A week ago -- was it only a week ago? -- I went out with Suzie for a couple of hours. There was an art event in town, where studios and commercial art venues throw their doors open after work, serve wine and snacks, and encourage people to stop in and look. Maybe it encourages people to buy, but it also makes us aware just how much art there is locally. This event comes around periodically, and I try to walk through whenever I can.
A week and a half before, Suzie had texted me out of the blue. The last time I had heard from her had been a month before (when I had texted her); the last time before that was another month (back in April) when she had texted me. Pretty much she has dropped off the edge of my horizon. But here she was texting me and saying “We should hang some time.”
For a moment I wondered whether I should even bother answering. But I want to put myself in a space where I welcome new friendships, so I figured yeah, I’d better. Otherwise the Universe is going to think I don’t mean it when I say I want more friends.
On the other hand, I’ve learned not to give Suzie too many options … in fact, not to take the lead in planning anything at all. She stops answering. It’s as if too much information overwhelms her. So I asked when she’s free. And slowly, over the next week, we settled on meeting after my work for this art event.
It wasn’t a great example of hanging out together. I drove by where she was supposed to be, but couldn’t park for the traffic; she, on the other hand, wasn’t out by the corner but sitting in a Starbucks – very visibly in the picture window – intently involved with her phone and not looking for my car. She spent a lot of time complaining about her job; and while admittedly it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, it fills Saturdays and Sundays only and it gives her free housing and food in exchange. Somebody else might use this as an opportunity to get a second job Monday through Friday which would be pure profit (or pure savings); Suzie uses it as a chance to swim, join an acting group, take drawing classes, and complain about how she is misused. And she talked about her plans to get out of her current living and working situation: since she doesn’t want to move back in with her ex-boyfriend, she’s going to take out loans in order to pay for a new apartment while she starts yet another pre-professional program in school (at least her third, by my count). When we’d exhausted the art studios within walking distance. I said I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I drove her home. Under other circumstances I might have suggested going out to eat, but I didn’t really feel like buying the two of us another $50 meal (like the last time we went out together). She suggested the movies, but I managed not to be interested in any of the movies that were showing just then so I deposited her at her residence with a perfuctory hug and a vague statement about next time.
Why am I telling this story? Partly because – like Mount Everest – it’s there. This is something that happened to me recently, and to some limited extent I use this blog as a diary these days. But also partly I think there is something here to understand. I don’t mean trying to understand whether Suzie is impractical, self-centered, and short-sighted: I assume that the plan to take out loans to pay her rent settles that point conclusively. (I believe, in fact, that we are talking about educational loans – the kind that can’t be discharged even in bankruptcy. At any rate, I asked how she planned to repay these loans and she answered vaguely that she’d heard they could be forgiven if you joined the Peace Corps. In other words, she has no such plans.)
No, the thing I want to understand is: how could I ever have been interested in her friendship in the first place? I can think of a couple of factors that might have been relevant.
- She’s a girl. Ever since … oh, about my sophomore year in college, I have found it easier to make friends with girls than boys (women than men). Also, I’m not romantically involved with anybody right now, so there was a certain undercurrent of sexual fantasy at work. Not a lot, I think – Suzie’s not very pretty, and at a rational level I don’t really want anybody right now. But my chromosomal patterning may not have gotten that message, and Suzie has the right chromosomes.
- She’s pagan. This had a huge drawing power: it was the first thing about her that interested me. At a verbal level, I don’t suppose that I “believe” neopagan doctrines any more than I “believe” any other kind; but I remember finding some of the rituals very moving. Also it is kind of fun running across another member of the (extended) pagan community, in sort of a masonic way ….
- I enjoyed trying to sympathize with all the dysfunctional things going on in her emotional life, and trying to sound wise when I gave her advice or conjured up similar stories of my own.
- More generally, I enjoyed showing off: that I can cook; that I can drive; that I can afford to pay $50 for dinner and not worry about it; that I know how to give a back rub. I have so many skills or attributes now that I never had at her age, and I enjoy showing off that I acquired them. This desire to show off even fed the fantasies: back when I was her age, I had no idea how to make love well.
Maybe there’s more, but I think those are the big reasons. And I hope it will help to put them down in words like this – to understand that these things are triggers for me, but that they do not guarantee that the person out there who activates these triggers is also someone I can respect … nor even someone who can command my bare interest for more than a few hours in total.
Even wanting more friends, I want more than Suzie.
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