To understand how solid dating advice could offend me I guess you'd have to know more about myself, my self-image, and my worldview. Which is a lot to tell but I'll try for the nutshell version.
Basically I'm full of rage. That's not as scary as it sounds - I don't take it out on people, so feel free to laugh at how that sounded for an opener.
I started out as a precocious kid with some social deficits. This is the 1970's so AS wasn't on the radar. I was typical HFA aspie - high test scores, wildly variable grades (A's if I liked the subject, C-F otherwise), destroying everyone at Boggle and Scrabble but making few friends. Fast forward through highschool and two failed college stints: loner/geek, super shy around girls, blowing off my non-elective courses to light off homemade fireworks on the train tracks. Friends and family puzzled at the gap between my intellectual and artistic promise and the subsequent lack of achievement (by their definition). Feeling like a misfit, not knowing why, never lacking confidence at my specialties (art, music, chess & other games, chemistry). My high self-esteem - some would argue superiority complex - kept clashing with my complete failure to attract women. Due to what I now understand to be aspie sensitivities, I loathed soap and deodorant from an early age and boycotted them as soon as it was up to me. (I'm not a slob - I love taking 30-40 minute hot showers - but we all know what society thinks of omitting the bathroom products.) I used to argue with people about how deodorant was a sham, that cavemen didn't need it, that it was an artificial 'need' created by corporations who first sell you a problem, then sell you the solution along with the fear of being ostracized for not using their useless product. Obviously I got nowhere with anybody on this topic, even people who essentially admitted to me that they were brainwashed but bought the sham products anyway just to 'fit in'. I dismissed them with contempt and continued down my lonely road. When I heard some American tourists panning Europeans for their questionable hygeine, I schemed on moving to France but it never came off.
As the years and decades passed, filled with loneliness, some awkward rejections, and a whole lot of failing to even break the ice with women (over the fear of yet more awkward rejections), the schism between my high self-esteem and my failure to make headway in an area very important to me widened to an untenable degree. I saw with a cynical eye how the social system was rigged by and for alpha males. I watched desirable women ignore me in favor of these males, then complain about men. I knew I had a lot to offer a mate, but refused to participate in the phony salesmanship process, all the while expecting to meet someone 'real' who would like me for me, as I was, from minute one. (No deodorant? Guess which minute I kept losing the game in!)
The self-image schizophrenia continued. I jumped from one side of the gulf to the other. I tried viewing the phony sales tactics as mere pragmatism, and I can be extremely pragmatic. I would undertake a hunt for a deodorant that didn't bother me so much, spruce up my wardrobe (slightly), practice pickup lines. Two weeks later Mr. Hyde was throwing toiletries out the window and screaming indictments of the human race. I'd gloom and doom for months, surly, convinced that the dumb b*****s were getting what they deserved by spurning my potential. But they weren't dumb b*****s, they were women I found attractive and wanted to get to know better. So periodically I'd try again. Nothing.
Even into my thirties, I never really let go of the utopia I imagined, a world in which I didn't need to slather noxious chemicals in my armpits every day ; a world where real honesty was a valuable commodity, and men who tried to use women were easy to spot and put in their place; a world where the system was not so mercenary, set up to benefit those already on top. I knew with crystal clarity how unrealistic this fantasy was, and understood well that I could not change the world, only myself. But I loved myself for who I was, and I still do. I take pride in my talents and aspie differences.
But I still wanted to know what sex was like, how it would feel to have a girlfriend. So at age 38 I tried another go at the sales BS. More toiletries reluctantly purchased, more wardrobe updates, and a foray into internet dating. It worked. I met an attractive woman, got laid, dated her for 9 months, broke up, we're still friends.
I succeeded because I caved. I now line Colgate-Palmolive's pockets with my hard-won dollars. My pickup lines are slicker because I launch them in cyberspace with premeditation. I know now how to lie by omission, what not to tell somebody I just met. I own a few outfits I can be seen at a club wearing. But I still hate it all. I still hate Big Brother, I'm just faking it. I am not a better person for it - I just had to have a piece so bad that I abased myself to get it. A sacrifice of principles and some dough, and really a worthwhile one because now I know what it's like on the other side of that wall of virginity. It beats sulking in Toadville. But it cost me, and if I want to do it again it will cost me again. I've been single, celibate and not even trying since I parted with my ex last June, I have to gather the energy before I can go through that BS again. I'll do it eventually, but I'll still resent every minute.
02 Mar 2010, 12:21 pm
