I dated a baby.
I’m not running a line for a tabloid or packing for prison or campaigning a weird new shirt slogan. My blind date turned out to be twenty-one.
I did have a forewarning, and didn’t think it would be too big a deal...until I met him. Little Boy Blue isn’t immature or annoying, which initially came as a profound relief. Now I wish he possessed those faults in spades, because things are not going to work and for one of the first times, I’m the one that has to broach the subject.
He’s nice. Very, very nice. Very, very sweet. And so incredibly vulnerable it gives me a stomachache. I cringe from it because I remember it. It’s as though, in the early twenties, a person is a slug, creeping along in its unguarded softness, easily harmed by anything. Pass into the midtwenties, and the slug finds it’s grown, or climbed into, a shell. Not a shell in the negative, reclusive, suspicious sense, but a shell that encases the personality, gives it a little protection, and allows the snail to be discerning about the things that touch it.
I heard, the other weekend, about a friend-of-a-friend who was wishing to be more vulnerable with everyone. It's an unrealistic sentiment (although I’m guessing this friend-of-a-friend still qualifies as an early twenties). Adults can’t be vulnerable to everyone; humanity is full of treachery and ambition and hidden agendas, and one of the beauties of growing up is the freedom to choose the people you trust.
Little Boy Blue hasn’t gotten there yet. From what I’ve seen, in talking to him, and then during our date last weekend, he still doesn’t know that you can’t trust people just because you want to. And although there’s nothing wrong with that, witnessing a person start the School of Hard Knocks fosters far more of my maternal instincts than my girlfriend ones.
Then there are the naked, blind, furry questions the young twentysomething asks, outright, on the first date. What do you expect from a relationship? What’s your pet peeve? What do you prefer in a guy? These are questions you learn not to ask. It’s infuriating to try to puzzle out a person’s confusing behavior, but you still know better than to ask. Besides, this person you’re talking to is a stranger. You have to get to know someone, at least a little, before you begin to approach relationship expectations. And even when you do, it's not with the intention of fitting yourself to those expectations; it's to see if the expectations can mesh. I had the feeling that if I'd answered, "I prefer a guy who wears mullets and muscle shirts and never showers," he'd have skipped a bath the next day, gone shopping and started growing out the back of his hair.
His questions kept startling me -- and not startled like "Hey look! A butterfly just landed on my nose," but startled like you accidentally caught a glimpse of a person's weeping bedsore through a hole in their shirt. I hadn’t thought about these questions in, and I cringed as I thought the word, years. I kept answering, "Umm. Hm. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it in a long time." And then I’d try to make up something that didn’t sound too blunt. The honest answer would have been, you can’t have expectations. Not beyond the basic ones of mutual respect, affection, loyalty, physical attraction, companionship. Everything else depends on the individual, and people are so different that you have to tailor your expectations depending on whom you’re dating. Plus as you get older, not only do your expectations shift, but the lesser ones kind of evaporate, and you get, at the same time, more easygoing and yet pickier. Sometimes fulfillment or nonfulfillment of expectations can come clear pretty quickly, but usually it takes a little time, and you certainly can't tell on the first date. The first date always goes well. It’s too early to be talking about this.
I didn’t say any of that. I pulled something vague out from my memory stock of intense dorm room conversations while I watched traffic stream past the putt-putt course.
Worst, though, about the vulnerability, is the quickness of attachment. He kept telling me how comfortable he was talking to me, as if that were some kind of miracle, which, when you’re twenty-one, it is; I answered, gently and truthfully, "A lot of people are comfortable around me." And kept realizing that the age difference matters hugely. I may be delighted to be comfortable talking to someone I've just met, but through my own little mini Summer School of Hard Knocks I've learned that it's not usually a sign. It just is. LBB, however, seemed to be doing calculations in his head (the emotional equivalent of 1 +1 = 11) and kept alluding to how he wants to get married someday.
Then I came down with a lovely case of tonsillitis the day after we went out, and Tuesday he stopped by with chicken soup and a dozen roses. I gave the socially expected response, but inside I was thinking, O my God. I’ve gone out with him once. He thinks I'm his soulmate. This kid is freaking me out.
So I have to send Little Boy Blue on his way. He’s nice, but he’s too young. And he’s getting serious ideas FAR too quickly. We have nothing at all in common, but that wouldn’t matter to him (again the age difference), and I have to stop this before he starts getting really long term ideas before a second date.
We’re supposed to go out to dinner tonight. He’s stopping by to pick me up. I really don’t want to sit through a meal with him, though; I keep getting more uncomfortable the more I think about it. I mean, the poor kid. I’m not interested in dating him at all, and I’d rather get it over with now and avoid an awkward car ride home.
I’m contemplating breaking it to him in the driveway. Well, I’ll invite him to sit on the porch. I don’t like the idea of him spending money he doesn’t have on a meal where a girl tells him she doesn’t like him. (I’d pay my own way, if I went, but he doesn’t have the money to spend even on himself, and I can't afford it either.) Now I just have to figure out what to say.
The roses actually hurt me. I put them in water and hid them in the study. Then I called John and left him a voicemail that concluded with, "I’m never dating again."
It’s not true, of course. But I won’t be dating any infants in the near future. And, truth be told, at the moment I’m quite happy to spend my evenings sitting in the living room rewatching episodes of Dark Angel and playing my favorite solitaire game, Idiot’s Delight.
7 comments:
Oh Sarah... this post inspires both laughter and sympathy from me. Poor Little Boy Blue; he has no idea what he's in for tonight? Chicken soup and a dozen roses after 1 date? Wow.
I agree with your statement that, with age, we get "more easygoing and yet pickier." Little things that I had on "my list" at 20 or so are now unimportant to me, but there are some bigger deal-breakers on the list now that I realize I cannot compromise on.
I've found that the one thing that feels worse than being rejected by someone you like is doing the rejecting yourself. It's an awkward and guilt-ridden experience for me, and I'm glad I don't have it often.
As far as breaking up with a one-time date goes, that was exceedingly painless.
It took two and a half minutes. Something in his parents' house broke, so LBB had left a voicemail taking a rain check on dinner; I sighed with relief (I hate to embarrass the poor guy in person) and called him back.
He took it pretty well (at least on the phone): I told him I didn't think it was going to work, that I have a lot going on right now, and the age gap was a little bigger than I'd thought. I told him I'd had a really good time the previous Saturday, and that I wanted to be up front with him, and not waste any more of his money. He said, mildly, "Okay," several times. I wished him well, and that was it.
I've been breathing easier ever since. I don't know what exactly it was, but the whole thing made me extremely uncomfortable.
Well, dating them is better than shaking them, I suppose.
Both, however, can be damaging to the baby.
Your snail/shell analogy is painful in its accuracy and familiarity. It seems that, as the first tentative steps are taken into the world of mature adult dating (I am aware that this is a borderline oxymoron), we almost universally attempt to apply some sort of algorithm to the process of getting to know someone and it’s not until we are comfortable with who we are that we’re content to taking a more organic approach toward forming a relationship.
I hope, though, that in my more awkward years my technique was never quite as jarring as flashing weeping bedsores would be. Quite the effective illustration, that, especially coming from a poet.
I applaud your decision to treat him with immediate honesty, though. He’s got to learn the same lessons that we all have, and it seems he would have been hard pressed to find a more compassionate teacher.
Well done.
Phil
Thank you. I wasn't sure what to tell him that wouldn't sound horrible, and I'm glad to hear from a guy's perspective that I didn't phrase it damagingly. Not that it eliminated the pain for him, of course; but I wanted to be gentle. He's a nice kid.
Probably what bothered me most about the poor guy was the rawness of his emotional state, and the disturbing sense that he had this quiet conviction -- not hope, or guess, but conviction -- that he and I were destined to be together for a long while.
Although I haven't asked twenty-one-year-old relationship questions since I was that age, in other ways I grew my shell later than most. It's only been in the past couple of years that I've started to realize the purpose of dating, and to loose my hold on dreamy Anne-of-Green-Gables romanticisms in favor of the forced practicality we need to humor in today's anarchic dating society.
LBB taught me, without intending to, a.) that I HAVE grown a shell, which came as something of a relief, and b.) that coming across as too serious on the first date or so, with no established commonalities and very little communication, is simply unattractive. This was a bit of an eye-opener for me, I must confess; I've usually been on the receiving end of the "you seem to be getting too serious" conversation (though I didn't bring that one up to LBB; I wasn't out to humiliate him) -- whether or not it was true -- and found this experience uncomfortable but enlightening.
So I certainly apply the slug/shell/snail analogy to myself, and most people seem to have been fortunate enough to grow theirs sooner than I did.
The weeping bedsores metaphor was perhaps a little harsher than I really intended, although for shock value the strength of the image carries the message I wanted. A good deal of my recoil from the underlying attitude behind LBB's questions was its familiarity -- his weeping bedsores reflected a little too strongly the shiny flat scars from my own.
Not that vulnerability itself is a weeping bedsore -- nobody has a painless past, and nobody is built from steel -- but I think the time to reveal it has to come later. LBB showed me that a little nonchalance goes a long way; diving headfirst into something with a virtual stranger only looks desperate and a bit creepy, and I'm glad to have seen it from the other side of the equation.
There's a sadness in the discovery, though. People attach so quickly at twenty-one because they're supposed to. Psychologically, human beings aren't meant to be alone as long as we are in the twenty-first century. The quick bonding of youth is meant to strengthen a relationship as it progresses, and perhaps provide something to look back on in the more difficult times. There's a reason Proverbs so often refers to "the wife of your youth."
What LBB needs is another young creature for whom a fast attachment is equally comfortable; or, he'll have to do like the rest of us upper-twenties singles and take a few knocks and develop the resulting protective calluses.
Of course there are benefits to falling in love at a later age -- as you said, adults begin to develop a self-confidence, a self-possession, a comfort with one's own personhood, that aid in understanding the differences between oneself and other people, and in fostering a better "live and let live" mentality that younger couples come by with a little more difficulty. There's also the different kind of joy that you only find with more "mature" love -- the joy of relief, the joy of stumbling upon a populated oasis in a dry and isolated wilderness. So I'm happy about my own position. There's no point in mourning something I can't have. Besides, faith and sound theology dictate that God has my best interest in mind, a bigger plan than I can comprehend, and a compassionate attention to my direction. There's something huge to be said for being settled in oneself; it makes you free.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I think “gentleness,” at least in situations such as this, has a tendency to be over-emphasized. At twenty-one, he’s undeniably young, but he’s no child (or at least he should be taking steps to transcend childhood at this point). As he becomes a man, it’s important that he begins to understand that in life, no matter the course it takes, will assail him with many unpleasant and difficult truths and, as he begins to venture out from under his parents’ sheltering wing, that these truths will begin to hit him untempered and unbuffered. Society isn’t doing him any favors by protecting him like a Fabergé egg. Sugar-coatings and condescending patronization, even when administered with the most tender of intent, will only serve to stunt the development of his “shell,” as you have so aptly illustrated.
It’s important that he be dealt with honestly, and by this I mean an honesty that is stark, without being brutal or malicious (both of which lend unnecessary insult to injury and can only lead to bitterness). He’s not fragile, and the hurt will heal. He doesn’t need to be protected any more. I admire him for his decision to pursue with intent, but with the rejection of passivity comes the acceptance of risk. This, I think, is a lesson that, when learned, will stand him in greater stead than almost any other.
That being said, I think you handled the situation as well as anyone would have. By emphasizing honesty over gentleness, you’ve appealed to his burgeoning maturity and allowed him to retain his dignity without causing him to feel “mothered.” What’s more, you’ll be able to meet his eyes in public without shame or guilt welling up in either party.
Again, well done.
I take your point completely. Having undergone the same sometimes brutal experiences, I know their value in ossifying the shell and in forging adulthood's necessary maturity.
More than anything else, I prize genuineness, which translates, in communication, as honesty. I've HATED the shallow platitudes people mouth while ending relationships with the desire to "spare" the person who's being hurt, when hurt is inevitable. Why not do the other party the favor -- and give him/her the dignity, as you said -- of forthrightness? "It's not you, it's me," "I just feel we're too different," "I don't want to jeopardize our friendship," "Now isn't the right time," "I have too much going on in my life," "Let's take it slower [i.e. I'm going to disappear on you]," etc., reek of avoidance, and the other party knows it.
That being said, unless I'm extremely angry I try to speak the truth diplomatically. When I mention gentleness, I mention it as a "fruit of the Spirit" -- not a wishy-washy, watered down self-serving sentiment as our culture defines it, but something that controls the honesty to the point where the honesty CAN give dignity. Gentleness alone accomplishes nothing, but uncontrolled honesty can devastate. A harness and plow by themselves can’t sow a field, but neither can a stampeding draft horse. It takes the direction of kindness, gentleness and love (again, in a Scriptural sense) to make honesty useful, to focus its power in order to achieve something fruitful. It's an interesting discipline.
Again, thanks.
Also, we women tend to be culturally conditioned to be absurdly agreeable. Speaking up is one of the hardest things for a girl to learn, unless she doesn't mind being thought of, and called, and reputed as, a bitch. And we're told, over and over, how hard it is for a guy to approach a girl, and we're told, over and over, to be nice to him, however uninterested we are.
I wish I could find the president of this cultural conditioning academy and give him a kick in the head. Now that I'm learning a little more, I've been realizing how stupid, and downright cruel, some of these ideas are. I don't think anyone really understands how men and women operate anymore -- the lovely little result of the widespread attempt to vaporize any difference between the sexes.
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