It wasn’t that he liked being miserable.
“His Music” – Stephen Dunn
He simply had grown used to wearing
a certain face, become comfortable
with his assortment of shrugs and sighs.
It’s been a mixed few days.
Last Tuesday, I had a final round interview. I was scheduled for the last available time slot. It went well. I’d love to accept the job. When I didn’t hear back by the end of the week, I began the process of preparing myself for disappointment – readying my assortment of shrugs and sighs. In both business and dating, I work under the assumption that one moves with urgency and enthusiasm when presented with “the right candidate.” If you want to make the hire, you convey that as soon as possible. If you want a second date, you make it known that you’re excited to meet again. I’ve been on the flip side of these interviews (and dates). I’ve been the hiring manager. We always moved pretty quickly with our first-choice candidate.
I have other interviews lined up. At least this time around, I’ve continued to search and apply elsewhere throughout the process (something I’m not very good at doing). For years, I’ve been trying to train myself to be more in the moment – which tends to run counter to keeping one’s options open.
Over the past few weeks I had also gone on a few dates. Some went better than others. In more than one instance, the post-date conversation seemed to have slowed – sometimes stopped. Based on my experience, people get quiet when they lose interest or when they’re not feeling it or when they want to avoid conflict/delivering bad news. I’ve had my share of less-than-pleasant experiences with people pulling away which has probably trained me to be on the lookout for pulling away and to cut my losses sooner than I need to. I don’t always understand the slower paces, the ebbs and flows.
Even though I shouldn’t be, I’m always a little surprised by the spiral-up / spiral-down dynamics of relationships and dating. How energy between two people, or lack thereof, feeds off of each other. Mutual enthusiasm or mutual ennui. I’ve had plenty of instances when we were enthusiastic when we first met, and somewhere along the way one of us pulled back a little and then the other. This, too, feels like lines from a Stephen Dunn poem. First one sigh, then the all too predictable and recognizable other. While I don’t think relationships should become quid pro quo or should be based on transactional exchanges (I ask a question, you ask a question and so on), the pre-relationship stages (dating) is very much a dance of getting to know each other and figuring out paces and intensities. There’s a lot of internal calculus going on – is this person worth my time, do they like me, do I like them and how much of my liking them is based on reciprocity? Yet, if unconditional is an absurd expectation in the beginning (and it is an absurd expectation), how can the start be anything other than a give and take dance through a minefield of conditions?
On one date, my date asked if I was aware of the Facebook group, “are we dating the same guy – San Francisco.” I am. It’s a women-only group with 51k members. By contrast, the men’s version of the group has fewer than 2k members. Women post screenshots of profile pictures of guys they’re dating or might consider dating. They then ask, “any tea?” to see if anyone else has had any experiences with the guy. My understanding is that they sometimes mock the guys (even though the rules prohibit it) or they’ll say that they were ghosted, or call him a liar, or narcissistic, etc. etc. Occasionally, they compliment the guy.
Pitched as a warning system and support group, it encourages women to share about relationship issues, but also any behavior they find manipulative or toxic – which, unfortunately, are overused and abused terms in today’s society. Trying to get what I want/need from this other person (which everyone does) is the very definition of manipulative. As such, I’m very skeptical of anyone (men and women) who uses such terms (narcissist, manipulative, toxic) without caveats, qualifiers, or nuance. It’s my observation that in our quest for self-empowerment, we’ve grown less tolerant or willing to compromise – less understanding. Relationships and dating involve compromise and understanding. Instead of acknowledging that not everyone is going to be a good fit, I’m afraid we’re becoming increasingly inclined to label, name, and shame – and what better place to do that than on a private Facebook group.
The group’s page also says that information from the group should never be shared outside of the group – doing so would be punished by being banned. If I’m reading this correctly, violating the trust/privacy of someone you dated is acceptable, but violating the trust/privacy of someone in the group isn’t.
Cool.
Knowing such a group exists makes me want to get out of the dating scene entirely. Date enough people and it seems easy, if not probable, to land on someone’s “do not date” list. It seems way too easy for someone’s subjective opinion of a guy or gal to become a defamation of character. It seems way too easy to present one side of a story as absolute truth – and that’s not a world I really want to live in. Moreover, I’d worry that there’s a poisoning that takes place even for those who feel they’re high-minded enough to avoid being poisoned. If we’re driving in a car and I say – I doubt that wobble sound is anything to worry about, you’re going to obsess about the wobble sound that may or may not exist. It’s like saying goodnight to your kid but adding in, try not to think about the monster in the closet.
I had a date tell me that she’s a member of the group. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. She said she prefers to form her own opinions. I appreciated that – though I really wanted to ask if she’s looked me up or if I’m listed in the group. Instead, I sympathized with the fact that dating is considerably more dangerous for women than it is for men… which it absolutely is. But as I’m reflecting on this now, that’s not entirely what these groups are designed to do. If a guy (or woman) is genuinely abusive or poses a threat to someone’s safety – it should be a legal matter. Everything else becomes subjective and risks swerving into the gossipy. If the group kept their feedback to only pointing out the most toxic and abusive behaviors, there might be value, but from what I’ve read about the group, that’s not what’s being shared. Such a group feels about as valuable as asking complete strangers for complicated medical advice.
Something about the whole set up of these groups feels wrong. Taking a chance on “love” requires risk and vulnerability. At its best and most exciting, it involves discovery and chemistry and surprises. Trying to vet people ahead of time seems to place the focus on efficiency and caution, but more importantly, it disregards the magic that can be found in interpersonal dynamics. I’ve dated people that were meh and people who blew me away. The duds might be amazing for someone else, but if I go out and tell 51k people that they’re a dud, I’ve just pre-conditioned a whole bunch of people’s expectations. Even for the people (men or women) who routinely behave poorly (however one wants to define poorly), there has to exist the possibility of redemption. A woman who dates a lot of guys and expects them all to pay for dinner shouldn’t be labeled (at least not in a public form with her profile picture) a gold-digger and a guy who isn’t ready to settle down shouldn’t be called a fuckboy.
I have been tempted to join the guys group so that I can write an expose of why these groups are a bad idea and how they’re contributing to the problems they wish to solve (bad dating experiences). I don’t think I have the stomach for it. If the women’s group is peppered with snark and potentially bad information, I suspect the guys group is twice, if not five times, worse.
No, instead of joining and writing the reasoned plea for sanity that will forever heal the gender divide, I acknowledge that this is yet another instance where all of these things are beyond my control, and the best I can do is set my own guardrails and model what I hope to see in the world. I have no intention of looking up any potential dates, or reporting on any past dates. Conversely, I hope none of my behaviors or dating missteps land me on such a list. and instead of trying to convince the dating world that we could, collectively, behave differently, I’ll rummage through my drawers for my well-worn shrugs and sighs…
As if those things (waiting for a job and wading through the dating scene) weren’t disheartening enough to sour my usually pleasant mood, my LinkedIn account was recently hacked. The other night as I battled feeling under the weather and tried to decide about going out to a show, I got an email from LinkedIn telling me of suspicious activity on my account. I clicked the link to change my password. Before I could switch apps on my phone to get the verification code, the person had added their own email to my account and changed my password – effectively locking me out. I reported the account and waited. In the meantime, I looked for any other accounts that had derivatives of that password – if it was chicKenMaRshMallow964! I changed any password that had the words chicken or marshmallow or 964 – because I’m assuming there’s an AI program out there trying brute force combinations on every account I have – from my accuweather account to my geocities account to my bank account to see if they can get in.
This is when not only do I put on the shrugs and sighs, but wear the face I had grown accustomed to. I know it sounds naive, but I want to believe in a trusting and trustworthy world. I also believe that the best way to do live in such a world is to be trusting and trustworthy. On most days, I try without much resistance. But sometimes, whether I like it or not, the outside world convinces me to shuffle around in my velvety, dark cloak of misery.