An acquaintance, having read the profile I managed to endure having up on Match for two weeks, made interesting comment. Well, interesting to me, at any rate, as pretty much anything regarding me is a source of endless (self-) entertainment. Which is good, inasmuch as that at least makes one of us.
What he said was that, while on the surface my profile appears to be very intimidating in terms of what I would be seeking in a partner, it is in fact, or so he reckoned (correctly, as it turned out, but then he is smart and that is invaluable when it comes to reckoning, dead or otherwise) not at all. This is because, unlike in the overwhelming majority of cases, I offer no list of what he has to be. Or like, or be like. And there isn't one, isn't any such list, anywhere in my head.
Consequently, many of the things that came closest to being stipulations were mediated by friendly and sort-of relativist terms: he doesn't have to believe in God, for example, but would ideally 'believe in Good'; he should 'more or less accept some sort of ontological basis' with regard to my referencing the mundane, the sordid, and the divine as categories. So not hardcore at all; in fact, pretty nimbly leaving the door open for discussion on whatever, even the huge things -- provided he knows what the bloody heck I'm even talking about.
That, of course, remains a bit of a sticking point, and one which I've argued with myself over for years. Intellectually, of course, I would think it fatuous to hope someone, friend or lover or sister-in-law, has the same reading resume, for example, that I do. Certainly my reading has been as much a part of my life, or my development, as my varied experiences -- but I wouldn't expect or consciously hope that someone would have had the same Life History that I have, so why do so with books, or thinky pursuits?
But I do imagine there is a bottom level either of fluency or of competence with the ideas and values I might be expressing, or the way in which I intend a certain word, or come to a position, or approach an idea or situation. And I'm not sure, though, whether that relates to actual intellectual experience or innate intelligence (the 'fluency' versus the 'competence'). Moreover, there is certainly the part of me that wishes on the one hand never, ever to fall in love with someone I'm going to have to have arguments with over Homi Bhabha or Agamben! Really really really. That part of me that distrusts and at some level despises all language and particularly despises any language that talks about language. The part of me that can love, rather than 'love.'
So, wow, it would be fantastic to find someone who did believe that some things transcended language, defied articulation -- and who was passionate enough to be able to seek those sort of experiences openly, genuinely. Unpostmodernly!
But, anyway, yes I do not say, must like Telemark skiing and growing Siberian ginseng; must be at least this high and weigh no more this; must eat, or not eat, meat; must like Western Swing and Shostakovich. So mine, for all its bloated words and grandiloquent turbidity, makes, in a sense, far fewer demands on the potential suitor than all those who ask that you agree on income, occupation, children, pets, occupation, hobbies, politics, and 'turn-on' and 'turn-offs' before you make a move one way or the other. Of course, not that I worked this out or laboured over the diction, but I'm sure somewhere in my pointy head there was the notion and the desire that the content and the writing and the vocabulary would nauseate and repel the least suitable.
Still, it is not as though I don't have desires or limits. We all do. In my case though, I have this possibly wrong-headed but nonetheless inextinguishable belief, or at least sense, that what matters is ultimately evinced. This, I have discovered (and so have others, and I'm sorry, genuinely) is one more thing that makes me a ghastly date. I don't ask questions. I'm also pretty sure I give weird answers when people ask me normal ones. The latter relates to so much being contingent or context-driven for me. As a very trivial example, I really do hate pickles, at some level. Nonetheless, I have a jar of Zesty Dills, I believe they are, in the front of my refrigerator, and I have on occasion cut up two of them and eaten them for dinner. But if someone were, for his own idiosyncratic reasons, to wish to know on a first date where I stood on the matter of pickles, I would not know how to answer. I would probably say I hate them, because that is an answer, and because it came to my head, but it's not true in the way I can say I like taking long drives alone listening to weird reportings about Central Asia. Certainly if he asked something of greater substance I could well be far more nonplussed and nearly preverbal in my stumbling attempts to come up with something resembling an expectable answer...
Partly it is because, when it comes to the big things, especially anything having to do with a big-R Relationship, nothing is really true at that point, and you as my interlocutor have no context for understanding anything I might say about me, if it were the case that I could come up with something. As there is no relationship, it serves little for me to do what amounts to conjecture about what I might or might not be like in a relationship. Admittedly, too, as I look at it, I think some of that reticence derives from an inground and inescapable sense of the seemly, even when I can remember 'what I am like' or 'what I like.'
But it's also truly that what I like depends on who you are. If I don't need a 6'2"-6'4" linedancing Presbyterian wildlife-biologist father of no more than two, then what I will enjoy with you depends on who you come to this as, and what sort of connection we develop together. If you really want me to come crew with you at the stockcar races, and I love you, then manifestly I am going to come to love the stockcar races, and your car, and your hot new exhaust system, and your pit crew. I may well come to love the pickles the Snak-Shak passes out with their hot dogs!
Frankly, it's also just fair. I am no longer twenty, and have tastes and opinions and my own little life, and I would hope that no one would demand that I stop engaging in all the silly little things that give me pleasure. If I hold out the hope that you will accept that I have a weakness for bad Arab dance music at times, and that every other month my house has a completely different color scheme, then who am I to ask you to renounce fly fishing or your veneration of a comic I consider insipid and exhausting?
And so instead of asking I wait. So, too, I think that what it occurs to you to tell me is arguably more revelatory than those things you share merely because you were prodded, those things that were not in your head, even if they really are a part of your life. I am given more things - more information, more insight - in the former case than the latter, by a lot. There is an interesting why there that doesn't exist in the second case, in which the only 'why' is because I asked you to tell me. Which is very boring compared to reflecting on what it might mean that you described your employees but not your firm, or your favorite poets but not novelists, or how you felt in Denali but not in Dalian.
In other words, I can make you tell me about mean, mean Sr. Catherine making you stand in the hall yet again for passing notes in class, or whether you preferred to be the bank robber or the policeman -- but what do you want to say? I'm not going to get a full picture anyway, I am not going to get to your core at this point, so what is the self you wish to give me, here where we are now? Yes, it could all be lies, but it could also be untrue that you went to Catholic school!
Upon reflection, I have decided that this approach, the receptive rather than active or inquisitive one, makes normal people think I am cold, uninterested, and in all likelihood a supercilious she-devil. Commingled with my insurmountable inability to give the vaguest idea of how I am when I'm in love (which is, in all frankness, the opposite of how I am when I am with someone I don't know -- but who would know that??), it makes for a very unappealing proposition for my unsuspecting date. And in sense, a very, very strong sense, if you like (not that I think it's possible, but let's hypothesize, shall you?) how I am on the date (the distance, the ostensible apathy, the cool, the lack of anything resembling the guts of me in evidence anywhere), then you will not like the me that would emerge in a Relationship. If you, by contrast, find the Date me ineffably off-putting, then my bad luck indeed, as you might be just the sort the Relationship me would get on with brilliantly.
Too bad you and she will never meet.
