You Can Be More Than Monkeys: ACCOUNT FOR PERSONALITY, DAMMIT
If you were to ask an extraterrestrial to summarize 99% of all human stories, it would twiddle its tentacles and speak thusly:
“A human predicts what will make them happy. They discover they were wrong.”
Which is, well, the inherent moral of almost any tale we tell. Every romantic comedy is “You thought this person was wrong for you, but surprise! They’re your soulmate.” Every sad drama is some dude going, “Wait, I should have done this other thing” at the end of the film. Every action adventure usually ends with the hero discovering that they *thought* getting the treasure of the Rio Grande would make them happy, but it’s friendship that binds the universe together!
The reason we tell these stories over and over again is because we suck at knowing what makes us happy. Worse, we don’t understand just how bad we are at predicting our contentment. We are convinced, with the firmness of Ahab lashing himself to the whale, that we know how to do this, and by God we will shoot down all incoming advice like they were death-dealing missiles to do…
…well, whatever damn-fool thing it is we set out to do.
And then we discover that really, this thing we moved heaven and earth to get didn’t actually bring the benefits we assumed it would.
So I think any rational human being’s main quest in life should be to disprove yourself. To figure out what terrible instincts you have, and remove them like a cancer. Because you probably are brimming with all sorts of awful ideas about what’s actually good in your life, and the sooner you can dismantle those things like the bombs they are, the better.
Today’s example: **What turns me on is what’s good for me.**
I say this because in a recent blog entry, OKCupid – a site dedicated to getting people to date happily – said this:
“OkCupid’s original system gave people two separate scales for judging each other, ‘personality’ and ‘looks.’… [But] according to our users, ‘looks’ and ‘personality’ were the same thing.”
The article is fascinating, and I’d encourage you to read it. But basically, what it says is this:
“If I see a cute person, they’re awesome to talk to.”
*Smacks with riding crop* NO! Do not do that!
Look, that’s your monkey brain talking, that primitive Amygdala hijacking your higher senses to go, “ME WANT FUCK” and rerouting all of your brainpower to answer the question of, “I want to fuck him, so why do I want to fuck him?”
Your brain, which can justify any awful decision, will of course answer: “Because he’s good for me.”
But no! Christ, that’s so blatantly stupid that even the bonobos are shaking their head. (And the bonobos are freaks.) The sooner you can disentangle “This person has the physical attributes to turn me on” from “This person may be awful in all other respects,” *the better off you will be.”
The biggest step you can make towards healthy, happy dating is to understand that “People who turn you on” can also be utter nitwits who you should not get involved with.
…Of course, another monstrously stupid thing that humans do is mentally doing a search-and-replace in every argument to change all instances of “often” with “all.” And so assorted dimwits will say, “…So we should never date people we’re attracted to?”
No, you idiot. What you should do is recognize that physical attraction is the first step in many. You start with boinkability, because if you don’t want to hit that, well, you should probably just be friends. (Also note that “friends” can be unattractive to you, and yet really good for you – another problem that this lack of distinction creates, that lurking sense that your friends aren’t as good as someone who satisfies your nethers.)
But after you’ve gone, “Yeah, I want that,” then you go through many steps after that to determine whether you should take this further – which includes the incredibly critical steps of 1) getting to know who they really are, and 2) determining whether who they really are is compatible with what you really want.
Or you can just assume that the hottest people are your best matches, and be continually upset.
But if you do the dumbass monkey-brain thing of conflating turn-on with compatibility, you will have inconsistent disaster. You’ll have that slot-machine payoff of “Some people I wanted to boink were good for me, and others weren’t so I’ll just keep pulling that lever!” And many people luck into decent relationships by sheer chance, which is good, because in many cases “sheer chance” is way better than their focused planning.
Yet you. You can rise above the ape to understand that these hormones flooding through you need no justification. You can separate personality and looks, and in fact damn well should.
Because if you think that attraction == compatibility, you’re going to keep making the monkey mistakes.
FOR EXTRA CREDIT: Are the people you can successfully date casually the same people who you can live with 24/7? Society thinks it’s an inevitable progression! But society are the same jerks who got rid of the personality rating on OKCupid! Think carefully!
The Expensive Things I Purchased In Italy
1) In Rome, one of the most stylish cities in the world, there is a hat company so renowned for their fedoras that they’ve actually made a relatively famous French movie with the hat’s name. (The movie is not about the hats, but rather the gangsters who wore them.)
That hat’s name is Borsalino. And I purchased one.
This hat is, in all ways, ridiculous. It’s as light as Elven chainmail, just this thin layer of woven stuff that somehow manages to retain a shape. When I put on my old hats, they feel weighty; this thing is a puff of air. Totally worth the 129 Euro it took to buy it.
2) What was not worth it was the 1500-Euro panama hats I tried on in Venice. There are four grades of panama hat, and for some reason the top-grade is $2300 and the next grade down is $750, and – well, there was an improvement in quality, but the fit wasn’t anywhere near as good as the Boursalino, nor was the quality seemingly that amazing. But hey, for a brief period I had a hat worth a reasonably priced used car resting atop my dome.
(Though major points to the woman in the shop for looking at me as I walked in and perfectly guessing my hat size just by glancing at my head.)
3) While in the city with the most Michelin-starred restaurants (one more than Paris, which I’m sure chafes), we decided to dine at one. I booked seats at La Terrazza Del’Eden, a one-star restaurant with a great view of the city. And my Mother got to see what Michelin-starred service was like.
Michelin service, for the record, is where they have a battalion of waiters constantly scanning you unobtrusively – they don’t interrupt your conversation, but if your wine glass goes dry they’ll be there to refill it within a minute. They are knowledgeable. They will do literally whatever it takes to make you happy. They are the Marines of the service industry, and in this case our waiters saw me come in with my new Boursalino hat. I looked around for a coat check for about five seconds before they smiled and unfolded a small table next to my seat for me to rest my hat on, and another table for my mother to rest her purse on.
These guys are pros, I thought.
The best dish I had in Italy – and there will probably be a meal overview, as Italy was basically a cavalcade of amazing dining – was this:
This is a peach gazpacho. I don’t know why I ordered it; I can’t stand peach, and I don’t like raw tomatoes. But I do like cold soup, and I said to myself, If a Michelin-starred restaurant thinks these are two good flavors to put together, I will trust them. And what I got was a synthesis of the umami of tomatoes and the light sweetness of a peach without the cloying syrup in it, this constantly mutating dish of flavors that changed as I tried, say, putting more of the puree of tomato onto my spoon or the cream on the side in. My mouth rang with flavors, my tongue vibrating as as chilled complexity saturated every taste quadrant on my tongue; it is the closest I’ve come to eating a meal as complex as a Velvet Tango Room drink.
But you also had dishes that looked like this red mullet:
And this foie gras:
So basically, we had a pretty amazing meal there. Well worth the price, if you like spending vast amounts of money on dining experiences.
4) But! I forgot to bring my suit to Italy because I thought it would be casual turista dining throughout, so my usual “nice shirt and chinos” would carry me. But you can’t pull that shit at a Michelin-starred restaurant!
(Except, as it turns out, you totally can. We had a family of Japanese tourists over who showed up in T-shirts and baseball caps. Michelin waiters being what they were, nobody said anything, but these people spent money on a huge meal with two screaming kids and a granddad in a sun visor who nodded off at the table. They were placed in the very far back.)
So I said, “What I need is a fine and stylish Italian suit,” and set out with my family to find one.
…not so fast, Fat American.
The first three shops were pretty damned rude. Stylish Italians are thin, and they weren’t particularly thrilled about me either, and so there was a lot of bad English and gesticulating of “This is what we have in your size,” followed by rat-a-tat Italian among the clerks that was pretty clearly, “Look, this guy’s in here, we can’t make him leave, what the hell do we have?” Which was fairly humiliating.
Eventually, however, we went to Sartoria Italiana, a tiny shop with some nice suits, and the proprietor didn’t seem actively repulsed by my heaving body. We tried on suits for almost an hour – my wife wanted a charcoal grey suit at first, as she thought it very flattering, but I pointed out that this suit didn’t feel like me. Which is to say that I’d wear it for the handful of formal occasions that I wore all suits for, and then it would gather moths in my closet.
No, I wanted something colorful, something bold, something European. And we were there so long it got awkward, as the clerk on duty left and was replaced by a “doesn’t-speak-English-at-all” clerk, who struggled mightily to get across the concepts of proper hems, what’s stylish in Italy, and what time to return.
Yet we persevered! And this was my Great Italian Suit!
This thing is light and comfortable, and it may get me to wear it on more occasions than just funerals and weddings. It looked phenomenal, and I couldn’t stop swanning about in it. Plus, I wore it for a whole airline flight (in order to preserve and protect my customs charges, as per advice from Bart Calendar), and it didn’t chafe or pull.
A suit like this can get a man to wear more suits. This could become an addiction, really. Which Gini is already starting to meep about the prices, but hey, I remember the days when all I wore was black T-shirts and black pants and she said, “Don’t you want to look nice?”
Be careful what you wish for, my love.
Still, despite all the serious sartorial stylings of the suit, one can’t stop the cross-generational appeal of FINGERGUNS:
How Being Polyamorous Makes Me A Healthier Person
The first time I dumped someone to save my wife’s sanity, I felt pretty bad about it.
Which is to say that I’m a roiling hot mess of bubbling neuroses myself, so I am endlessly tolerant of fucked-up behavior in others. If someone has a breakdown in public at a party, I think, “There but for the grace of God go I,” and immediately try to talk them down. If someone gets into a screaming fight with me, I think, “Our lines of communication need work,” and set to figuring out what crossed wire has led to such fury.
This has allowed me to turn a lot of dysfunctional messes into good friendships.
The dark side is that I’ll spend months, years, convinced that a breakthrough is around the corner and never getting there. It’s like the Xeno’s Paradox of fucking, wherein every week we have another howling breakdown followed by a breakthrough, but nothing ever seems to get better.
And I can’t leave, man. Because they need me. And we came to a new realization last night! Same as the realization we had last week, and the realization we had last month, and we’re still fucking miserable but Lessons Are Being Learned, we’re halfway to heaven.
Next thing you know, three months of my life have vanished into the suckhole – the bad suckhole – and I’m just exhausted.
Gini does not stand for that shit.
Gini is of the opinion that sure, I can date, but there is a limited amount of time I can devote to diagnosing the issues of my lovers. And that time ends when ours begins. Left to my own devices I’ll still be ruminating about Jessica’s problems on my date with Gini… And Gini will tolerate a dash of that, but really she’s selfish.
When my bad times with other lovers impinge on our good times, they gotta go.
(And the same goes for my long-term girlfriend, though since we get so little time together it takes a fantastically dysfunctional relationship to rip through that little slice of fried gold.)
The cut-off didn’t happen often – maybe twice in seven years, honestly – but the threat of being cut off changed the flavor of my relationships. I started choosing less needy women. I started asking, “Is this person legitimately going to get better if we have a night-long discussion, or am I just fooling myself into the illusion of progress?” I started asking some seriously hard questions before I flung my heart down the Well Of Mystery Smooches, asking, “Yes, we share the same psychological issues, but is ‘having similar problems’ the same as ‘compatible’?”
And slowly, I started having saner and more satisfying relationships.
The weird thing is, rejecting the incompatible-but-sympathetic is something I should have done years ago. But I couldn’t do it just for me. But I can do it if I’m protecting not just my sanity, but guarding the happiness of my wife and girlfriend. I might piss seven months of daily arguments away on my own, but I owe it to Gini to be as happy as I can for her. I owe it to her to not waste my spare time (and some of my not-spare time) spinning wheels on people who I’m fundamentally incompatible with.
So now I take my time. Because I’m working to shield my wife. Which works to shield me.
Poly makes me better at having all kinds of relationships. Even if I went monogamous, the lessons learned would be applicable. It’s okay to break up with someone even if you think they’re close to having a breakthrough, because frankly, you’re not responsible for guiding everyone to the gate. It’s okay to want to be in relationships where, the occasional bumps aside, you spend most of your time being happy and communicating well.
I’m better at that these days. Thank God.