Blind Dates

The tea shop I write in is a hot spot for blind dates. I am witnessing at least one of them right now. Amongst the students piled high in sweatpants and textbooks, the girlfriends grabbing dessert after a movie, and the weirdos like me, leaning over notebooks and staring out the window, are several couples, chatting over their tea. Which one of these pairs didn’t know of each other’s existence before a week ago?

That woman talking at length about how she came to accept her Filipino-American identity, while the guy across the table slouches his face into his hand and nods in understanding—they are way too comfortable to be on a blind date. Their later conversation reveals that they are gay best friends. That couple holding their cups in front of their faces, sipping their tea and barely speaking—a well-established relationship or a really bad blind date. Despite their reticence, they hold hands on the way out of the shop later on.

But the lady in the casual-but-cute outfit describing her time living in Tucson in a measured voice but with lots of hand gestures and words like cosmopolitan and juggernaut while her male companion drops the lid of his teapot loudly onto the table—these people have never met each other before, I’m sure of it.

The man takes out his phone to check the time.

“Wow, that’s a shiny phone,” the woman says. “Is it heavier than an i-phone?” She and the man take turns weighing two phones against each other in their hands.

This is the way you can tell the blind dates: their victims are talking about nothing. Either that, or narrating their entire life stories in a way we would never do to either a friend or a regular stranger. I was born in Hawaii, but I moved to Pennsylvania when I was a month old…I went to Berkeley for college and the University of Michigan for graduate school. It’s like a job interview, except both parties are being interviewed at once, and no one is relaxed.

I never wanted this sort of thing to happen to me. But my friend told me I had to do it. You haven’t even tried, she would scold me. How can you say you hate something if you haven’t tried it? She is married and has been with her husband for ten years. I suppose the idea of an awkward evening with a lonely stranger appeals to someone at such a point in life. It sounds fun, she told me. If I were single, I would totally do it!

Eventually I caved under the pressure and went on a handful of my own blind dates, one of them in this very tea shop. It was a perfectly nice little date. We had a lovely conversation about our families and what kind of music we liked. I asked him about his job. He was a film editor. It seemed like a pretty cool job to me. Someone would have to be passionate about an artistic job like that. It’s the kind of job people love. Did he love it?

Not really, he told me. It just paid the bills. He had gotten a two-year-degree that qualified him to do it, and it had provided him with stable work editing commercials for beer and prescription drugs. He performed his duties faithfully, with neither relish nor disgust.

What he really wanted to do was be in a band. “It was always my dream,” he told me, “but I can’t even play an instrument.”

“You could learn,” I said. “You should learn to play an instrument and then start a band!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, sounding dejected. “You have to be good if you really want to be in a decent band.”

Well that’s silly, I thought. “You work at it until you get good.”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think you need to have some kind of talent to begin with. I’d know by now if I were supposed to be a musician.”

Later, as I recounted this episode to my pro-blind-date friend, I felt like an episode of Seinfeld, with my ridiculous fussy reason for not seeing him again. I couldn’t even find concise words to encapsulate the problem.

“He wasn’t passionate about anything,” I tried. Well, that wasn’t true. He was passionate about the bands he liked to listen to. He had told me about a few already, adding that we should go to a show sometime.

“He didn’t have anything he was proud of,” I tried again. But this was still wrong. He was quite proud of his fancy stereo system, which he had described to me in loving detail.

“He wasn’t creative?” my friend suggested.

I’m not sure if this was dead-on, but it was at least a little closer. I wouldn’t need him to be traditionally creative, just to create something. It could be anything: a song, a poem, a computer program, a dinner, an automotive transmission. A perfectly edited beer commercial. Anything. Just something he cared about, something that he had actually done himself.

Considering I couldn’t describe this criterion in something shorter than a paragraph, it seemed like a petty reason not to date somebody. That’s how I felt after every blind date I ever went on, all four of them. Non-creative guy was my last one. I couldn’t take it anymore, shopping for people online like shoes, callously sending back each pair that didn’t fit my fussy standards. I emailed him and told him I didn’t plan to see him again. He took the rejection poorly, with lots of complaining and bafflement.

A week later, I sat in the tea shop, writing in my journal about how I regretted hurting the guy’s feelings. Maybe I should have given him a chance, I wrote. How would I even know if I liked somebody after one date?

This was the heart of the problem: how can people be attracted to somebody based on a date? Or two dates, or six, or twenty? How can you develop feelings for somebody that you only ever meet out of context, never observing how he deals with a challenge, or treats his friends, or does something he’s really good at, or does anything at all besides sit and drink tea and talk?

Should I go out with him one more time, I wrote? Or give up this whole dating thing altogether?

As if in answer to my question, I looked up and saw him walking past the window of the tea shop.

What is he doing here? In Oakland. In my neighborhood. In front of the tea shop that I told him I spent all my time in. He lived in San Francisco, and had talked about Oakland like it was an exotic vacation spot that he had never before visited. Was he trying to find me? Was he stalking me?

He walked by the window once more, then checked his watch and walked in, right past my table.

“Hi,” I said as he walked by.

“Oh, hi,” he said, looking surprised. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, confused. “Funny seeing you here.”

“I’m meeting somebody,” he said, looking around. “Oh, there she is!” He walked to the back of the coffee shop, sat down across from a woman about my age, and began a stiff conversation.

“Uncreative Guy stole your date spot?” my pro-blind-date friend said, when I told her the story that night. She was laughing so hard she could barely talk. “That’s classic! He’s not even creative enough to come up with a new place to go.”

I suppose this showed that my intuition had been right: he really wasn’t very creative. Or maybe just not very wise. Either way, I had made the right choice.

I think what I hate about blind dates is really what I hate about dating in general: that it is treating a person like a commodity. But I don’t see any way around it. That’s how we get things. We shop for everything else we need: food, clothing, shelter, a school, a car. I suppose shopping for a mate is like shopping for a job. We all hate to do it, but we’re scared of where we’ll end up if we don’t.

Like You’ve Never Been Hurt

Dance Like No One’s Watching. Love Like You’ve Never Been Hurt.

These words of inspiration annoy me a little whenever I pass the car, parked along my bike route to my favorite tea shop, that bears the bumper sticker upon which they are inscribed.

Wouldn’t you be an idiot to love like you’ve never been hurt? That’s how you love the first time you’re in love—when you haven’t been hurt yet, at least not by somebody you’re in love with—and look how that ends.

If you’re thinking, Well, I’m still with the first person I was in love with, and it hasn’t ended in horrible pain yet—just wait. I’m not being cynical; it’s going to end, one way or the other.

I remember the first time I was in love. I thought I was meant to be with this person, thought we should go to graduate school together, get a matching set of English PhDs, find one of those double job openings that are oh-so-common in the academic world, which would fortuitously enough be in some wonderful exotic city, and spend the rest of our lives writing obscure books and having babies.

When this plan did not pan out, we decided to continue living together in our three-bedroom apartment as roommates anyway, because, we reasoned, we were best friends and mature adults. You can imagine how that went. Suffice it to say, we drove our third roommate away by provoking horrible childhood memories of his parents’ divorce. My now-ex-boyfriend was forced to date women in secret for fear of upsetting me, and I lost ten pounds because I couldn’t stomach any food if he was in the apartment.

I’ve been in love a few times since then. I can’t say that I loved the same way, with the naïve expectation that the relationship would last forever, that this person was the one, my soul mate, that if this relationship fails then a part of my life has failed. I will never think any of that again, and if you’ve paid attention when you’ve been hurt, you probably won’t think it, either.

The advice on this bumper sticker, which, I just found out, dishearteningly enough, was written by Mark Twain (I assumed it was written by the same committee of hippy marketing experts who coined such bumper-sticker wisdom as Mean people suck), reminds me of something that my kickboxing teacher frequently says to me:

Don’t be scared to come in.

By come in, he doesn’t mean into my kickboxing school, although if I were thinking logically I would probably be scared to walk through the front door. No, my teacher says this when I am staring at a man who outweighs me by at least thirty pounds, who is faster and more experienced than I am, and who without a doubt will throw a very powerful, fast side kick at my stomach the moment I come six inches closer to him than I am now. Since I know he is going to do this, I should be able to avoid it happening, but so far, the only way I can prevent it is by staying approximately three feet away from him at all times, which is not conducive to fighting somebody.

Don’t be scared to come in, says my teacher, watching me tango with this opponent. He moves a step closer; I back up a step. He moves to the left; I move to the right.

Don’t be scared to come in. I know better than to be an insolent student, but I can’t help myself—I shoot my teacher an indignant look. Don’t be scared? Do I look like an idiot? Do you see his front leg, cocked and ready to throw the side kick at me before I have any chance of reaching him with any part of my body? Of course I’m scared!

I know what my teacher means: Don’t let your fear prevent you from coming in. That’s what we usually mean when we say “Don’t be scared”—be scared, but do it anyway. That’s the definition of bravery.

And I know what Mark Twain meant, too: don’t let your past experiences of being hurt affect your ability to love, without reservations, in the present and future. Just like fighting: when you get kicked hard in the stomach, you don’t stop fighting; you go back in. But you don’t go in like you’ve never been kicked in the stomach. You’d be an idiot to do that.

We Live As We Dream, Alone: Part 3

Dating

My friend John only dates a woman for a year at a time. After a year passes, he starts to feel restless and depressed and needs to end the relationship. He is in his late thirties, and he has been following this pattern his entire adult life. I was curious whether this was a lifestyle that he maintains intentionally or whether he is just taking his time shopping for a more permanent arrangement.

“What is your plan?” I asked him. “To have a series of one-year relationships?”

“No, I don’t want to have a series of one-year relationships,” he said, repeating my words back to me in a wounded voice, like this was an insulting idea.

“So, what do you want?” I asked.

He shook his head and shrugged.

John is like many other people I know, taking the romantic middle path. He eschews the stagnancy and dependence of permanent relationships, but he doesn’t want to give up on companionship, affection, and sex. And so he is rather permanently situated in the state of romantic affairs known as dating.

At this point, for the sake of full disclosure, I must confess: I don’t understand dating at all. On my list of the most baffling cosmic enigmas, it is up there with mortality, the nature of consciousness, the purpose of life. If you were to look at all my journal entries on the topic, you would find a prevalence of entries ending with the words, I don’t understand.

Do you ever try to think about the universe and whether it is infinitely large, and if so, how could something be infinitely large, and if not, what would its boundaries look like and what could possibly lie beyond them?

That’s how my brain feels when I think about dating.

Dating makes logical sense as a way to shop for a permanent relationship. The goal is to stay together until you decided to get married or break up and go looking for someone else to marry. But what about people who don’t—necessarily—want that sort of relationship? People like John. When he begins dating somebody, he isn’t thinking, I will date this woman for a year and then we’ll break up, I’ll be alone for a while, and then I’ll go date some other woman.

Nor is he thinking, If things work out well, I will stay with this woman forever.

“What is he thinking?” I asked my friend Marie, who is very insightful about relationships, shortly after this conversation. “What does he want?”

“He doesn’t know what he wants,” she said. “When it comes time to decide what he wants, he gets scared and ends the relationship.”

Marie is married now, but when she was single, she didn’t understand the logic of dating, either. After a series of emotionally exhausting relationships and break-ups, Marie decided that she would date casually but never be anybody’s girlfriend. Temporary relationships seemed artificial and painful to her.

“Breaking up is horrible,” she said. “This person is like your family one day, and the next day you’re supposed to just cut off all those feelings and go back to being friends, or not speaking? It’s unreasonable.”

It does seem unreasonable, and yet, there do not seem to be better alternatives. No matter which direction we turn, the traps are set: denial of our independence and self-determination, denial of our physical and emotional needs, or some combination of the two. It’s a paradox that we can’t escape from. Ethical behavior calls for us to be independent yet socially connected, to be loving but not self-sacrificing, to honor some of our animal instincts and defy others. It’s complicated and confusing, but we don’t have a choice.

We Live As We Dream, Alone: Part 2

Celibacy

The Dalai Lama—potentially the happiest person on earth—has been known to advocate celibacy, not just for monks or priests or ascetics, but for everybody. Sex, love, marriage, and child-rearing, he argues, are forms of attachment that lead to misery, and sometimes, as he points out, murder and suicide. We’d all do better just to call the whole thing off.

It seems odd that the most important behaviors for the perpetuation of our species, finding a mate, having sex, raising children, could be such impediments to our spiritual growth. If we all followed the Tibetan Buddhist path to enlightenment, our species would die out in a generation.

In the Dalai Lama’s view, sex and romantic love are unhealthy addictions that should be relinquished, much like junk food or television. Like all worldly attachments, we value it more than its actual worth and imbue it with all kinds of meanings that stem from our own state of mind more than from the act itself.

Once we relinquish our unhealthy attachments, we see them for what they really are, unadorned by our compulsive fascinations with them. That box of cookies is a concoction of highly processed flour and sugar and chemically-altered oils. Those people on the reality television show are not our familiar acquaintances but particularly inane and narcissistic strangers.

And sex—well it’s really just a lot of groping and banging around of genitals that happens to cause a powerful wave of addictive chemicals to pour through our bloodstream, much like the cookies do. And as with the cookies, once we give up sex, and the chase that precedes it, and the commitment that follows it, perhaps our lives will be healthier. As with cookies and cigarettes and television and college, perhaps we will think of it wistfully from time to time, with that nostalgia we reserve for things that we once loved but which we now know were bad for us.

On the other hand, my other spiritual guru, sex columnist Dan Savage, believes that repressing or denying our sexuality can lead us to act out in inappropriate ways, like priests who molest children or closeted gay U.S. senators who harass young male interns. If these men would allow themselves—or if their respective institutions (the Catholic Church, the Republican Party) would allow them—to be in loving relationships with partners of their choosing, they would not feel the compulsion to impose their sexuality on innocent bystanders.

That is the fear about a life of celibacy, that in trying to maintain a healthy diet, we are in fact unconsciously starving our bodies and minds of something we need, a process that could turn us sicker than we were before we began trying to heal ourselves.

This raises the question: is sex and love something we can really renounce? Or is it something that will manifest itself in our lives in one way or another, something that will turn rancid if we don’t direct our energies towards healthy partners and relationships that make us happy? Is what the Dalai Lama advocates more like renouncing junk food or renouncing food itself?

Part 3

We Live As We Dream, Alone: Part 1

Commitment

My friend Samantha has a husband whom she adores. I remember her raving about him from the moment she met him: he’s a math professor and he does drugs, she cooed. I wouldn’t have gotten married if I hadn’t met him, we were destined to be together, we’re soul mates.

I have often envied Samantha’s domestic life. Her house always seems warm, busy, inhabited, full of grown-ups and babies and dogs, her own and other people’s. She has people over for holiday meals, mostly other parents with young children. A lot of these parents are people she used to spend sleepless raved-out weekends with back in college. Now they spoon-feed their toddlers, pull their breasts out to nurse, talk about preschools and potty training. There are always actual beverages like juice and soda and coffee and beer, and twice as much food as we need. I eat until my stomach hurts, because it seems impossible to be disciplined or ascetic here, in this recreated womb, where all needs are catered to and I am pretending to be part of a family.

In comparison, my apartment is a bachelor pad. Everything is sparse, arranged solely for convenience. All signs of sentient life derive from me or my cat; when I return at the end of the day, no one will ever be there to greet me and everything will be exactly as I left it. There is never anything like juice or desserts in the kitchen. All the food will be eaten by me and nobody else, so there’s nothing nice or special.

I know that part of the reason Samantha’s house is so comforting is because she is a mother, and plays that role to everyone in the house, myself included. If I were the one catering to everyone’s needs, stocking the house with juice, feeding the dogs and nursing the baby and cleaning up after it all, the house would seem much less peaceful. Still, I know that mothers and fathers feel a comfort in their family life that is not unlike what I feel at their houses. What seems a holiday to me—lots of food, conversation, children running around—is their everyday life.

One day when I left Samantha’s house, she asked me where I was off to.

“I’m going to go do two hours of kung fu,” I said, feeling especially happy about this fact; I had been looking forward to the class all day.

Her eyes actually narrowed a bit as she said to me, “I’m so jealous.”

“You can do kung fu if you want,” I said to her.

“No, I can’t,” she replied.

Of course she could, anyone will say. She could go take a class, have her husband watch the baby for an evening, even get a babysitter so they could go together, as a couple. But it would never be her priority, and, more to the point, it would never be just her decision. The sacrifices involved in moving from single to double are not so numerous, but they are weighty: the loss of autonomy, of the ability to make decisions about one’s life without anybody’s approval, of the right to prioritize oneself above all else.

I try to imagine my life from her side of the fence. I can do whatever I want all day, and I don’t need to check in with anybody. I don’t have meals with anyone, which means I don’t need to have meals at all, which means I can grab toast and peanut butter and run out to a martial arts class or take advantage of any other opportunity for self-improvement instead of eating dinner. I can come home as late as I want, as drunk as I want, or not come home at all; no one will notice or care. And of course, if when I come home, I were to bring some drunken stranger with me, that would be perfectly acceptable.

These are all circumstances that I know Samantha sees as benefits of being single, whether or not I do, losses that she and her coupled brethren will lament when they are feeling bored, trapped, in a rut. But I know if she had the chance to trade lives with me, she wouldn’t consider it for a second, not for all the kung fu classes and one night stands in the world.

Part 2