Changing My Mind About Dating

A friend who married later in life once told me, "Simone, you have to approach dating like you handle your job. You set goals, objectives, benchmarks etc. and work towards them. Set a goal to have a love life." I shrugged then just as I am shrugging now. I don't buy the idea that women should have to work so damn hard at love. That's too much work for so little in return, and yet, like a fool, late last year, I took her advice and tried my hand at online dating. I was forewarned that dating in NY is hard and that you only really do it to shake off the rust, presuming that there is rust. Granted my coworker met her husband on one of these sites, but even she admits that it was kismet. So I thought that I was going into this with eye wide open. I'd lowered my expectations of what would come of setting up dating profiles and I kept an open mind about the kinds of men with whom I would be willing to interact because this is the one area in my life where I truly do not know what is best for me. I am more particular about toilet paper than I am about men, and to be honest I think that is because I've never really been one of those women who truly needed a man. I need accessories. I need wine. I need coffee. A boyfriend, and certainly a husband, have always been optional, not necessary. The men in my life and around me always seemed to have a sense of entitlement and predilection for a certain kind of woman, usually someone totally unlike myself. I am not thin or classically pretty. I don't suffer fools lightly, and although I am all woman in every sense of the word, I have a very powerful and dominant energy that is usually synonymous with masculinity. I've been known to make men cry. No seriously. I have. I rarely cut people slack, especially if they walk around swinging a dick. Now let me be clear; I don't hate men. Quite the opposite. I like sizing up builds, beards, and bulges. I am the woman who will look a man up and down, make eye contact and show no shame. I admire the granite-like nature of the male aesthetic, but I struggle with the delicate constitutions of their ego. Blame it on upbringing or the constant enabling by other women who do in fact need a man; whatever, the cause, I am not gentle enough to be the glue that holds a man together. I am a supporter and protector by nature, but I am less of a consort and more of a co-regent. Come already put together, ready to withstand life's blows, or stand aside and let me handle this on my own; in my own way. For a while, I thought Breon, maybe you are being too hard. Soften up girl. So I tried the softer approach, and to be quite frank, that doesn't work for me. I am not a background player. While I admire him, I am not cut out to be the Hurts to your Tagovailoa. Either we both shine or he needs to be secure enough to not ask me to dim mine. At any rate, we need to find some common ground that allows us to both be franchise players. I know. I am asking for a sort of unicorn, but I know that they exist... they do.

And that brings us to now...

After 3 months of online dating, I am taking a page out of Tracee Ellis Ross's playbook and learning to be happy just being my own fabulous self. I'd rather take amazing selfies on a vacation that I paid for myself than sit across from a guy who believes that the Netflix Kevin Hart docuseries was - and I quote- "triumphant". That says to me that you too are emotionally stunted, and a disappointment waiting to happen.  I have found a lot of emotionally and conversationally stunted men in these virtual New York streets that cant seem to get past a "good morning beautiful" text. I've met some freaks that I had to calmly remind that nothing on my profile says that I am into polyamory or fetishes. Thanks but no thanks; I don't want to finish my drink. I just want to leave.  There have been the baby mama bashers, the "I like having sex with women but women are the problem" types, and my favorite "I have a girlfriend but she aint ackin' right, but hold on; this is her texting me" characters. There are the posers who have a polished introductory routine but once you spend time getting to know them, you realize that they can barely form a coherent sentence. Then there are the "oh you are a lawyer, so you ballin' right" guys, for whom, everything you do is an exhibition of your spending power. My dude, Navient gets most of my check. If I would've known that you were this kind of date, I would've save my time and money (because he didnt pay) and drank the free wine I have at home. I did meet a nice school teacher, but he has a rain cloud over his head that just wont let up. No, I cant stand the rain, and I have given up trying. Dating was supposed to be fun, but its work, and as I have already established, work is ghetto.

So where does this leave me?

I still communicate with the school teacher, but when I imagine my life a few years from now, I don't see him in it. John Mayer has a line - one of a zillion- that I love: "...and I can't remember life before her name." Life before him and the others was calm. It was something that I could balance and keep stable, and while I am fond of him, his name I can remember... his face is growing fuzzy. The thing that sticks with me the most is during a moment of loss, him in the dark, bending down to rest his head on my shoulder and me briefly holding both of our weight. Although I care for him, I am not the glue that will hold him together. If anything he has shown me that it takes all that I have to simply hold me together. My singleness makes more sense now than it ever did before.

Dating in and of itself, made me realize that people pair off for a few reasons, love not always, if ever, being chief among them. You find someone who adds to you what you have yet to grow in yourself. You find someone who is on a similar journey and needs a traveling companion. You have so much to give that not having someone to shower it upon is a sin against God's nature. For someone like me, I am hyper self aware and everyday I learn something new and invaluable about myself such that I find myself still falling in love with newly found pieces of me. And while we are communal creatures, I have found great joy living life in my head, content to walk alone for as far as I can just to see if I can do it. My, how many miles I have walked alone, and amazed the hell out of myself. But yet through all of this I am still learning what it means to love myself as fervently as I have loved others. Right now, I can't be anyone's glue but my own. It's hard to type this but its also liberating to know this.

I haven't thrown in the towel on companionship of the romantic sort. It's just not a goal of mine. Ambivalence is the word that comes to mind when I think of being in a relationship, and angst with regards to dating. I am open to whatever the Most High sends my way, but I am simply not pressed. I deleted all of my online dating accounts and blocked numbers. I feel lighter and more in alignment with myself.

The teacher occasionally reaches out but we keep it light. Its for reassurance, I guess. Its pleasant and not a bother. However, sometimes I don't respond, and we both know why.

Changing My Mind About Working...This is Ghetto

A friend sent me a text from her excursions in Sint Maarten, a place she was not feeling the day before, but now pleasantly resigned to her current situation. Lamenting on the thought of leaving and returning to mundanity of her 9-5, she shared words that have now become a sort of benchmark for quality of living: "working is ghetto". Now as I type this in my dungeon of an office, tucked in a corner at the back of the lowest floor, I too must admit that working is indeed for the less couth. I mean who willingly and eagerly signs away their life to take on tasks and responsibilities that they'd rather not have? The modern human does. That's who! Consider the white collar 9 to 5. You sit at a desk, and if you're lucky, in an office with walls, in front of a screen and silently crumble apart on the inside. I keep flowers on my desk just to remind me that I am yet still among the living flora and fauna of the world. When they die after a week, I find myself envying their escape. For them, at least, there is an end to this senseless torture. They say figure out your passion and work wont feel like work. I call bullshit. Work is work. I am only here because I need a check. Do I like helping people? Yes of course. If I didn't need to pay my student loans would I be helping people? Maybe but not Monday thru Friday from 9 to 5. I don't like people that much, and frankly I think if there weren't a whole entire professional landscape built around helping people, the altruism we so desperately seek in the world would finally have room to manifest. Maybe the government would remember that its supposed to serve people? At any rate, I lie to myself every morning. Its the power of this lie that gets me out of bed in the morning, onto two different trains and through throngs of zombie-like New Yorkers, to my pit of an office, just to "help people". Even when I had the so-called "cool job", I had to lie to myself to get going. For starters anyone who believes that multi-national corporations hocking ice cream can be a force for good is certifiably delusional. Secondly, getting white men to "pay what they owe" to society, in particularly people who look like me, is a Sisyphean task. The lie stopped being so powerful; all of its euphoric sway lost. However, the grander lie that working the way that we work is normal, has a cult-like grip on my logic. Everyday I tell myself that I must work to matter. I must contribute something so that I can add it to a piece of paper proving my value to society. I must work to accumulate validation from others who I hope will say that I am both smart and productive. I get results. But what happens when those markers of success cease to trigger floods of dopamine in the reward center of my brain? What happens when I can no longer ignore the heaviness of fatigue, or the finish line that seems to get farther away with each achievement. The addiction no longer gives me the high, and suddenly I realize that Whitney was right: crack is whack and so is working for a living.

There are days that I wished that I didn't like nice things. That I could value my freedom more than the fleeting joy of finally buying a Chanel bag or even something more practical, calling myself a homeowner. All signs that I am upholding my side of this social bargain. I long for the sense of freedom that would allow me to live day to day and figure it out as I go along, but the fact is, I like my things. Love of things might be the most ghetto of all mindsets. Listen, I'm not saying be a bum. I do value productivity and purpose, but less in a capitalist framework. I think about Coltrane towards the end of his earthly run. His music was not made for sales or to appease the masses. Ole dude, literally became a conduit. A divine experience. We wont all be that exceptional, but I do believe that we have the capacity to do amazing stuff... when we are not consumed with the need for things and a paycheck to acquire things.

Maybe I have worked so hard up until this point that I am literally out of fucks to give about work and the working world. I've always been the model of get it done. If there was anyone who was going to succeed, it was going to be me. There were times that I didn't give my all. Take law school of example. I was literally taking up space, doing the bare assed minimum - believe me it showed -  because I didn't know what else to do. I just knew that I had to work at some point, and law seemed like a lucrative and important avenue for me to venture down. It was like walking down 5th Ave knowing I can't afford anything. I can however admire the windows. I spent three years admiring the concept, never intending to buy into it completely. But there were those times where I gave my all a little too much, and despite getting it done, I didn't get the return I'd hoped for. Those times left me spent and questioning why. I'd do something remarkable and the CEO would barely mention my name, but would revel in my achievement. A colleague, whose sense of self was bigger than mine, would proudly explain my doings as if they were their own, and I, too tired to fight, would convince myself that the only thing that mattered was that it got done. This is not to say that I've just been a victim of my own making. There were some hard fought victories that still drag a smile across my face, but not as much as reading something that I wrote years ago or looking a crisp photo that I took. Lately, I've derived more pleasure from cleaning my closet than completing a policy manual. At least having a clean closet matters to me. My coworkers can run amok and I've just decided that I don't care anymore. As people, most of them are great, and that goes for all of my colleagues past and present. I just don't care about them as coworkers, which is ironic because my current job is all about creating a caring and cohesive team. I gotta laugh at that.

At some point or another, most of us have found ourselves sitting at a dining room table in front of a plate of food that we usually wouldn't touch with a javelin pole. Our host, eagerly looking at us, hoping that we delight in their creation as much as they took pride in creating it. You know deep down inside that this shit is ghetto, toxic even, but you fix your face, adopt a steely resolve, and shovel a mouthful onto your palate. You chew and somehow manage to suppress your sense of smell, all the while slowly dying on the inside. You eat enough to ease the fears of the host and put your fork down without having to explain why. You uphold your end of this social bargain. The reward: you aren't ostracized. The downfall: you'll likely be invited to dinner again.

Every 2 weeks I get a sizable check. Everyday I am expected to show up and keep showing up. This is the arrangement.

I was off for 10 days. I came back to work for 3 got frustrated, and left for another 5. Most of those days, I sat on my couch questioning work and my career. I picked apart my life choices: 

I work because I must support myself and my habit. What's life without a constant stream of things to sedate me? I could get married and be a housewife, but I like control. Being a housewife doesn't give me that, unless I start stashing money in secret accounts or convince him to let me manage the finances. Shit. That's work too. I don't have any wealthy benevolent elderly relatives who will write me into their wills or set up a trust in my name. I'm clever but I have a bullishly strong sense of fairness in my blood. So I cant foresee me coming up with a Theranos equivalent. I'm too practical to invent something like the fidget spinner and dupe people into buying such nonsense. I'd be a poor salesperson for my own product. So around 5pm on Sunday, I told myself "Self... you are going to work tomorrow and you will tell yourself the same lie that you've been telling yourself for years. Tomorrow you will believe it even when you don't. Why? Because we have bills to pay. Adulting to do. You've had 15 days to figure out a solution, and you didn't. So you don't get to whine. You take what you have been given and go get it done."

...This shit is still ghetto though.