Bill's Notes

Francis has an interesting post on people who come to see the futility of dating anymore. Hit home to me. I'm not looking for sorrow or pity, or anything like that. But some of it did sum up a lot of what I've been increasingly thinking and feeling in the past few years, since my breakup with J.

Basically, futility. It's a hard concept for some to get. That the heart at age 42 that's been broken eight times just isn't that eager to get back into the batter's box. It's one thing to get back into the batter's box when you've been beaned once or twice. But when you've beaned every time you go into the batter's box through a 26-year career, you tend to figure it's time to stop. And that's a bit what it's been like, over-dramatizing a bit. Actually, it's been more like getting beaned to the point of going to the hospital once every three years for 26 years, and you've taken about half the seasons off to recover.

Francis says it better, though I admit I haven't quite carried my futility with the dignity I'd have hoped for:

There are other factors at work, too, most notably the accumulated sense of futility. (A rather clever magazine cover parody your Curmudgeon saw a few years ago was titled FUTILE: The Magazine Of Mid-Life Dating.) It would seem to be the pattern that romantic connections become harder to form the older and more frustrated we become. Whether that's because we become pickier about our potential partners or ever less inclined to alter our own habits and living patterns to accommodate them is a question for another screed.

For whatever reason, quite a lot of worthy single persons of your Curmudgeon's acquaintance have entered the "why bother?" age bracket, and have effectively given up on the search for a mate. About two-thirds of these persons have been married and divorced. Their condition of solitude has taken on a curious solidity. It seems to encase them in an aura of concrete drab: sad, but accepted as beyond redress. Despair is like that.

Make no mistake: when your Curmudgeon calls these individuals worthy, he means it. They're engineers, physicians, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, mothers, fathers, churchgoers, philanthropists, athletes, gamesmen, artists, musicians, and boon companions. Like all of us, they have their flaws, but nothing that an objective assessor would call disabling, or disqualifying for love and life partnership. They're sound and solid folk.

They don't want to be alone, but they are. They suffer it quietly, without complaining or making a fuss. They've learned to deflect the suggestions of their relatives and friends in that oblique way that changes the subject so deftly that the well-meaning suggestor never thinks to return to it. As they lack little other than love, they often inspire admiration from others who fail to sense their pain. Theirs is a well upholstered despair.

Over the years, your Curmudgeon has become increasingly well attuned to that state. It evokes a desire to meddle that's all but impossible to resist. He has to remind himself rather frequently how well armed his friends are.

Of course, "don't give up" is the single most important bit of advice one could give to a man engaged in a difficult quest. But once he has given up, what remains that anyone could tell him? What remains that he'd be willing to hear?

Perhaps it's not a kindness to chivvy someone out of his resignation to solitude. But the impulse can be very hard to restrain.

And yes, I've thought a lot about my own role in this. For a long time I assumed it was all my fault, all of the broken relationships, all the hurt. Heck, half of literature is about people who refuse to see their own role in their own undoing. As I've gotten older, I've concluded that it's not all my fault, but it's been absolutely no less than half my fault. Every time.

But regrets will eat you alive — I know that. That's why I do my best not to do that. I quote Paul Simon:

A bad day's when I lie in bed
And think of things that might have been.

But that doesn't happen all the time. And I should note that in the song, the speaker is married. Guess everyone feels this way sometimes.