“Just because I love it, doesn’t mean it’s going to work.”
This was the reminder I wrote for myself one Saturday as I walked around a beer fest on a gorgeous sunlit day. The expansive lawn where the festival took place had a sweeping view of the Bay. Everyone seemed happy. Sunshine, beautiful views, live music, and alcohol are a pretty good recipe for making people seem or feel happy. It also seems to be an apt description for my life out here on the coast – though maybe not all at the same time.
At least once a week, I do something or experience something here that makes me think this place is amazing. On that Saturday morning, I joined a small group of people for an 8-mile bridge to breakfast hike. The hike begins along the path where I go running. We walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. We stopped for a picnic breakfast near Fort Baker on the other side of the bridge. We then continued on to an ice cream shop in Sausalito. This was my second outing with the group – they go once every few weeks. It’s a fun and generous group who seem like genuinely good people.
After the morning hike, I went to the beer festival. After the beer festival, I stopped by my local/regular pub where they were having a going away party for Dolores. Dolores has been a regular at the bar for over a decade, maybe two decades. She’s soft-spoken and very kind. She always drinks red wine, and always sits at the end of the bar near the big window that is open on sunny/warm days.
Earlier that week, I took several of my routine city walks towards Fisherman’s Wharf and along the Embarcadero. I’ve been trying to time my arrival at the Ferry Building so that I can sit in the late day sun and have a beer. I took that walk three times that week and twice I changed things up by walking from the Ferry Building to the Mission District instead of walking through the North Beach neighborhood. In the Mission, I discovered a new-to-me spot – a bar I had been meaning to check out called Zeitgeist. They have a good beer selection, a large outdoor space with lots of sunshine, and they play a cool and eclectic mix of music (I’ve heard Johnny Cash, Steely Dan, Glass Animals, and Motorhead). I liked the bar enough (music, alcohol, sunshine) that I went twice. On the third walk, I skipped the beer at the Ferry Building and went to a restaurant/bar that I’ve gone to before, Capo’s in North Beach, where they have good and cheap happy hour food (damn good meatballs) and the bartenders are cool and friendly. The one bartender, whose name I can’t remember, looks like he’d be pretty tough. He’s got neck tattoos and reminds me of the actor Raymond Cruz from Breaking Bad and The Closer, but he’s got the warmest smile and is always so nice to me.
It feels a little weird to be such a San Francisco fanboy. I’m still waiting for the newness to wear off, but I know that the minute it does, I can switch up my routine and discover something else… or I can stick to my routine and still discover new things. One day, while sitting outside of the Ferry Building, I saw and heard a flock of boisterous green birds fly by. I looked it up on my phone and discovered that the city has over 200 wild parrots living here. That’s awesome.
All of that said, I’m “failing” in the two areas that were ifluential in my decision to move here: job opportunities and dating opportunities. I put failing in quotes because I’ve gotten a lot more interviews than I was getting before I moved here and because I haven’t exactly brought my “A-game” when it comes to dating.
With statistics like only 20% of applicants get called for interviews, the odds make landing a job a numbers game. All I can do is keep applying, keep interviewing, and be patient (I had three interviews this past week, but also one rejection from an interview from two weeks ago). I’m still confident that the job thing will work out. To stay “sharp,” I’ve been doing some volunteer consulting work for an organization in Chicago. While not my intended goal, doing this work has been a good reminder that I’m good at what I do – good enough to be coaching/mentoring/advising director-level people at mid-sized organizations. It reminded me that I know what I’m talking about and have strong analytical, marketing, and management skills. Yay me.
I’m a little less confident (and also less concerned) about the dating thing. In some respects, despite it being a priority for why I moved, I’m increasingly more willing to de-prioritize that part of life. There are plenty of attractive, smart women out here – almost too many. I recently set up an account on a dating app and within three days had over 350 “likes” or “swipes” or whatever you want to call them. In theory, this means there are over 350 people who would go out with me. I say in theory, because I don’t trust apps to not lie as a way to increase subscriptions and also I’ve done the tipsy or bored swiping thing and wondered what the hell I was thinking a day later when someone matched with me.
[Aside: For more on the lying and manipulation that tech routinely does, read up on how the apps are being sued, or even more interestingly read this article that details what google has done to make their search results worse so that we all spend more time searching and seeing their advertiser’s content.]
As I’ve been trying to understand what my “A-game” might look like and as I’ve been trying to figure out my side of this unbalanced and perhaps unbalance-able equation, I’ve been walking myself through a series of cart-before-horse scenarios to get to the heart of what I want and what’s holding me back. This is what I do – I have a lot of mental conversations with myself.
The getting ahead of myself thinking often begins with the admission that I don’t necessarily want to go out as often as I do. It doesn’t really represent the balanced life I’d like to lead. Going out – for a walk, or to the bar, or to the waterfront – is my way of getting my people fix. Or to quote the poet Stephen Dunn, “I’d like… to keep alive this strange human streak I’m on” just maybe dial it back or balance it out a bit. I like going for walks every day, I try to avoid going to a bar every day.
Years ago, I discovered that I’m part social butterfly and part introvert. I live a rich internal life, I crave routine, but I like to be out among people and doing spontaneous things. I suspect I need to see people every day. I don’t have to interact with them, but see and observe and maybe be seen, yes. The butterfly in me meets new people almost every time I go out. These past few weeks I talked to and exchanged numbers with two guys who sat next to me at Zeitgeist; I talked with a very friendly couple at Capo’s who took down my email; I exchanged numbers with people in the hiking group; and I hung out with a former pro football player. I may not have deep friends yet, but not a week goes by when I’m not meeting someone new. Most weeks I’m meeting several new people.
I’ve also learned that this scenario changes dramatically when I get into a serious relationship. I’m sure that’s true for most people. The need to be out among people recedes as I begin to enjoy spending my time with this new person. My attention, naturally, shifts as some of my social needs are being met in a different way. Lately, what I’ve found myself saying in my head is that I might need someone, presumably a girlfriend, to reign me in. I might need someone who will make staying home the more attractive option to going out. This, then, becomes a depth vs. breadth debate, a quantity vs. quality dynamic. Historically, I’ve struggled to find balance between these two lives. The chasm between spoken for Matt and single and ready to mingle Matt is pretty wide. It’s not that I want to stop being the semi-social person that I am or stop doing the quasi-social things I do, but I wouldn’t mind having a different set of options to choose from and a deeper (more regular) connection to add balance.
The problem with thinking that it’d be nice to have a good reason to go home / stay home, is that there are a whole lot of other things (things that I don’t really want to be bothered with) that have to happen before ever getting to that point – not least of which is liking someone enough to have them involved in my day-to-day life. That requires meeting people and getting to know them and then getting to know them more. Which suddenly seems like a lot of work with a high probability of it not working out.
Dating, at least in the early stages, typically involves dinners, drinks, and activities. I enjoy dinners, drinks, and activities, but scheduling a time to do them with someone else feels forced. The conversations feel forced. The follow-up feels forced. I’ve only had a handful of experiences (I’d say fewer than five in my life) where those first dates felt natural and easy and almost glowingly magical. In those instances, nothing felt forced. Those were the ones that led to daily conversations and in two or three cases speculation about what a future together might look like.
I like the daily connection. I like the speculative visioning and co-creating aspect of being in a relationship. And for the relationships that got to that stage, I enjoyed the dating aspect. It’s all the non-starters that I don’t care for. It’s almost as if I’d prefer to jump to the more comfortable stages of arguing over the correct way to load the dishwasher and who hogs the covers without the hassle of dozens of first dates with dozens of women where we ask each other what we do for a living, or talk about the best vacation we’ve ever had, or how toxic that one ex was, or that next year one of us is hoping to go to Belize. It’s not that those conversations can’t be interesting, but without some differentiating factor that I can only describe as chemistry, they’re not terribly different from the conversation I had with the former football player. It’s as if I’ve gotten so good at (and used to) meeting people on a superficial level (strangers at bars), that I now see the early stages of dating as an extension of that superficiality. In the romantic life I wish to build, I want to be done with superficiality as quickly as possible. Superficiality interests me only in so far as character study interests me. I also recognize that there’s no going around this, there’s only going through – and I fight it every step of the way.
But wait, there’s more (it gets worse)… the next thing I know in my cart-before-horse thinking, I’m walking around my apartment and thinking, there’s no room for another dresser here, and what shit am I going to have to get rid of in order to make room for someone else’s shit. Mind you, I haven’t even gone out with anyone or talked to them, and I’m worrying that they’re going to want to hang their art and photos, and I’m going to lose all of my closet space – and I don’t even want to think about the tiny counter space by the bathroom sink. The next thing I know, I’m telling myself I need a bigger place if this is going to work and I don’t want to get a bigger place because it’s probably not going to work.
I don’t have much, but I like what have. That becomes the “I’m not sure I want to date” chapter that I’m always revising. That becomes the title track to the blues album I’m writing in my head: “I don’t have much, but I like what I’ve got.” This is the getting “way ahead of myself” thinking that makes companionship seem almost unimaginable. And I mean that in the literal sense. I can’t imagine it. I’m probably more domesticated than most men, yet, I frequently struggle to picture living the type of settled-in and settled down life that I lived when I was married or when I was engaged. Or perhaps more accurately, because those experiences are the only experiences I’ve had, I can only imagine living that way – and as such, I can’t imagine a new or different version.
The last time I was in that type of a relationship, was five years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I enjoyed the let’s go out, let’s stay in dynamic of the relationship. I liked the mutual decision making process. I liked the shared and sharing nature of how we lived – deciding what to cook for dinner, and how to spend the weekend. But, to quote the song “Laugh Track” from The National, “everything melted in less than a week.” And I’m wondering if somewhere in the recesses of my brain, heart, spleen, or pinky toe I’m doing the cost-benefit analysis of what a new partnership looks like and the math isn’t adding up. I like to think that I am, at times, fearless and not so risk-averse… but maybe I’ve grown somewhat cynical or jaded or fearful. Right now, I’m only living out part of the life I’d like to live (I hold back because of the job/finances situation) – which is to say, I think my options for meeting my own needs are only going to get better, and I’m not sure I want someone coming in changing everything up (probably in a really good way) and then wrecking the place – leaving me with barren walls, no furniture, and an empty social calendar.
This is where I’m blending caution with pragmatism, optimism with reality, future with past, geography with partnership. This is where the note on my phone originated. This is where in the middle of a beer festival on a glorious day, I said to myself, this can all be taken away. “Just because I love it, doesn’t mean it’s going to work.” We can’t expect to hold on to anything forever.
For me, it’s a lot easier to overcome a job not working out. I can even handle a place not working out. It happens all the time. I’ve had numerous jobs in three different careers. I’ve moved my entire life for a job that didn’t work as a pandemic knocked the financial stuffing out of me. Because I’ve weathered those changes before, I can imagine and weather those types of setbacks again. Moving and landing a job are easier risks to take. Partnership on the other hand… is, or feels different. The fact is, I’ve only been married once, and I’ve only ever lived with three partners (and one was in college, so I’m not sure how much that counts). Maybe it doesn’t have to be, but in my personal history, that type of sharing, that type of dreaming is a pretty big deal. So while the idea of having someone I want to come home to is very attractive, it also seems unimaginably distant.
Because I don’t know what to do about “this,” I don’t really do anything about it. Because, ultimately, “this” is about giving up control (of my time, of my expectations, of my assumptions), I focus on the things I can control. I focus on the things that are low-stakes – like exploring and discovering things on my own. If I have a shitty time at that new bar, no harm, no foul… and because I’m on my own, I have much more of a say in my enjoyment. An uninspiring date, however, only reinforces the egocentric belief that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. And because I think a lot of people are in the same boat, a boat where they’re valuing their current life and are wary of the disruptions dating might cause, we’re in this collective situation where we tend to give up or we go through a series of half-assed attempts at dating because finding simple, fun, inspiring and consistent seems to be an expectation on which so few people seem capable of delivering.
As I was writing this (several weeks ago), I opened the dating app a half-dozen times. I had over fifty possible matches, and eleven people with whom I’ve matched. Seven of those matches were conversations that stalled. One conversation started with me reaching out on Monday, them replying at around midnight on Friday and me replying when I woke up on Saturday. That’s where it ended. Another started and ended on Thursday (again with the ball in their court). On Wednesday, someone liked me and asked a few questions. I replied. the conversation ended on Wednesday. Last Saturday, I reached out to someone, they replied, I replied, the conversation lasted through a few texts on Sunday and ended on Monday. Collectively, it felt both exhausting and disheartening.
Whenever I find myself pining for the simplest of shared pleasure in those past relationships, it’s because the conversations were funnier, more organic, and just easy. If I prefer talking with strangers at a bar, it’s because those conversations are usually more engaging and certainly less forced than the awkward first date. If I put the cart before the horse and say I can’t imagine merging two lives (physically and emotionally) it’s because even under what I thought were good circumstances, we couldn’t figure out how to make it work… and with most of the people I’m “meeting” now, we can’t even sustain a simple conversation long enough or muster up enough mutual interest to meet up for a drink.
And so, I don’t do any of that and instead go for long walks or to beer festivals or out to the bar where I have great conversations and a good time and then walk home thinking that’s all fine and good and entertaining, but I wouldn’t mind something different with a little more depth to it.