In a Joe Coleman art book I bought a long time ago, there resides a timeline of Joe's life that includes an entry about his first wife, and how she "abandons marriage, 1992," or some such. To Joe, and to pretty much everyone else who has ever really made a go at a marriage, they can see it as an entity unto itself. Married people often talk about how a marriage requires a lot of work.
The two times I had a girlfriend in the eighties demonstrated to me that even such a deal as that can require a lot of work. It can take a lot of work to compel women to take in interest in me in the first place, and it can take a lot of work to date them once they do take an interest in me.
My last post talked about how even having a love interest can take a lot of work, and so it can. One can straddle an ambiguous world between a totally unattached, single life and the promise of some good times with someone that they care for. I've seen reams of YouTube videos posted with titles that suggest how a man or woman might negotiate their way through this time. Seeing how romantic love and all that attends it dictates how we choose a mate in our society, one would do well to pay attention to this phase in one's life should one find oneself in the midst of such a deal.
In other words, such a time, for me at least, is not some exercise in effortless spontaneity where I just serendipitously find the embrace of my beloved. Sexual encounters themselves can seem like these random, chaotic events, and negotiating the realm where one desires one person but has an opportunity with another at some point often saw me "saving myself" for the one I assigned the status of love interest. That has everything to do with a time in 1985 when I had a seemingly random sexual encounter with a female friend who was not my beloved Veronica Ortega. The psychotic episode that followed this stressful incongruity between the two women and what they represented to me led me to turn down similar-seeming opportunities later on down the road, much to my regret.
Yep, I'm still single, and the life of a totally single person can take a lot of work, with or without a love interest. For me, the work of single life these past many years showed itself in finding things to do with myself that proved constructive and sustainable. I spend a lot of time on music and art, and on generally maintaining my health and well being. The vast majority of this time since 2001 saw very few opportunities for a dating or sex life with women. But as I shed the bad habits such as smoking, drinking, drugs, AND assigning love interest status to women in my world that invariably seemed to strike these women as arbitrary, premature, inappropriate, and INTENSE, I think the overall package I've made of myself helped me make much more intelligent decisions about all of that dating, love, and love interest stuff. And that all takes a LOT of work, spontaneity or no.
The two times I had a girlfriend in the eighties demonstrated to me that even such a deal as that can require a lot of work. It can take a lot of work to compel women to take in interest in me in the first place, and it can take a lot of work to date them once they do take an interest in me.
My last post talked about how even having a love interest can take a lot of work, and so it can. One can straddle an ambiguous world between a totally unattached, single life and the promise of some good times with someone that they care for. I've seen reams of YouTube videos posted with titles that suggest how a man or woman might negotiate their way through this time. Seeing how romantic love and all that attends it dictates how we choose a mate in our society, one would do well to pay attention to this phase in one's life should one find oneself in the midst of such a deal.
In other words, such a time, for me at least, is not some exercise in effortless spontaneity where I just serendipitously find the embrace of my beloved. Sexual encounters themselves can seem like these random, chaotic events, and negotiating the realm where one desires one person but has an opportunity with another at some point often saw me "saving myself" for the one I assigned the status of love interest. That has everything to do with a time in 1985 when I had a seemingly random sexual encounter with a female friend who was not my beloved Veronica Ortega. The psychotic episode that followed this stressful incongruity between the two women and what they represented to me led me to turn down similar-seeming opportunities later on down the road, much to my regret.
Yep, I'm still single, and the life of a totally single person can take a lot of work, with or without a love interest. For me, the work of single life these past many years showed itself in finding things to do with myself that proved constructive and sustainable. I spend a lot of time on music and art, and on generally maintaining my health and well being. The vast majority of this time since 2001 saw very few opportunities for a dating or sex life with women. But as I shed the bad habits such as smoking, drinking, drugs, AND assigning love interest status to women in my world that invariably seemed to strike these women as arbitrary, premature, inappropriate, and INTENSE, I think the overall package I've made of myself helped me make much more intelligent decisions about all of that dating, love, and love interest stuff. And that all takes a LOT of work, spontaneity or no.
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