My Life in (Dating) Hell, Part 2
by Tony G. Rocco
The Main Event: Dating
When we’ve made a choice (and been chosen) through whatever matchmaking methodology we’ve employed, we are ready to venture out on the extended test drive called Dating. This is when we take a long look at the merchandise, evaluate the handling, the responsiveness to our needs, the reliability, and, of course, the ease of maintenance. Is this model the right one for my active lifestyle? Will it enhance my image in the eyes of others? Is it suitable for everyday use or just weekend drives in the country? All these concerns and more are vetted during the Dating process.
Sometimes the Dating process ends very quickly. Our evaluative radar is on high alert. Is there “chemistry?” Are there any obvious flaws or faults, deal breakers or intolerable annoyances? Signs of ideological or religious incompatibility? Our antennae quiver alertly, our fingers hover over the relationship ejection button.
Many people have a hair-trigger inclination to dismiss a date out of hand with nothing more than a vague hunch or intuition as the basis for judgment. After all, who wants to get involved in the messy activity of building a relationship when you don’t like some… je ne sais qua?
If neither of you disqualify the other on the first encounter or two, you embark on the extended process of formal Dating. You are so damn lucky.
When two parties come together for the purpose of Dating, each side approaches with an expectation of the romantic happiness to which they feel they are entitled. Thus, a modern-day romantic relationship is essentially an exercise in entitlement: you must satisfy my needs or I will shop around for someone who will. “I want my needs met” is the war cry of relationship shoppers everywhere.
A Failure to Negotiate
I trace my own failures in the relationship marketplace to various instances when I would not or could not meet the needs of the other partner. Maybe I should have hired a relationship “attorney,” otherwise known as a Marriage and Family Counselor, to help with negotiations. Their function is to help broker a deal between feuding partners struggling to get their needs met. In the modern-day relationship world, they do a bristling business.
For your consideration, I offer a slice of my own relationship life, an egregious failure to fulfill someone’s needs. As fate would have it, I met a cute red-head at a speed-dating event and we seemed to click, so we started Dating.
Some background first: this woman had been involved in a long relationship with a partner who did not like having sex, and she had been traumatized by the experience of being sexually neglected. So she made up her mind that the next time around she was going to get all the sex she could and she was going to get it her way. It was a non-negotiable need that constituted a deal-breaker should it not be adequately met.
To be clear, I had my own non-negotiable needs that I wanted met, which primarily had to do with getting some emotional intimacy. Sex was fine, of course, but I wanted my emotional needs satisfied more than anything. Yes, your dear author is not above the give-to-get logic that so organizes the world of romantic relationships.
For this woman, being in a relationship in which she was not getting sex the way she wanted as much as she wanted whenever she wanted felt like being right back in that old, painful relationship. So she refused to sleep with me if we weren’t going to have sex, meaning that we couldn’t sleep together most nights because she had to get up too early for work to spend the night screwing. Message: if I can’t get what I want (sex), then you can’t have what you want (emotional intimacy). Give-to-get logic is brutally simple.
And those times we did have sex, she was not satisfied with how I did it. She once screamed at me on a public street in the rain about my “inability” to satisfy her sexually, and accused me of being disinterested in women. Not getting one’s needs met can bring out the worst in people.
She finally determined that she was not going to get the non-stop sex she wanted the way she wanted it as much as she wanted it, and she went into dreaded “let’s be friends” mode. After all her self-centered and insulting behavior, I was hardly interested in having a friendship. Deal broken, relationship over.
A Radical Redefinition of Relationship
The relationship-as-commodity model, based on the same logic on which we conduct our economic lives, is a failure in the world of love and romance. Even when both parties agree that the other adequately satisfies their needs, the relationship is nothing more than a dehumanizing transaction, an alienated arrangement that can be revoked, terminated, and abandoned at the whim of either party. The give-to-get equation, with it’s cold calculus and focus on selfgratification, is antithetical to a humane relationship, let alone one that produces romantic bliss.
The only way out of the state in which we find ourselves relationally speaking is to radically redefine what it means to engage in the activity of relationship. A relationship is not a transaction in which emotional goods are exchanged, as the relationship attorneys would have us believe. Rather, it is something built by the parties involved, an object of love that gets created, not exchanged.
I am not giving to satisfy your needs, and you are not giving to satisfy mine, but we are both giving to the relationship, which transcends yet includes both of us. Rather than giving in order to get, and obsessing over our needs, we both give in order to give, and marvel at the wonderful object of our creation, our Relationship.
Perhaps, in the forgotten words of John Lennon, I am a dreamer, but I hope I’m not the only one. I have no self-help plan, no glib Dr. Phil advice on how to achieve sure-fire relationship success. I am not even saying it would be easy. Giving for the sake of giving, for the sake of creating something with another person rather than getting something for oneself, is not an effort that lends itself to simple, paint-by-number steps. It requires a qualitatively different kind of activity, the kind of activity a mother engages in with her child, an artist with his work, a priest with his flock. There is almost a spiritual quality to it.
Can we imagine a way of dating that isn’t organized like a serial job interview? Where objectification and evaluation are not the main activities? Where we could do other things, like create a relationship not based on idealized expectations but on the reality of who two people actually are? Perhaps, like imagining a world without divisive politics or religion, it seems hopelessly idealistic and naive.
If we could imagine it, we might also imagine having more than a single, eggs-one-basket relationship that must bear up under the stress and struggle of two people trying to get all their emotional needs met. Perhaps we wouldn’t have to idealize and, some say, fetishize the couple. One can only imagine what that might free us to create with each other.
But a new way of relating is not easily conceived of or acted upon in this age of self-gratification. With the next relationship commodity just around the corner, why bother trying? I just want to get my needs met.
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