On the Joy of Attraction

Yesterday, after deciding that he had disappeared (as on-line dating people are wont to do) into the ether, dateboy e-mailed me to ask if I was still available to go out on Saturday evening. My heart jumped, and I responded back that yes I was still available. I am annoyed at how quickly I can revert back to a dreamy state of bliss with just one e-mail.

It reminds me, too much, of the one time I was "in love." So sit back and I'll tell you the whole sordid tale.

After college, I joined the Lutheran Volunteer Corps (LVC) - and urban Peace Corps type organization run by a bunch of Lutherans. The significant part of this was that it gave me sufficient distance from my family to come out as bisexual. A good thing, I thought, and jumped at the chance to get into queer culture and find a good woman to settle down with.

After LVC, I moved to Washington, DC and found a temporary job at a research institute...and it was there, on that first day of working for a living wage after 2 years of selfless poverty, that I met the SJ (not his initials, of course). Over several months of mindless (happily...I didn't want to think about big issues for awhile) work, I was charmed by his wit, his looks, his angst at the ending of his last relationship, his whole hip attitude. I felt like I funny, intelligent, and could be my silly self with him.

When they started looking to fill the position I was in, I jumped at the chance and easily got the post. I was heartily over heals in love at that point. I stopped dating the woman I had been seeing and started dreaming of heterosexual bliss.

Little did I know that SJ fell in love with friends, then drifted away when the lustre faded. Of course, it's hard to drift when you work a cubicle away. But by the coming spring, I had found that I was no longer in and that any hopes that I had of a romantic future were crushed. It was a gothic time of listening to Nina Simone, reading poetry, not eating or sleeping regularily. I was poor company to most of my good friends. The one good thing that came out of it was that I quit smoking.

Somehow, I managed to salvage a friendship out of that love by keeping my own feelings tamped down inside. I wouldn't have missed the friendship for the world, but it still makes my heart ache at all that I had to sacrifice of myself in order to do that. And when he told me 2 years later that, after a process of discernment, he had decided that he was going to become a priest, I was completely lost.

And I lost his friendship, too. When he "married God" (really that's what it comes down to doesn't it), he stopped e-mailing or writing. I know only peripherally where he is right now.

What does this have to do with dateboy, you may wonder...That thrill of being attracted to someone that seems interested in me raises all those old fears that I will not be the one that he is looking for. I don't (in short) trust that he won't find someone (or something) that is more compelling. And so when I get excited because dateboy e-mails, I start all sorts of internal self-talk about how I shouldn't get too excited and I should keep everything just as casual as I can. I censor myself...and it feels crappy. It feels like something I don't want to do again. But it also feels like something I have to get past.