SMART PEOPLE ON BAD DAYS: FELICIA

Love your column!!

Here’s my question: Where the fuck is the decency (anymore)?

So many times I have been talking to what seems might be a nice boy, and he’ll even go the next step to say “hey, let’s get together again–say, Saturday? I’m really looking forward to seeing you again!” And then, come Saturday, he blows me off.

Ok, fine, bucko, you had a change of heart and never want to see me again–but can’t you just frigging tell me?

WTF?

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Dear Felicia,

It sucks to be blown off. Wait, that sounded wrong. Like maybe that’s part of your problem. Let me rephrase. It sucks to be stood up. It really does. I’m sorry this keeps happening to you. You don’t deserve it.

Let me address a couple points in order: Jerks, boys, you, and anymore.

First: jerks. It should come as no surprise to all you smart folks out there to hear that some men are assholes. In fact, some people are assholes. All kinds of people, to be sure: the smart, the stupid, men, women, the beautiful, the ugly, the conservative and the liberal, the young and the old, you get the idea. Dating, like working in the service industry, is going to bring you into contact with a wider swath of humanity, and therefore, more jerks. This is simple, unfortunate, statistics.

There is no real way that I can see to protect yourself entirely from this except to stay home and masturbate. So make sure you take a few days off from the search and the scene to do that.

But you’re not concerned enough about the general assholery of the nation to write to an advice column. You’re writing because you’re concerned about the specific awfulness of a tiny slice of the population: jerkish boys who have gone on first/blind dates with you.

Now, you used the term “boys” rather than “men” to describe the people who keep standing you up. Perhaps this is your problem.

Boys are precious little under-eighteens and not suitable for fucking. I’m’a assume that you are not going after the junior-high set. Because that would be illegal and icky and morally outrageous, and if that were the case you’d need a therapist and a lawyer, not an advice column answer. So my suspicion is that you keep running into men who behave like boys. Boys should know that they are precious and in need of love and protection and a diaper change. Men should understand that while they were adorably growing they might have been full of sugar and puppy dog tails, but now that they are older they are full of competence and responsibilities, just like the other fifty-one percent of the population. A man saying that he wants to see you again and in fact making a date, and then never calling is engaging in little-boy behavior. It is unattractively immature and cowardly. A man (or a woman (as opposed to boy or girl)) would, given a change of heart, own up to it and make the call, even if doing so exposed him to some ire or necessitated acknowledging that he was causing a real person (you) some pain and disappointment.

And really, who wants to let a man-boy who thinks it is okay to avoid his responsibilities to others in order to protect his precious psyche from even passing unpleasantness into her life and her bed?

Not you. So really, no loss there. Think of it this way: you had a nice-enough evening with someone who, it turns out, you didn’t want to see again.

On the other hand, maybe it’s: you. The only reason I, as an adult woman, could envision myself acting like these boys is if I were afraid of you. Maybe you are terrifying, and these men are making dates they don’t intend to keep just to get themselves out of the room unscathed. Maybe you look at all men you meet as boys, and not as potential mates. And maybe the necessity to prove themselves men is just too much scary effort to do more than once. Maybe you come off as imperious and exacting, or much more terrifying, as needy and desperate. It’s probably worth looking at your own behavior to make sure you’re not putting these men in a bad spot, because if you’re making them uncomfortable that’s not ultimately good for you. You should approach meeting these men as a chance to have a good time for one night. Life is full of possibilities, and so is the first date, but it shouldn’t be imbued with too much excitement or too-high expectations. So go, see men, have a good time, and don’t worry about later until later. And, if later never comes, don’t worry about it at all. Just (as hard as this is) go out there again and meet more people. Not all of them will be jerks. It’s just not statistically probable.

The thing that really stuck out to me about your letter, though, was your use of the word “anymore.” You want to know where all the decency has gone. Which makes me think that you think there was some special time in the past when everyone was honorable, worthy, proper and upstanding. A lot of people are under this misapprehension.

Things have changed since our parents met each other and managed to do it at least once. But I think things have mostly gotten better.

They have also gotten louder. Everywhere you look you are getting messages about sex, love and dating. And this is the poison that our culture is selling when it comes to love: we are told that there is only one person you can truly love, that that person is the opposite sex from you, that that person will be perfect in your eyes, and that you must use a series of tricks, obfuscations, prevarications, and gymnastics to keep that person. You already know that these things are patently untrue and extraordinarily destructive. You are, after all, a smart person. But take a moment and think through your recent romantic interactions. Can you honestly say that none of this cultural bullshit influenced anything you said or did?

We are inundated daily with unhealthy ideas about how we should behave when in close emotional proximity to people. We’d have to be blind and deaf to not internalize some of it. Not only that, but other people stress us the fuck out, and when we’re confused or nervous, we don’t always make good decisions about what to do or even to whom we should turn for advice. The good news is that the people who talk the loudest –Christian conservatives, Oprah, and your parents—aren’t necessarily the ones with the best insight.

The bad news is, that in the age of divorce, many of us feel that we don’t have good models for healthy relationships. In fact, according to some estimates, forty percent of children in America now live most of the time in households without a father. Conservatives are fond of quoting statistics like this one, along with trends in same-sex marriage, teenage pregnancy, women in the workplace, and the level of sexual innuendo on television to shore-up hysterical views about the disintegration of the modern family. And there is an alarming grain of truth in what they have to say. That kernel, small as it may be, is this: our modern society is not set up to support healthy relationships. There is enormous cultural pressure to want unattainable things from our partners, to ask impossible things of ourselves, and to give up when relationships inevitably get hard. There are too many of us who grew up in households we don’t want to replicate.

Relationships are hard. But that’s it.

Those pessimistic, our-most-basic-institutions-are-crumbling-and-it’s-your-fault folks are not right about anything else. It is absolutely not true that in some mythical time past family was easier to create and maintain, or even, as the liberal and right-minded Tomas B. Stoddard wrote in 1988, that we are living in “an increasingly loveless world.” There is as much desire, companionship, affection and adoration now as there ever was, and every one of us should appreciate the fact that there is, arguably, even more and better sex for the taking.

Relationships have never been easy or ideal.

If you don’t believe me, ask your great-grandmother how much fun it was to change every single diaper, or your great-grandfather how much awesome oral sex he had. For that matter, ask anyone who was alive before 1967 how cool it was that white people and people of color were legally forbidden from getting married. Ask your mother how it felt that she couldn’t get a credit card without her husband’s name on it. Ask your gay uncle what it was like to come out of the closet and then live through the AIDS crisis. Ask your aunt her views about masturbation or about going to a wedding as a single woman. Ask a free-lover about how much fun herpes is.

Things in our relationships, and our most basic social institutions, are getting better, not worse. That said, I am going to advise you to do something a bit old fashioned. If you have friends and family that you like, try to meet potential mates through them. Internet dating and bar hookups have provided many of us with a way to meet wonderful people we would never otherwise have had the chance to get to know. However, when you meet people in these ways, there is initially no social pressure exerted on the person you have met to treat you well. If you meet someone through a friend or family member, the new guy has an incentive to call you back if he says he’s going to call you back, because if he doesn’t his mom or friend or brother or whoever is going to yell at him. So try dating in your own social circle: pick someone you work with or volunteer with or are on a kickball team with, or someone your sister knows anyway. Someone for whom there are consequences to being an ass.

And don’t lose hope.

You’ve just had a bad run. And that is undoubtedly shitty. But there are six-billion people on the planet, and some of the ones you meet are going to be wonderful to you.

Thank you for joining me for this week’s Smart People On Bad Days, A.K.A. “The longest possible answer to the shortest ever question.” Feel free to make a comment below. And keep those letters coming!

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