Warning: Any comments on this post that I deem offensive, unsupportive, or insensitive will be deleted immediately. If you comment regularly on HS, please do not comment on this post, either here or there. I admit this blog is irrational and I am ruled by my emotions, okay? Now shoo.
Last night TSTM had what I guess you would call an argument. He called me up, stressed about any number of things unrelated to me, and we had a nice talk. Then somehow we got embroiled in his stress about things related to me, and that turned out poorly. (Not, like, catastrophically poorly or anything. We made up by the end of the call, and although I am not feeling 100% good about things - as evidenced by my need to write this post - I think it will get a lot better when I see him tonight.)
The basic issue is, TSTM is a man, and as such has a bit of difficulty with the concept of being an adult, and particularly with the concept of being involved with a woman who does not idolize him and give him everything he wants (generally, from how his stories end, in the hope of later jellyfishing him into giving her everything she wants). It is not that he wants to have sex with every woman in New York, exactly, or that his meeting of me interrupted some great streak of Casanovian conquest. It is certainly not that he doesn’t want to be seeing me or even, apparently, that he wants to see me rarely enough to have time for substantial opportunities to have sex with every woman in New York. It is that he wants to know that he can sleep with every woman in New York.
This is a pretty typical male desire, I think, and I am not upset by it in the abstract. What bothers me is that he seems incapable of finding a stable ground for himself. If he truly wants to be completely free to do whatever and whoever he wants, he should have stopped calling me months ago. Or he should have been out doing other things/people concurrently, or he should still be doing that. But he does not. This is because he desires - much more than I do, I think - the practical and emotional security of a relationship, and also because he is crazy about me. So this is not exactly a new concept, that you can’t have everything, but he struggles desperately to assimilate it. I’m sympathetic to this plight, because choices are hard and he seems to have the feeling that he is on the tightrope of a single correct path and always about to fall off.
What I am not sympathetic to is when he brings up his therapist.
This is partly because I am uneasy with the concept of therapy as it is generally deployed (here I am not talking about people who seek therapy to deal with a traumatic incident or a major problem, but rather people - including many New Yorkers -who seem to think spending $400 per month to sit in a room and talk is an important component of self-care): basically, people with no serious problems pay someone who barely knows them to listen to them obsess about their every trivial issue, and take every word the therapist utters as gospel. Perhaps part of the problem is my general distrust of doctors of all kinds - they don’t seem, in aggregate, to be nearly as bright as people assume. But even so, therapists are not omniscient. They are human beings and have human biases, they misunderstand (or their patients misstate), they have bad days, they make mistakes. And patients misinterpret them, or they hear what they want to hear. Many times I have heard someone say, “My therapist says…” to preface a statement so ridiculous their therapist could not possibly have said it and still be sane, and/or so offensive or immature that they would never utter it without that disclaimer. But instead of objecting to whatever is problematic about the assertion, people are expected to accept it unquestioningly because the therapist’s word is law.
What TSTM’s therapist says about me is that he doesn’t want TSTM to limit himself. On the face of it, I totally agree with that statement. I don’t want TSTM to limit himself either. I want him to accomplish, or at least aim for, anything he wants, and I want him to believe in himself, and I want him to always be seeing and learning and doing new things to whatever extent he desires. This is what I want for everyone I care for. But as it happens that is not what the therapist meant, or not what TSTM thinks he meant; what he meant was that TSTM should not limit the number of women he dates or has sex with.
I find this ludicrous for any number of reasons. First of all, it is not as if TSTM is a virgin, or has only dated two girls, or is twenty-two years old. Second, it strikes me as advice brimming with latent sexism, since I’m pretty sure no therapist would advise a female patient who has just met a promising man that she should ditch him in order to sleep around. Third - where the hell does this therapist get off referring to our entire relationship as TSTM limiting himself?
This is the thing that upsets me most. Last time I checked, life was not about how many people you can sleep with before you die. Even people who have had a fair amount of fairly and/or very casual sex (like, um, me) know this. Even TSTM knows this. Sleeping with, or going out with, or what have you with, a lot of different people is great fun, but it is only great fun. It is not creating meaning or becoming a better person or growing or really doing anything. It is just fucking.
Of course, by engaging in something with potential for seriousness, one generally accepts certain restrictions - limits, if you will - just as one accepts restrictions of other types in order to pursue or accomplish anything meaningful. A man who wants to lose weight accepts restrictions on his diet; a man who wants to run a marathon tomorrow accepts restrictions on his alcohol consumption today; a man who wants to develop a meaningful interaction with one woman accepts restrictions on his interactions with other women. This is not called “limiting oneself”; it is called “growing”. If anything, I think - from my vantage point of having no degree in anything therapeutic but in being a person who thinks about things rather a lot - that resolving to engage in as much casualness as possible and refusing to allow anything to develop beyond that is much more limiting.
Of course, it is inadvisable to accept restrictions lightly, or to accept them for inadequate return. I am not saying all men should immediately stop their screwing around and get married to the nearest available women. I am just saying, if in the course of his screwing around a guy meets a woman he finds himself drawn to and wanting to see again and again, I don’t see what’s so “limiting” about acknowledging that.
I’m also offended on a personal level. I like TSTM, and I am glad I met him, and knowing him makes my life better. About 95% of everything he says and does indicates he feels this way as well. While I am aware that I have lost some of my freewheelingness since meeting him - I no longer to to bars and dance with, or flirt with, or have drinks bought for me by strange boys, for example; also, I no longer have the guarantee of not having to spend my Tuesday night dealing with someone else’s issues - and while that freewheelingness was fun, I consider this an acceptable loss. In return I have gained a companion on some of my adventures, a thoughtful and supportive confidant, and an intelligent sounding board with a perspective unique from but still understandable by my own, among other things. I do not feel that dating TSTM limits my New York experience, on the whole; I think it encourages a tradeoff of things I don’t really care about (going to bars with my roommate) for things I do (going to new plays in tiny theaters) and introduces other things I would never have thought of doing or would not have had the courage or wherewithal to do on my own. I do not think TSTM really feels that I limit him, either, and I think to some extent he is aware that the idea of infinite freedom in the absence of all real engagement in one’s life is illusory and nihilistic, but it is upsetting to me that he brought up the idea.
