OK, so this post is a bit more personal yet not containing too much navel-gazing I hope (hmm… navel-gazing sounds like a great companion genre to shoegazing music). It’s more like a snapshot of how things are currently and what I’m thinking when I’m alone and have lots and lots of time to think about why things are that way… and yes, as you can see from the screen capture of a video I made below that it isn’t hard to picture me as the kind of guy who has a hard time finding women with the compatible mindset and extravagant looks to fit my style of life.
So, basically we’re all alone in this world – you and me both. Let me elaborate: every individual experiences the world with their own senses, sieved through their constantly accumulating history of emotions cultivated from personal memories. We cannot simply connect with the exact memories and feelings of another human being even if we sometimes feel like we have deep connections with other people.
Consequently it is really quite impossible to know what someone else is thinking or feeling, basically, when you get down to it (one problem when you’re interested in someone, for example, and would like to know how that person feels – it’s not easy as you probably know!). Every one of us at some point in their lives therefore feel something akin to being the only ones really existing in this whole universe and that everyone else is just a supporting role or statist in this Hollywood epic called “My Glorious Life”. (goths may opt for “My Bleak and Boring Life in Eternal Darkness” here if they want to)
Romance or a lack thereof – or, “For fuck’s sake get to the point!”
Yes, yes, what I really am getting at is this: the thing is, being alone means you have a lot more time to think about shit. How things are, why they are the way they are. Many lonely weekends, evenings and nights that people in relationships don’t experience to the same extent as they are too busy arguing or making love or cleaning up the vomit of their kids to have the time to think as much as I do. I know, because I’ve been there – It was joyful being in a relationship, not having to be alone and worry about things because there was always someone else to riff on your thoughts with and whose life you could participate in when your own was getting uneventful.
Or simply put, there wasn’t time to think because there was always stuff to do, new things to experience with someone else.
Yes, there are always friends, but they have their own lives (esp. when they start families of their own) and the point of friendship is anyway that you cannot expect anything out of it – it’s just a silent agreement with no real obligations, and that’s the beauty of it. Some people are great at cultivating new friendships wherever they go, yes, but I’m not really that kind of person – I like having a few good friends and that’s it; I’m out of energy if I try to be friends with everyone.
Being in love is usually more, and demands more energy. It’s having a physically intimate friend who’s always there for you every second of your life (in theory if not in practice).
Not having love in your life brings about a certain problem – the lure of love at some point creeps into thoughts and ruins an otherwise nice contemplative mood when you have all the time in the world and want to think about something nice. You always end up thinking about love at some point, which is frustrating. Of course, when you find it, new problems arise but that’s like moving through the levels in a video game – not having love in the first place is like playing the first level of Super Mario Bros. ad infinitum – it’s a great level alright but it would be great to reach those caverns and castles for a change, dammit!
Be brave, make the first move – yeah right…
Why complain about being alone then, get out there and make contact? Some people have it easy finding love (or make it seem disappointingly easy) and some have it hard. Me, I count myself in the “hard”-group firmly.
On paper, I should be quite an OK catch I think (or so people say, but maybe that’s just friendly pep talk) but IRL and on the web where photos are a primary way of judging you, well, my vast life-experience tells me a wholly different story. So based on decades of that experience (for example, no random woman has ever hit on me or even initiated a conversation with me in a bar or nightclub which I find pretty alarming actually) I’ve reached the conclusion that I might not be nearly as attractive as I am funny and smart and perfect in all other ways. Let’s not forget I’m modest, too.
But unfortunately, for me at least, it seems that your perfect personality doesn’t matter unless you first meet the looks-requirement, as a recent study has suggested [Live Science]. The same study tells us that women also historically have downplayed how much looks really matter to them, as it used to be said that it was the privilege of shallow men to just choose females based on looks whereas females wanted a great personality even more than a thick wallet or pretty face. Apparently, men and women are quite alike in the end – looks first, personality second is the way things are and unless you pass a certain “minimum looks requirement” it doesn’t matter how good your personality is, and that’s what I think I have been experiencing in my life. But I also think that it’s just natural as well that we are focused on looks, as my background in evolutionary biology whispers in my ear it sounds quite normal and smart that we actually want to reproduce with decently good looking people because our kids will inherit those traits and become (hopefully, but not always) good looking kids. I *know* that in my case, my kids would be super-intelligent and stunning lookers always of course, but that’s quite hard to prove…
“Ah, you should just make the first move and not be bothered if you get no response – that’s what I had to do also, and countless of women turned me down,” I hear one particular friend of mine telling me loudly. “It’s all about rinsing and repeating until you succeed, forget the women who reject you.”
But the thing is, in his case the probabilities of success were always higher than mine, so he didn’t have to take as much a beating than I might have to. Especially during the times he already had a girlfriend but hunted for others, it was kind of less pressure then of course for him as he always had a secure relationship to return to – the bastard. Maybe that’s just another thing that kids should be taught more at school or something, accepting rejection. Because I suck at it. I usually blame a vivid imagination and sticky memory for that, because I can’t seem to forget rejections and other negative stuff as easily as people would have you believe is possible – mistakes I made as a kid (stole something, lied to someone, failed some school assignment) still haunt me randomly to this day cropping up as lifelike memories now and then.
So it could be that some of us are just bad at taking risks for those kinds of reasons. Or I might just be making up an excuse here, maybe everyone must train oneself to accept repeated rejections and I do recall that my married friends did so in their youths, although they also had their share of women who made advances towards them as compensation.
So, what the fuck are you gonna do – call the Ghostbusters?
Being alone is OK, because I don’t feel lonely. But yeah, it would be great to get to the next level as I stated previously, because I’d like to see the whole game before it’s GAME OVER and time is ticking away. Yet when it comes to romance I don’t want to face rejection and am going to keep on waiting for the woman to give some signal of acceptance before making any advances – the problem here being that a clear “green light”-signal usually only happens to guys who are interesting enough, us other plebs just need to take big risks and chase women until one of them tires and succumbs to our charms. I hate that kind of chase. So, what to do then. Blame the young, handsome immigrant men for taking all the Finnish girls and feminists for having made it easy and accepted for women to work and live as they please?
Nah, blaming others has always been for losers (except blaming people who start wars, because that really makes life more difficult – I hate warmongers and dictators, only people I hate really), the only one to blame is always yourself for not trying to become better.
So I’ve figured it out, basically – I’m going to become the totally better superstar-version of myself, and there are only two ways to accomplish that: 1) make the most out of my limited body, i.e. train hard and 2) use my talents to make the world a better place and myself famous and rich in the process!
With those simple two steps, I bet there will be more green lights turning on and even if not, I’ll feel better. So it’s a win-win basically, why the f-u-c-k did I not figure out this previously? Because, as much of a cliché as it is, you gotta be happy about yourself first in order to make others happy.
Just watch this space, is what I’m telling you… yo.
OK, so I made the stupid, stupid mistake for the first time in years and made a (semi)public new year’s resolution…
There are some things I saw as a kid that I thought were cool but never really got involved with myself. One of those things was skateboarding; my cousin in Sweden had this plastic board with red wheels that I liked aesthetically really much, and it was the first board I ever tried, even learning how to move forwards with it. Later on I got my own heavy, very old school & cheap wooden board, or plank more like, that all the kids had back then. But it wasn’t quite as fun or good-looking as the plastic board I so fondly remembered so I moved on to RC cars or yo-yo’s and whatever…
