This part will, with any luck, be the section that the previous one was meant to be. I’ll confess, I chickened out – Dani said that I never write anything personal in my “journal,” and loathe as I am to admit it, she may be right. This entry will be, then, my attempt to come to terms with that and with any luck overcome it – although I’m certain that a good dose of clinical diction will dilute any hint of romance.
I mentioned in the prior entry that my relationships tend to burn out rather quickly, and speculated that this was perhaps not because they were lacking something that I was looking for, but instead because the enjoyment, for me, ensued from the looking for in and of itself; once things become predictable, I tend to (despite my best intentions) check out. Whether this is an entirely unique phenomenon is unclear – while I’m certain there are people who claim to desire stability in a relationship, there are also those who claim that neither money nor looks are important; perhaps what we want and what we think we want don’t always overlap. This happens with somewhat frightening regularity to me; fairly early on in relationships, I tend to experience a particular moment in which I recognize the “fatal flaw”, and some sort of biological switch is flipped which signals what will ultimately result in the parting of ways.
Now, for the mushy. The young, weak at heart, or bitter should probably close their browsers. I’m somewhat taken by a particular young woman right now, who for reasons still somewhat unknown to me has yet to reveal her tragic flaw. I like to think that I do a little better in finding a match every time (I suppose one can’t really use the phrase ‘trading up’ without risking a significant amount of wrath), but even I’m a little bit surprised at this. Best guess: I tend to be a little bit of a personality leech, meaning that I seek out people in life who are better than me at skills I want to have. Normally, this results in the aforementioned overtaking – however, the people who tend to persist in my life are those who generate new information or abilities at a rate equal to or faster than I can catch up to them. These people I like to keep around, because they’re easy to learn from – and quite frankly, because I tend to find most other people become quite boring.
Maybe that’s why I like Dani – she produces new content more quickly than I can dig through the old stuff. I admit that there’s an extremely narcissistic element to the sort of ’searching’ that I do – it’s not the search for a particular quality that I find enjoying, but the ability to search at all. In short, the quality desired exists not in the other person, but in myself. However, this is precisely what makes Dani attractive to me (and perhaps non-tragic, because I suspect that the tragic element is generally one that leads to predictability): I’m never quite certain where she’s going to go next, at least in the metaphorical sense (the real life one is almost always towards candy.) This makes her challenging, and quite possibly a peer. In addition, a tiny part of me, which rarely gets to see the light of day, appreciates the possibility that the sort of challenges she presents me with allow me to wrangle with my own demons a little bit, and for the briefest moments clutch somewhere deep down inside at the possiblity, however minute, that there might be some sort of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness out there to aspire to.
So there. I’m in love with Dani because sometimes she’s better than me at things and I can’t ever figure out what the fuck she’s going to do next, or what she’s thinking. Also, great lay.
