Geisha Be Gone

As many of you know, I recently took a trip to Montreal that was intended as a kind of exploration of romantic potential with an ex who has become a valued friend and true supported of The Chunk.

Those with whom I've talked about the trip might recall that I felt almost unethical engaging on this fact-finding mission with someone for whom I thought that I basically already knew the outcome: I was not interested in him in that way. The analogy I used with most people was that if we had been forced into an arranged marriage, then we could have made it work, but that we'd be missing out on having a lot of our needs met if we settled on each other.

There were two factors which led me to go through the romantic motions, though, and I think they're both important to understand (especially because one of them was very subtle and did not occur to me that I was doing it until I was back home in California):

1. Despite the feelings I've had throughout the past two years for R (that you are probably tired of me blogging about, here), I knew that I should not wait for him to come around or agree to something that he may never want (nor, perhaps, should he want). It was important for me to still date and pursue romantic options and not pine away for something that might never materialize. I knew that I'd be a healthier individual AND a better friend to R (even though he already has a truly excellent circle of friends -- another bonus to being wit him!) if I weren't engaged in that kind of waiting exercise. When it became clear to me that L (I find it sort of funny that their initials are L & R and trust me there really are just about as opposite as are left and right!) was looking to explore romantic possibilities with me, I felt, as I do with other options that come up, that I should look into it, even if I thought that the chances were very small that it would be, in the end, something I would really want or could make work.

2. (this is the subtle one that surprised me when I realized I was doing it) I met L at one of the most difficult times in my life, which I've already blogged about, here. Although I actually declined his offer to date (opting, instead, for a rather ridiculous, in retrospect, whirlwind romance with a UN human rights officer), I did, over a period of months, realize that he represented a possibility yet unknown to me: to love and respect A MAN in a totally platonic way that is free from manipulation and full of healing. As happens with most people we sincerely care for, I came to feel very invested, these past few years, in his own personal struggle to locate himself, and part of that involved wanting for him what he wanted -- an intelligent, sincere, ethical (younger) partner. Unfortunately (I say "unfortunately" because I think that it's unfortunate for both of us that there was any misrepresentation of feelings) I, at some point, decided that I wanted so much for him to be with someone that I was willing to offer myself.

Now, let's be clear: I'm not saying that I'm so selfless and wonderful that I was willing to pretend to care about someone I didn't just so he'd be happy. Not at all. Rather, I was willing to try to make myself see in someone a romantic possibility that I didn't think was there because there was already such a strong basis of mutual respect and caring, and because I wanted for him, as someone I valued, to have something that could make him happy (the flaw in my thinking is, of course, that he could never be happy with someone who deep down didn't want to be in that situation, and I wonder if at some level he sensed that).

As some of you heard me say with increasing frequency as the time for the Montreal trip approached: "I love L, but I don't want to be with him. I just can't change that." This is UNRELATED TO (and this is key) my usual followup-statement (UNRELATED, but both statements are true): "I want to be with R."

In one of our SEVERAL journeys to pick up the constantly in-repair car, my mother and I talked about our experiences and habits of playing geisha to men we didn't really love (I should again stress that L was a slightly different case, because I care about him a lot, just not in that way). I still have not been able to totally understand why it is that we slip into these personnas, but I think it's perhaps that we focus on being what someone else wants because we are at some level afraid of articulating, going-for, and then receiving what we want (and need), that fear existing at multiple levels -- fear of being rejected or punished if we express our needs; fear of not being deserving, capable, or ready/responsible enough to receive what we've asked for; fear of asking too much; fear of what must be a startling calmness that comes when things aren't broken in our lives.

It's an important thing to understand, because I realized that it coloured so much of my interaction with men (and I am not like this in my friendships to any comparable degree). From the kind of sexual partner I am to the kind of dinner date I am, I have caught myself so many times constructing myself so as to accommodate, to the best of my ability, the needs of a man -- many times needs that he couldn't even himself articulate or understand, but that I have been able to anticipate and address. If you have ever wondered why someone of rather average physical appearance has had so many people convinced they were in love, or at the very least infatuated, well this is how. The pernicious thing about the whole process is that they only get what they need/want in the short-term (because in the long-term they are either eventually rejected or are smart enough to self-distance when they realize what is going on, that their needs are not being sincerely and sustainably met) AND we don't get what we want either (indeed we scarcely understand what it is that we want).

I should say, also, that I'm not coming to all this now. This is stuff I realized and worked on in Cairo, and even if thoughts preceded corrective action, I have come a LONG way.

Not that everything must always come back to R (I hate feeling like to some readers that undercuts my other observations/statements), but this is also one of the reasons that I have known that my love for him has been so sincere. I don't perform. There's no faking. There's no manipulation. My strategy totally falls to pieces. It's also why I would tell him *and mean it* that I didn't want HIM to try to burden himself with his ANTICIPATED expectations of what I'd want from him, and then force-feed himself our relationship and go through the motions of a partnership, the terms of which he didn't agree to or have any hand in setting. I've been there and done that, and I don't want anyone to do it for me, especially not someone I love and want to be happy.

Returning to L and Montreal, I had so much anxiety about this trip because I was so dreading the performance, and not just in a self-pitying "I don't want to do this because I don't want to" way, but also in an "I don't want to do this, because I'm not sure it's right for HIM" way. It was SUCH a relief (as I told many of you when we got back) when it turned out that L kept a physical distance in Montreal. I'd been trying to get together with him since coming back BOTH for silly errands-running help AND because I wasn't prepared to feel like my last performance was safely behind me until I'd heard from his lips that romance was not his agenda.

Today, after a distressing amount of silence on his part (I do well with honesty, not with silence and ex-post-silence retrospective honesty) he expressed his wish that we be friends, not lovers. I felt bad for him that he was so concerned about letting me down, but as I told him in the email that I sent him, this is a huge relief to me. As I've tried to regulate and limit the geisha tendencies so that I'm in that kind of situation as infrequently as possible, there was the lingering problem of L and the fact that it was one of the most significant remaining interactions like that in my life, with the consequences (especially to him, I worried) being also great.

Well it's been two very productive days. I was with Dr. Juicy for 9 hours yesterday, the majority of which were spent studying Arabic (well she was studying for her OB/GYN exams), and today she nabbed a table for us at the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Center at 9:15AM and we worked there until lunch. I came home, read L's email and replied, and now blogged. Back to Arabic, feeling great about the way things are going (both with Arabic and in my life) and really happy to have made my life that much more REAL lol (you have to admit, I'm totally one of the most real people you know ;p).

VC