palette and range of emotions we feel, the excitements and giddinesses and downs and ups and melancholic moments, and…the ability to fall in love that I’ve felt and that we’ve all heard so much about too…all of these emotions are just as open to us no matter what age we are.

Isn’t it like that for you, too?

Isn’t the possibility of connection…the building tango of chemistry, the Kodachrome dizziness of ‘falling’…isn’t that possibility of emotion the same in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties…in your eighties or nineties…?

My mind zipped back to being just thirteen years old. A first girlfriend, Rebecca, during the early summer of 1989.

Over that year a group of school mates had started to hang out with girls from the local girls school. Rebecca and I got on beautifully, a kinship. I can picture her face, right now, with a sallow Spanish skin and fullness of hair that was as lively as her smile. All I remember is that I plucked up the courage to tell her so, and to utter the curious committal words of the time: “….Will you go out with me?” I couldn’t believe hearing the word “Yes.” She dumped me three days later, our kindling romance still unlit in the nervous pre-kiss phase. Then later that year I fell for Tessa, a year older and who I admired and adored, especially the athleticism of her legs moving around a tennis court. We made it more than two months before another rejection.

And my mind will zip forward then to being forty-four years old today. And then it will do the quick maths of forty-four minus thirteen, and how that equals thirty-one. And my mind will re-coil, staring at the number. Thirty one years of dating? “WTF” as the youth will say…

But those thirty-one years have brought some wonderful relationships.

Love and feelings of ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’. Some very wonderful gals, women. Heartbreak, when you’re turned down. I can still remember the block I was on when a tear last rolled down my cheek in the gutting disappointment of rejection. Unsureness, as I will call it. Repeatedly over the years. The guilt and pain of hurting someone and then the ache that stews for months afterwards. Local relationships and distance relationships. Americans and fellow aliens and internationalists.

But ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’ – as one of my idols of youth sang. And that is simply to have the feeling, that instinct, that this is a person that I want to be with tomorrow and next month and next year and the year after that.

I can face the question better with the playful image of the splay of cards, and the game of which conversation to provoke. Who is asking and what is their little angle of bias there sometimes? How will my mood will influence the card chosen, and how that will influence the two-step of conversation that will result. And what I might learn from that?

The beauty of conversations, of choosing cards in life. And how each card chosen influences the hand we have to play, and so the one after that.