Tom's Love Quest

Today I unsubscribed from all foot party email list groups which I’d joined one year ago. 

I’ve attended three of these parties, where I met two lovely women; well, perhaps   not   so lovely after all.  In fact, once I learned that they only befriended me because I paid them, and not because they liked me,  I quickly lost interest, in them and the whole business in general.  I’m not so desperate that I must further humiliate myself like this.  I’m better than that. 

At first, I felt accepted, foot fetish and all, which heretofore has been quite the rare find in my love quest.  But ultimately, I got rejected repeatedly at the foot parties, as the girls accepted my fetish only because they received good money to do so.  But me as a person, they seemed to regard with little or no significance.  That stung, and indeed sheds some light on why sexual intercourse forms of prostitution are illegal.  It’s no fun to realize that all you ever really meant to someone was how much you could economically advance them. 

Indeed, I am a worthy person; deserving of anyone I’d care to approach, without charge.  I should not pay high fees for a woman’s interest, which is fake anyhow, because it’s not my money that should entitle me.  It’s just because I am human that demands self respect as well as respect and acceptance from others. When people deny me complimentary acceptance, an acceptance which by the way is the birthright of any human being, then I shall, from now on, avoid them.  Why?  Not only is paying them to act like they like me debasing and painful.  But in so doing, I’m devaluing myself; reducing myself to groveling with my open wallet in hand. The more money I pay, it’s clear, the less I’m valuing myself ironically.

For whatever reason, whether I’m lacking in some way, or they are, if any lady sees my money as my most valuable asset, then I’d rather get away from her, and find people who see more.  Unfortunately, though I thought I had, it turned out that I actually found no one with this   better vision   at the foot parties.  So after three trips to Philadelphia in May, June, and July of last year, the thought of attending again felt wrong, and all interest in making further visits disappeared.   In fact, I’d be ashamed to go back there now; not because I deem myself unworthy of the models at those parties, but rather because I think I’m worthy of so much more than a couple hours of costly foot worship, with people who but for the money I paid them, did not see me.  As I see it, to attend now would contradict my high self opinion, and defy my sense of dignity and decorum.    So I’ll not do it again in the foreseeable future. 

I’m looking for   free love,   which is the deepest, truest form of love; love from people who enjoy me   for me,  and not exclusively how much I can pay them.  It hurts too much to obtain love in any compensatory way because it assaults my self esteem to continue begging and groveling for affection by flashing my bills.   No matter how attractive the woman, she has no right to diminish men in this way, and I’ll never again permit this to be done to me.  This man at least, believes that he deserves more, and he’ll either  get  more, or simply live without. 

Thus, it’s back to the proverbial drawing board. Yet I have faith that I’ll get this right someday.  It’s all part of the   Love Quest;   a search for understanding and sustained affection and satisfaction, that I’ve been engaged in for so long now that I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I gave it up.  So, the quest continues. 

Tom Hesley

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• Other Foot Party Posts
• Tom’s Diary –> Today’s Business: 2010-05-02

Dear [Mentat],

I enjoyed our debate last weekend about how close to true love, love at first sight (LAFS) actually comes. You say that LAFS is not love at all, but rather just infatuation or lust. So you seem to believe that LAFS is not a useful indicator of how much in love we might fall, and so should be ignored while selecting a lover. If I understood you correctly, we should not use it therefore, to determine who we’re the most likely to fall in love with. I say however, that LAFS   is   love, or more precisely, it can be, because it often and quickly leads to the kind of life-long love the folks the world over revere. Allow me to further clarify my position.

I suppose that how meaningful   love at first sight   is, depends on the particular qualities you’re looking for. If you seek primarily a person’s “surface” or immediately-visible traits that attract you, then you needn’t delve too deeply to find those, as by definition, they are apparent at first sight. Example: How about the man who is moved romantically by a long pair of slender female legs? He need know little about her deepest, inner workings to know that she attracts him in the ways that he prefers. On the other hand, if you’re searching for less visible traits, such as a person’s pet peeves, their political views, or how they’ll treat you when you’re sick, then LAFS probably won’t occur for you, since you’ll have to spend some months digging for those “deeper” facts before your heart will allow you to “fall.”  Since the qualities sought here are not apparent at first sight, then LAFS will not happen.

Of course, most people don’t seek just one quality; they like several to many. Our leg man may also like women who speak with southern accents (an indicator of the preferred background he’s seeking). And / or, he may be drawn to a flautist or anyone who is deeply involved with music. If we observe a lady playing the piccolo, and a piccolo player is the sort of person that really turns us on, then we needn’t know any more about her than that she plays piccolo in order to feel the romantic draw of LAFS. Then, if the piccolo player thanks us for our applause with a southern accent, and has great legs to boot, we get even more excited.  My point: There are many readily discernible qualities therefore that can trigger the LAFS sensations; qualities that tell us much about the deep recesses of the person even though they are immediately visible.

To me, a person’s “surface” traits as you call them, are probably no less indicative of their attractiveness than their more obscure “inner” traits like personality, values, how they act once they really know someone well, and so on. If they look pretty outside, then they probably have the sort of mental constitution on the inside I’m looking for.  Conversely, if they have the lifestyles, intellect, and values that I prefer on the inside, then I’ll usually find them attractive on the outside too. The outside tells us much about the inside if you know how to read it.  Therefore, you really can judge a book by its cover. 

Now I must say that I’m reluctant to split humans into an outer or surface half, and an inner, personality-based half because the physical body resembles the personality and the personality resembles the physical body.  The two are so heavily connected and dependent on one another that they cannot be meaningfully discussed separately, since so much of what’s in the one is derived from what’s in the other. I make the distinction here though, because in your arguments on Saturday, you did it when you referred to the “surface” qualities Vs. the deeper, “inner” qualities of a lady.  I do it here just to show that it can’t really be done.  See my article, Outer Vs. Inner Beauty  for further arguments in this vein. 

I agree that LAFS is based primarily on more surface qualities than the more slowly developed love that you’ve experienced with your current girlfriend. But does this invalidate LAFS? I think not. Why? People resist the usefulness of LAFS, believing that how a person looks on the outside says   nothing   about who they are on the inside. This is wrong in my view. How they look and who they are, are essentially just different manifestations of a person’s whole essence. Their looks are very indicative of their total nature as human beings, just as are their personalities.  Click here for arguments that without personality (the insides) to animate a body (the outsides), the body cannot be attractive.   

But, people can make themselves look more attractive than they actually are.  It’s true that the outsides can be made to misrepresent the insides through the use of makeup, elevated shoes, toilet paper in the bra, cosmetic surgery, and so on. So you might argue that the outsides so manipulated, would not necessarily show the true, inner person, and you’d probably be right. But in this case, it’s the manipulation  of the readily visible traits that renders them less useful; it’s nothing inherent in the traits themselves.  However, they do show that the person is not comfortable in their own skin, which could indicate a host of hidden psychological problems and low self esteem issues.

I’ll admit that LAFS tells us little about the beloved’s capacity to love us back. The fact that we love them at first sight does not mean they will love us in return. To figure that out, we must take the necessary time to learn how they’ll treat us once romance begins to flourish. LAFS is therefore no crystal ball.  Indeed, it often misleads us to people not well-suited for us.  Just as sugar in and of itself makes not the perfect cake, so it is that LAFS does not by itself, create the forever-perfect relationship. In my view, love at first sight (LAFS) is a necessary  ingredient for a passionate, deep, and lasting relationship, just as sugar is for a cake that tastes good.  But it’s not a sufficient  ingredient. 

Without sugar, the cake is not sweet at all and so there would be little reason to eat it.  Yet LAFS does sweeten the cake; it predisposes us to view our beloved’s behaviors more favorably, and to love them with greater devotion; especially if they love us too. It boosts our tolerance of their idiosyncrasies, and thus, makes it easier to put up with them over the long haul. It causes us to reshape our goals and values to better accommodate our lover’s. In this way, LAFS can inspire a deeper love eventually that makes it easier to stay with the beloved through the rough times. Thus, I’d say that LAFS a necessary precursor to the most successful marriages.  So while LAFS is no guarantee of lasting love, it often results in such. See here for examples of how the quickest born romances in my life indeed lasted the longest. Thus, if you want the deepest and most lasting love, then LAFS would be a sure way to raise the odds of getting just that. LAFS can indeed be a significant indicator of lasting love to come.

Take care.

Tom Hesley

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• Water Park Musings: 2010-06-02

Friends,

People say that you can’t predict when that in-love feeling will strike. They argue that we shouldn’t be picky about who we date because, as they say, you never know when the love bug will bite. If you judge someone as an unfit lover before getting to know them deeply, then you’ll probably walk right past one who could make you happier than you ever imagined. I got this sort of push back when posting the “formula” for my ideal woman to a couple mail lists a while back. They balked at the notion of “planning” for love, calling it a futile exercise.  As they put it, loves trikes when you least expect it.  So you shouldn’t even try predicting it. How it works they claim, is unknowable and that when it finally comes, it’s a blessing from above. In short, they say that we should not look a gift horse in the mouth and that those who try are wasting their time. God will bring love to our lives in his own time, and we as lowly humans can’t possibly know his schedule.

I agree that the very young and / or inexperienced may be unable to predict accurately who he’ll fall for. But I’ve found that the more I’ve fallen (or not), the more detailed and refined the ideal lady becomes in my mind, and the better I understand her, and the more quickly I recognize her when I see her. True, it’s never 100% accurate. But once you know what to look for, where to look, and what to avoid, it gets easy to target dates that, if they’re reasonably nice and receptive, you’ll fall for almost every time.  Love is highly predictable if you know what you’re doing.

In my case, certain types of people and environments are more likely to promote this falling in love than others. The recent parties I’ve attended exemplify this. I’ve met women in many diverse places, from subways to caves, from airplanes to helicopters. and most recently, at these parties. So far, I’ve attended two of these, and in both cases, found an abundance of women who falling for was simple. The party organizer and I apparently have the same tastes in women because he picks the ones I generally like the best. As I see it, if you’re hunting for elephants, you go where the elephants are. So by choosing your hunting grounds intelligently, you’ll raise your odds of bagging what you want by many fold. By working the right venues, you can better predict the likelihood that you’ll find love.  This is highly predictable.

Also, you can increase this “psychic ability” at predicting good love for you, by looking within yourself. Ask yourself who  really  turns you on. Look in your dreams for this answer, as well as your childhood. Experts suggest that what attracts us to specific sorts of lovers is for the most part, already established long before adulthood; in pre adolescence in fact. People resembling those that you most fantasized about as a kid, are probably the ones you’ll most quickly, most deeply, and most lastingly fall in love with as an adult. Thus, to make lasting love last longer, we need to spend less time trying to change what we like, and more time simply understanding what we like to begin with, and then pursuing those natural desires.  Pursuing genuine desires brings us much closer to fulfilling them.  This is highly predictable as well.

In my view, we should act on our truest desires; not so much those that we run through filters of choice. Often, we rule out someone that we’d otherwise find irresistible, due to academic or intellectual concerns. Maybe she comes from “the wrong side of the tracks” or he doesn’t make as much money as we’d like. In extreme cases, people actually defy their deepest desires in lovers, because they deem such longings irrational or petty. Because they can’t discover rational reasons for the wanting, they set out to ignore it. This is sad, because this way of proceeding promotes inequality, and, it can cause us to pass over someone who would have been a wonderful lover to boot. If one renounces his deepest yearnings, then he’ll have no chance of ever becoming maximally fulfilled in love. Indeed, the best kind of love is not a love that we intellectually decide to have. It’s one that we already desire, and then use our intellect to augment rather than quell. So listen to your heart and follow your dreams, and this will put you in the running for finding that love of your life.  This is highly predictable too.

Some call me a racist, as I generally date only white women. But it’s not that. In my childhood, I knew no black, Indian, Hispanic, Asian, or other ethnicities, as I’m from a small, all-white town in rural PA. There, in the late 60s, the only lover role models to build fantasies around were white women. So in my impressionable years, I based my dream girl ideal on them. They were the ones with whom my childhood eroticism became inextricably associated. In my earliest, most pliable years therefore, I came to know white girls as the ones who could make me feel the most romantically stimulated. Thus, my dream girl is white, and by choosing white dates therefore, I’ve significantly raised my chances of falling in love. Now I do like black women in platonic ways, and indeed have several as close friends. And, in some rare cases, they can excite me romantically for short periods of time. But by in large, it’s the white girls that steal my heart with that automatic and thought-free love lust that they inspire. In short, my advice to you if you’re looking for lasting passion in your relationships. is to find the people you  truly  desire. Then falling for them becomes a virtual certainty. Indeed, it’s highly predictable.

Also, consider that your dreams tell you lots about who you want most as well. If you’re dreaming of them in fond ways, then you’ll probably feel the same when you meet them for real. Your dreams therefore, give you a glimpse of what she’s like before you ever meet her. So, find the women of your dreams, in reality, and you’ll most likely fall in love with her at first sight. Again, this is highly predictable.

People tell me that I’m too picky. I’m puzzled over how they would know this; especially if they don’t know my life and the set of desires I’m working with. They call me shallow too. This I can dismiss though because typically, the people saying this aren’t ones that I’d date anyway. They often denounce my desires, calling them trivial, and claiming that I want things that have nothing to do with the woman’s true essence. You’ll often encounter resistance from people who fall outside your ideal as I have; especially  if you fall within theirs. They’ll resent you for rejecting them because they desire you, and can’t have you. Don’t worry though, and more importantly, don’t listen. They can’t know you better than you know yourself, and so the odds are very good that they have you wrong anyway. Thus, if you let them define who you desire, you’ll probably end up in romance-less, will-based relationships where the best you can do is just go through the motions. Taking too seriously what others think are noble desires for you, will almost surely lead you to feeble eroticism and repeated dead-ends in love. This is highly predictable as well.  So avoid it.

I’ll close for now by saying that if true gratification is really about satisfying your needs and desires, and if you know these very well, then knowing the kinds of dates you’re most likely to love becomes a veritable snap. You’d best listen to your desires if you hope to ever gratify them fully. Those who heed their hearts have the greatest chances of actually getting what they want, and therefore being the most happy.  One last time: This is highly predictable.

Take care.

Tom Hesley

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• Water Park Musings: 2010-06-02

Dear [Mentat],

I’ve wanted to write you for weeks now, about a new lady in my heart. I don’t know her well yet. But for me, it was   love at first sight   (LAFS). Well, maybe not precisely   first   sight, but within a couple hours of it anyhow. Since meeting her, the flowers out back look  prettier. The food on this diet tastes better. Heck, even the stench of the cat’s litter box is easier to ignore during cleaning. Plus, [Linda] has inspired me to write voluminously; she’s given me the voice I’ve sought. So many things make sense now that didn’t, prior to May 2nd, the day we met. and my energy level at the keyboard has exploded since, as a result. Being in love makes great things happen.  Sometimes, I have to force myself to leave the computer, whereas before, I had to force myself to stay. Like you do when you’re in love, I count the hours since I last held her hand (which, by the way, is around 528), and I count down the hours until I’ll see her again (which is 308). I haven’t done that since the days with   [First Love]. In so many ways, this wave of passoin feels just like the one I rode with   [First Love] throughout the 70s and into the 80s. It’s blissful!

We’ve talked about LAFS before, you and I, and we’ve argued its pros and cons. Yet I still wonder why people so readily dismiss LAFS as meaningless infatuation. When I examine my past relationships, it appears that LAFS is the best indicator that the feelings of love will last a long time if not forever; which is contrary to popular belief, I know. Yet, that’s my experience. Indeed, the ladies I struggled most to forget after we broke up, were the ones that I fell in love with the most quickly. Indeed, the quicker I fell, the deeper I fell, and the more enjoyable the romance was. Of course, the loving hurt more as well, during those times of uncertainty that occur in any romance. With the highest of highs also comes the lowest of lows.  So I suppose that where there’s great opportunity for pleasure, there’s also a great chance for pain. But I don’t mind that, because the good parts make whatever suffering that ensues, worth enduring.

People though, protect themselves from this pain by strengthening their emotional defenses against LAFS.  LAFS is also   vulnerability   at first sight because it makes us weak to another; another whose intensions we know not.  We become sensitive to the needs and opinions of someone we fancy immediately; feeling intense joy when they like us, and great sadness when they reject us. Since people fear being vulnerable to a stranger, and since LAFS greatly increases this vulnerability early in the mating dance, they dismiss LAFS as reckless, shallow, and impulsive abandon. To them, love that takes a long time to grow is a much safer love, even though it’s a less pleasurable love.  They apply an easy-come-easy-go philosophy, suggesting that the longer that love takes to grow, the longer lasting it will be. They say that if love comes quickly, that it will go quickly as well.  So they seek people who do not inspire LAFS, as a way of keeping control over the situation and thus, reducing the disappointment, should their “beloved” turn them away. This makes it easier to keep their guard up until they themselves decide that to lower it. But this is just so wrong.  By protecting themselves from the pain, they’re also fending off the potential pleasures as well.

I dated many for whom there was no LAFS, and they were the easiest to get over as well. Just because we take lots of time to get to know someone before admitting to loving them, does not guarantee a deeper, more abiding love. In fact, I’ve seen the opposite. While the resulting friendships were nice, without LAFS, that’s really all they ever came to be; friendships. There was no spark, no electricity, no insatiable desire, no drive to write reams of love letters, no prettier looking flowers out back, no better tasting food, and the cat’s box remained impossible to clean without gagging. Without LAFS, there was no positive bias on life, no perpetual lift in the shoe, no rising sun above a bleak and lonely physical and emotional landscape, and no truly deep concern about making her day a little better. It seems then that when I love quick, I also love deep, and I love long as well. But when I love slow, I never come to love at all.

Yet women see it differently. They see a guy who wants them right away as just being about sex, or as having some hidden agenda. Or, the more benevolent ones simply doubt the fellow’s candor, believing that it’s highly unlikely that he could know so quickly that he wants them. Indeed, [Linda] was shocked to learn that I’m already smitten with her, after but one date. But it happens. It has happened, and to me, LAFS is as real as romantic love ever gets. So how do I convince her that it’s real?  How do I show her that the realest love is in fact, the fastest love?

There’s a great book on this topic:   Love at First Sight,   by Earl Naumann Ph. D., that describes studies that validate LAFS. The 1500 people he studied who experienced LAFS, generally had longer-lasting, happier relationships, than those who took the lets-just-be-friends-first approach to dating.

I suppose that every man is different. But for me, women should know that if I’m crazy about them on the first date, that I’ll probably stay that way indefinitely. It’s in my history.  A quick fall is a deep fall for me, and the longer I’ll stay in love as well. So LAFS can be just as meaningful and enduring as the more slowly evolving friendship-derived love that so many these days idolize. LAFS makes it easier to tolerate the beloved’s “imperfections” and idiosyncrasies, and it makes the couple way less likely to fight or grow bored with each other. No, I’d rather have a true love that I quickly fell for, than a friend that I decided to love after months of consideration. True love is better and   the truest love of all, happens the most quickly.  That’s in my humble opinion, sir.

More later.

Tom Hesley

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• Water Park Musings: 2010-06-02

Dear [Ballerina],

Hi. How are you? I hope you’re well and that you remember me, because it’s been five years since we last spoke. You remember that summer of 2004 when I winked at you on the web. I wanted you from the first time I glimpsed the pictures you put up there. I figured that you wouldn’t respond because women who look as good as you rarely do. Your face reminded me of Helen of Troy because, in another time, just like hers did, yours would have launched a thousand ships as well. So I was not surprised that you didn’t respond right away.

In fact when you did, a month and a half later, I’d all but forgotten who you were, but was pleased that you wrote nonetheless. Then, right away we began emailing and swapping pictures, and then, a couple weeks later, talking on the phone. I tell you that you made September of 2004 one of the most romantic months of my life, for I’ve never felt the passion for a woman more strongly, than I did for you. Your memory to this day in 2009 fills my heart with joy, and my eyes with tears.

Yours is a great memory. But it’s a sad one too. I never got over how things so abruptly ended, and what’s more, I never understood it. So I never had closure. You just stopped communicating one day without any explanation, and that was that. Our relationship was suddenly through, though in my view, we were just getting started on the most wonderful journey ever.

I still wonder what drove you away, and since I never had anything from you afterwards to go on, I can only guess at what it was. I suspect several factors. But I’ll only talk about one in this letter.

You remember in early October I came to Pittsburgh to see you? You’d just visited me a week earlier and you spent one night here. I remember that you sure liked TV, as you watched mine all night long. We had such a good time then, that we decided that I’d visit you this time. So I came out and you picked me up at the train station, and drove us to your apartment in South Hills. I met your son and daughter then, and your son and I helped your daughter with her math homework. That was so much fun.

Well, during the second afternoon of my visit, I walked into your kitchen to find you cooking our supper. I stood in the doorway watching you for what could have been an hour, but what only felt like a few seconds. Your hair was just the right length. Your skin was fair and healthy. Your east European accent was so cute, as you called out orders to your kids to help with the meal. Your legs were strong yet long and intensely sexy, and nowhere on you was there even one extra ounce of fat. You were the healthy woman I’d been seeking for decades, and with more people in the US obese today than not, believe me I considered you quite the find.

In old Europe, you could have been a queen, and I’d have gladly worshipped you too because everything about you, and I mean everything, was perfect. The way you walked, the way you talked, the way you smiled and watched me so intensely as I spoke; it was all so wonderful. The way you cooked, the way you cared, the way you wanted to serve was so very charming and disarming.

I fell in love with you then, standing in that doorway, and I didn’t just suspect that I’d fallen. I knew it positively. These indescribably sweet feelings of pleasure and peace swirled in my mind and brought me close to fainting. The sense that my decades-long search for my dream girl was finally over flooded my entire being, and if I was a believer in God, I might describe this moment as Him, making a miracle. With one loud snap of his fingers, he drove any doubts I had about you and how quickly things were moving between us, away from my heart, and in that instant I would have married you. I would have thrown all caution to the wind and had no misgivings about doing so either.

What I was feeling then, was precisely opposite to the pains of loneliness and missing fulfillment that I’d come to know so well in my life. But all that had changed this weekend as I watched you cooking that meal. Every last painful emotion from past relationships disappeared. Not one voice in my head said that you might be wrong for me. In fact, they all argued profusely that you were so, so right.

I was certain that our sex had been, and would continue to be phenomenal. This was important to me because I’d always wanted good sex but never found it consistently; until it showed up in you. So this was another reason I valued you so much. I’d been looking for someone like you for so long and was desperate to end the search.

Then, there you were, the embodiment of my salvation. You were the first woman in twenty-five years who could make me hard with but a single look or just one kiss, or a brief but tender caress with your beautiful index finger. Unlike with all my other women prior, with you I didn’t have to fantasize or concentrate in order to warm my loins. With you, it happened automatically and naturally, without any forcing whatsoever. It was as though my body had been waiting for you to unlock its deep vaults of intimate passion, that had been filling up for years.

I’d been waiting so long for someone like you.  But by the time you came along, I feared that I had no passion left to offer any woman and was also frustrated that I couldn’t find someone who could please me this way. But oh my!  You sure proved me wrong. My body responded to you as a thirsty cactus does to water. It drank you in, loving the sensations, and never quite getting enough. I was convinced that there would always be more pleasure to be had and to give to you too.

I don’t know exactly what it was about you that revved up my romantic interest so. But I do know that that love lust resulted from the confluence of many factors that both you and I brought to the table. It was much more than just your body, and it wasn’t just me. It was you too, though not just you, and not just me. It was the circumstance of our lives at that time; how each of us was raised, the values with which we’ve been instilled, our particular experiences, and so on.

My fever of love was not a desire I chose to have. Never do I decide on the sorts of women who excite me. Those ladies, whoever they are, just do, perhaps due to natural selection or some other big forces that dwarf my puny will. As I see it, we don’t voluntarily decide when and where or for whom our bells of love lust ring. Put simply: We don’t control who turns us on. That’s determined by many forces beyond our control at very young ages; probably before we’re born or even conceived in fact.

You caught me looking then, and threw back a big smile. Then you returned to the meal without a word. I wanted to kiss you and to thank you for being my dream girl. I wanted to compliment you too on your charms, and I figured that some of this feeling, but not all of it mind you, came from how physically fit and trim you were. I was so glad that keeping yourself healthy was very important to you and admired your ability to do it well.

In our phone talks, you revealed that you spent many hours each day exercising and dancing, and believe me, that work paid off for you. Though in your mid-forties and now an ex-ballerina, you still looked great; just as good as you did a decade earlier in those pictures you’d shown me the previous night, of you twirling and dancing joyfully around the stages of the most exclusive theaters in Pittsburgh. I revered your discipline that allowed you to stay as thin at 47 as you were when you were 17. So as you cooked on, I walked over to and stood at your back, putting my hands under your arms and around your waist to cup your flat stomach. Then I said, “You’ll never know how glad I am that you’re thin.”

You then grew angry. That one comment would throw up a wall between us that never came down again. “What do you mean?” you snapped, clasping each of my wrists in your hands and throwing them away from your ribs. “You know,” you argued, “I used to be just like you. I hated fat people, and always avoided them. But I’ve learned! I’ve learned that they can’t help the way they are, and that it’s wrong for people like us to hold their weight against them. But you don’t care that they’re human beings. It seems like all you care about is a woman’s body.  If she happens to be too fat, then you ignore the person inside and just throw her away. But they have feelings too I tell you. Don’t their minds and hearts mean anything to you? How can you be so cruel? That’s mean and crazy, and you really ought to grow up!”

I was so shocked and dismayed at the abruptness and degree of your hostility that I said nothing back. I just walked into the living room without another word, and we didn’t speak of this again for the remaining two days of my visit. But oh, how cold and distant we became. You stopped sleeping with me that very night.  Instead you chose the couch in the living room. You gave short yes-no answers whenever I’d ask you anything. The morning you drove me to the train, you were cordial but I knew that once we said good-bye and you kissed me on the cheek, that I’d never hear from you again. I haven’t either. Not even to this day in 2009.

When I got home that afternoon, I called you only to get your voice mail. I left several messages during the following week, inviting you to call me back. But you never did. I sent you email too, but to no avail. You totally ignored me and I had no way to discuss it with you.I was crushed.

For months afterward, I frequently awoke in tears. What we had seemed so right. So how could it have turned out so wrong? Losing you profoundly saddened me. What’s more, you allowed me no say, preventing any way for me to explain what I meant when I said that I was thankful that you were so thin. But I want you to know. So I’ll write it here and maybe someday you’ll find it. Maybe someday, you’ll understand. Maybe someday you’ll call me again. Maybe someday we could be friends. Maybe, maybe, maybe,… Maybe not. But I hope you’ll at least read the rest of this, even if you do nothing more.

First off, I do not hate fat people. I maintain good friendships with lots of them, and I’ve worked productively with many more. I enjoy their company, value their opinions, and respect their judgments. I also empathize with their difficulties in losing weight because I’ve struggled myself to get thin. So I understand that trimming down and then keeping the pounds off is hard. It’s a never-ending battle, to be sure.

But I believe nonetheless, that permanent weight loss can be done. In fact, it has been done by millions. So I disagree with your claim that the heavy cannot help that they’re heavy. While a small percentage of them do have medical problems that prevent them from losing weight, this is not true for the vast majority; as proved by the masses who manage to lose weight all the time.

I care about these humans. Perhaps you didn’t know that before you came along, I dated mostly the heavy. So you don’t have to convince me that there are some heavy, yet very wonderful people out there, who’d give everything to please their lovers. I dated several such women and those relationships lasted the longest of all; at least until I met my current girlfriend. These women were very caring, understanding, and thoughtful. I could not leave them for months sometimes, because I couldn’t bare the thought of jilting them. Believe me, I cared deeply about them.

I knew that losing weight was a life challenge for them and felt mighty sorry too because of it. But I also realized that I couldn’t be the superman who would save them; who would carry them away from a life of solitude, brought on because others avoided them for being so big. I wanted to be the hero though. I wanted to be the bigger man, and I cried for many an hour, once I understood that I couldn’t.

Why couldn’t I? Because my strongest, most profound desire beyond good food, clothing, and a warm and quiet place to live, has always been to enjoy lots of erotic quality time with beautiful women. Mine is a thirst that only women like you can quench. But for whatever reason, I just don’t feel erotic when lying with heavy women.

Before you, I struggled in vane to “scale down” my vision of my ideal woman many times; but never succeeded. Indeed, I wanted to somehow learn to love the fat ladies. After all, there were so many more of those types around than the skinny ones, and usually whenever I managed to attract someone, she was big. So, changing they type of lady my heart beats for seemed like a good idea since I was way more likely to attract a fat lady than a thin one.

I longed to learn how to actually get off on the weighty. I prayed to God and the devil too, to make me lust for them. I spent hundreds of hours meditating; trying to convince myself that I physically enjoyed the so-called big and beautiful just as much as the petite and trim. I dated heavy women lots of times besides, though truth be told, I found the encounters unfulfilling. In the worst cases, they disgusted me. So after five or six failed attempts at dating the heavy and close to two years in therapy, I realized that I can’t help that I want certain things in certain ways. I can’t help who I desire, and so, I can’t change who I desire, and I desired you in a big way.

So please don’t blame me for wanting you but avoiding the heavy people. I am a good man, and my aversion to fat ladies comes not from prejudice or shallow thinking or an unwillingness to get to know them.  Instead, it comes from years of failed efforts to see them more favorably. I can’t help that I found you irresistible but not them.  So it’s strange that you would hold this biological nature of mine against me. Well, I hope you understand me better now and that you realize that my desire for you was a valuable thing that you discarded without taking the time to understand it.

So how would you have me handle this? Should I have continued dating the heavy while passing up chances to spend time with the tall and thin ladies that I so dreamed of? I couldn’t do that with sincerity, and if that makes me an uncaring person in your eyes, then I’ll just have to live with that judgment, because I cannot change. I know I cannot change because I’ve tried relentlessly for years to change.  But at least, through all that effort, I deeply understand now that I can no longer lay with the Rubenesque while my heart longs for the slender.  I will not do that to either myself or them.

Sure. I care that they’re human beings. I care about them a lot, as human beings. But I can no longer forego my dreams by staying with them, while they fulfill theirs by being with me.

Yes, it’s a sad thing that so many guys pass by the pleasantly plump and that as a result, these women are often left alone. But that’s not my problem, for I cannot solve it unless I deny my own needs. Now honestly: Do you really think that a man should give up his dreams in order to make a woman happy that he does not desire? I do not, and if you do, then you’re coo coo.

Besides, even if I withhold from them what they want, others will still love them. Lots of guys adore frumpy females, and I’d be doing a disservice to them by clinging to one despite my true feelings against that. I’d be keeping a lady that I really don’t desire, from men who do want her. That seems wrong. Just because I reject her, doesn’t mean that she’s doomed to a life of chronic rejection from all other men. So don’t blame people like me for the loneliness and isolation often experienced by the heavy.

To me, the only way a person can ever achieve complete happiness is to know and accept his set of preferences for women unconditionally, and then spend his time seeking to fulfill them as they are. He’s merely spinning his wheels if he wastes valuable time trying to change what he wants.  Experience shows that such efforts in inner self makeover are doomed to fail, and result in lower self esteem and much frustration and profound deprivation. We really can’t easily change what we truly desire.  All we can do is either act to satisfy it or act to repress it, and I choose to go for it rather than deny it.

But instead of going after what we really want, we often second-guess our desires when we believe that they can be changed.  Then we never get around to actually fulfilling them. We question whether they are morally straight or unselfish enough to pursue. The result is that we end up going without what we want because we think it lame or immoral. Thus, we’re left perpetually unsure of ourselves and sadly, unfulfilled to boot. So it makes little sense to think of me as shallow or selfish, for I am what I am, and I want what I want. I can’t change that, and if you thought about this at any length, you’d probably discover that you can’t change your desires either.  Therefore, was it not wrong of you to fault me because I cannot change mine?

When we met, I knew what I wanted, and accepted that as unchangeable as my fingerprints. Whatever made you the goddess I saw working the stove that day, though I didn’t fully understand it, I cherished it. I was so thankful to have stumbled across our situation, where everything aligned perfectly. I was thankful for you. For the first time ever, I had this strong sense that I’d found a relationship that was as good as they get; I felt that I would never find another one better than ours. Even if ours would have gotten tough at times (which it didn’t), I would have stayed with it because I had this strong idea that no relationship would ever be better.

Now I understand why people hold on to what, to the outside word, looks like a doomed love affair. Perhaps they feel about their lovers as I felt about you; that no other person could make them feel as wonderful. The good times, if they’re really good, make it possible to weather the bad. We had good times like those, you and I, and if you hadn’t so completely cut me off, I would to this day, still love you.  I’m sure.

You mentioned their minds. You seemed to be saying that while we might not be able to pleasure ourselves from a person’s outsides, then we should be able to do so with what’s on the inside. But I wonder: Does it really make sense to split humans apart in this way? Mind Vs. body, physical appearance Vs. personality, Inner beauty Vs. outer beauty, and body Vs. soul. I don’t think so.

Perhaps you were upset because you thought I was placing too much value on your body and not enough on your mind. This idea is wrong because it’s not true that people who express interest in a person’s physical attributes have no regard for the person’s mind. I say that they can’t help but regard the mind since it’s the mind that animates an otherwise lifeless body. A body can’t very well be sexy without a mind controlling it in sexy ways. The mind and the body are fused into one in such extensive and broad-sweeping ways that it’s impossible to tell where the body ends and the mind begins when discussing sexual attraction. The ways in which the mind controls the body, along with the body’s shape work together to make the body sexy. You can’t have sexy without both of these working in harmony. So even when someone says that they like your sexy legs, they’re in fact saying so much more. Not only are they complimenting you on the shape of your legs, but they’re also admiring how you move them when you walk, or cross them when you sit down, and so on. They’re admiring your mind as well, just as I was admiring yours when I complimented you on your thinness. Again, I’m sorry you didn’t see my point of view more clearly. I would have gladly explained it to you if you hadn’t severed communications with me so abruptly and so completely.

If your anger at me stemmed from your pity for the heavy, then I think you underestimate how attractive some guys find them. Not everyone thinks them ugly. What about you? Do you think they’re ugly? Do you think you need to defend them because you seem them as ugly? Is this why you rose to their defense with such intensity and sharpness when I commented on how thankful I was that you were thin? If so, then perhaps you’re shallower than I. You did say that you were like me once. Perhaps you still are. The fact is that people’s tastes are not universal. Though admittedly, many prefer a healthy and thin mate, many choose the chubby. Some enjoy the pleasantly plump, and they worry about crushing someone who has too little meat on her bones. There are lots of married heavy folks. So they do a better job at mating than you give them credit for. Perhaps?

In light of the above, why do people expect others to love with a blind eye toward a person’s physical attributes? Do you expect this? Is this why you snapped at me, because I do not love with this blind eye? You know, it’s been said that you can tell a great deal about a person just from one drop of his blood. So if that’s true, then would not his appearance tell us so much more? After all, there’s much more of it than that drop of blood. At a glance we can deduce his general health and make some pretty good guesses about his life style and preferences. By listening to his cough, we’d know if he smokes or not, or has some lung disease that perhaps we should avoid. By smelling his scent over time, we can tell if he values cleanliness or if he is taking some medicines that alter his scent. A foul odor generally means poor health or at least, poor health practices on his part. By listening to his speech, we can learn much about his education level and the culture in which he was raised. By observing how heavy he is, we can figure out how much he likes to eat and what sorts of food. From his weight, we can also predict how healthy he’ll likely be in the future and how much he values good health besides. You’d agree I think, that a relationship with someone who does not value good health as we do would be difficult. So I say that with all this data, we can make wiser choices about whether this person would be a good mate. By paying attention to this data, we can avoid lots of wasted time by steering clear of relationships that would not be (could not be) what we want. Sometimes, you don’t need to actually get into a relationship with some to know that it would be bad if you did. I’ve learned over the years that relationships with the heavy don’t make me happy. So I hope you’ll forgive me when I turn away from them these days, without even giving them a try.

We don’t control who turns us on. Do you think I do, and because of this, do you think I can decide to be attracted to the heavy? Let me assure you. I don’t, and I can’t. Since I can’t control this, you’re wrong to judge me harshly for it. It was wrong of you to end our relationship without as little a single discussion. The reality is: What turns us on is a complex convergence of hundreds or thousands of variables that involve ourselves, our lovers, the genetics and upbringings of each, and the circumstances surrounding them. Perhaps a small number of these variables we control. But most we do not. Further, it’s usually not just one of these variables that makes us desire or not. This is why desire is so hard to manipulate. You’ve either got it by default or you don’t, and not all the makeup, hair color, fancy clothes, or perfume in the world will change that.

You had it with me and you didn’t have to try at all.

You know if I thought about you enough right now, I could bring a tear to my eye. Your sudden departure five years ago left a wound in my psyche that has not yet healed. Oh I don’t think of you very often. But when I do, there are still some strong emotions there and I always wish that things had worked out better. But I don’t regret complimenting you on your thinness; I’d do it over the exact same way. What I’d do differently though, would be to talk more to you before you sent me home. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the wherewithal back then to say what I’ve said in this letter. Let me ask you: Would this have made any difference? It seemed like you had made up your mind and that no amount of talking would have changed it.

Does it change anything now? I shouldn’t ask that because if you showed up in my life again tomorrow, I’m not in a position to respond to you. I have a wonderful girlfriend. [Emmy] never bolted on me and she always takes the time to listen to me. You didn’t do that. You handled the situation poorly and because you were so reckless with my heart, I don’t think I could ever fall in love with you again. Still though, when I look at the pictures you gave me, I wonder at what could have been, and regret that we didn’t get further than we did.

Well, thanks for listening. I needed to get this out. I hope that you’re doing well and that you’re not given to the sorts of too-quick reactions these days that drove us apart back then. I’ll just have faith that the experience grew you as well as it did me. Do take care and perhaps in the next life, we can try it again.

With love,
Tom Hesley

Hello.

It’s Tom here again with some background about me to help put this whole love quest thing into context.

Let’s see. I’m a 48 year old single white male. I never married, never had children, nor do I want to. I’m 5’ 8’’ tall at 179 pounds. Currently, I live where I grew up, in central, PA. However, in my working life of nearly 20 years, I’ve lived in Dayton, OH, Pittsburgh, PA, and Philadelphia, PA.

I began my education in public school. At that time, I lived at home with my parents and sisters, like most kids. But in third grade, I switched to a special needs school in Pittsburgh due to weak eyesight, which affected me since birth.

Well, if I had it my whole life you may ask, then why didn’t I switch schools sooner? Because the low vision did not lower my grades in the early years, and I liked being close to my family. The teachers in kindergarten through second grade accommodated me lovingly. They liked me and were eager to help. So my grades stayed very good, my self-confidence kept pretty high, and I got along well with the other kids.

But it got harder to keep up as the lessons grew more complicated, as they had in third grade. Kids teased me then about my thick glasses, threw rocks at me, and beat me up in the school yard at recess. I grew frustrated since I could no longer follow the training, and teachers grew impatient as I got angrier. I missed more and more of the lessons, as teachers taught more with chalk boards, overheads, and copies of their handwritten notes; which I could not read well without getting very close. If I was going to have any chance at a good education, I needed a different school; one equipped to handle low-vision kids like me. So, in February, 1970, I left the school across the street for, hopefully, a more positive learning experience in Pittsburgh.

Of course, this meant living much of the school year away from home since each way to Pittsburgh took more than two hours. So with the new school over a hundred miles away, I stayed there overnight during the week. The only times I saw my family were the weekends and on summer breaks. Initially, this adjustment hurt all of the family, and my Mom agonized for years over whether she should have sent me away. In the end though, we all agree that she chose wisely, and I’m grateful to her for sticking to it though she missed me and cried over it often. I cried too, especially on Sunday nights, for the first couple years. But I’m glad we all stuck with the new school, as it did what we’d hoped it would by giving me a second, much better chance at a decent education.

Though my vision is low, it’s always been stable, thank goodness. I have enough to be productive in many “sighted” activities. I read large print, take buses, and watch TV. I know what colors are. My favorite is a deep yet vibrant blue. I maintain the house, doing most repairs and enhancements myself. I fix computers, mow the lawn, do light construction, perform plumbing and electrical repairs, and I paint. I know how to use power tools like drills, saws, sanders, and heat guns. That great school in Pittsburgh taught me well how to better apply the vision I had to maximize my independence and productivity.

However, the biggest drawback of my reduced sight is that I cannot drive. This fact has complicated my love quest greatly since good old sweet sixteen. In fact, many women who’ve rejected me confirmed this. “I can’t date you,” they’d say with a tone that challenged my audacity to ask them out in the first place. “You don’t drive,” as though I should have known better than to seek their affections. Nonetheless, finding sustained pleasure in love remains my top priority. Though my eyes are weak, everything else is strong; including a desire to enjoy fulfilling erotic relationships.

The search has been hard for different reasons at different times. During high school, I struggled because there weren’t many girls there that I wanted. Why? The high school was small, with less than 150 boys and girls combined, and of all the girls, only four to six interested me romantically. Of these, three were too old. Plus, the remaining three were quite popular with the other boys. Thus, competition was fierce, leaving the pickings quite slim. So I had few dates in high school, and no one ever asked me out first.

I was also quite shy. The prettiest girls scared me most. The more I wanted them, the more I feared approaching them. This meant that the girls I desired most were the least likely to know that I wanted them. I never quenched my teenage thirst for great sex. Not until well after finishing high school (which, in retrospect, was probably a good thing), did I ever score. Looking back on that time from here in 2009, I’m glad I didn’t have sex and am thankful that I never got anyone pregnant. But in the 70s, I hated this abstinence forced on me as it was by the circumstances at the school, by what some described as my average looks, and my own fears.

My fear seemed my worst enemy. So, I spent the first decade or two of my love quest, trying to rid myself of it; striving first to understand it, then learning how to beat it, and finally, once I realized that I couldn’t beat it, learning to happily live with it. I’ll share how this came about in upcoming episodes.

Fear turned out to be quite the foe. I could neither silence it with alcohol, nor marijuana, nor a hundred self-help books, nor direct confrontation, and not with years of psychotherapy. Fear has been such an encompassing and basic part of my conscience that eliminating it completely proved impossible. So I’ve not destroyed it. However, I do go after what I want, even though the fear accompanies me everywhere. I negotiate with it and sometimes, it allows me to speak.

I’ve made peace with fear, and learned to tell my desires to women, not so much in spite of it, but rather through working with it. What do I mean by that? Well nowadays, I see fear as a protective parent or older brother, watching over and guiding me, using its strong but gentle hand to steer me away from situations likely to be fruitless. But I didn’t discover until well into adulthood that fear almost never the bad guy, and there are times when it does not restrain me, even around the tallest, thinnest, most attractive women. Sometimes, it allows me to approach. And those situations were the most likely to turn into full-blown, happy relationships; more so than when I chose to ignore it and press on without considering its counsel. Few (if any) times where I defied my fear ever turned out good. In retrospect, I should have listened to it more that I did. It has wisdom and so it knows when the women like me and when they don’t, and it permits me to approach those that do and pushes me away from those who’d rather I fly a kite. I’ve come to understand how that works and I hope you’ll check out future episodes for more details.

Though in my teens, fear kept me away from almost every pretty girl, at times I rose above it and made my interest known. However, usually the very thing happened that I feared: They rejected me and threw in some distain and jeers for good measure. My fear knew what it was talking about when it said, “Stay clear of this one.” Nonetheless, I enjoyed some potent romantic times. A few girls said yes. A few girls, my fear permitted me to seek out.

One case was our tenth grade prom. That date turned out to be perhaps the best romantic date I ever had before or since. I asked this female employee if she’d go with me. When she agreed, I almost fainted with thrill. The date turned out well and even today, I remember most every minute of it. But because I was a minor (sixteen at the time), she wouldn’t go out with me again. And by the time I came of age, she had left the school and I, in this pre-Internet era, could not locate her though I tried.

Besides the prom date, I had a “first love” and it was in eleventh grade that my passion for her really ignited. But for various reasons, anxiety tainted that association because her first love was someone other than me, and, I knew it. Plus, she and I had very different values. I was too young to understand that intellectually, although my conscience got it loud and clear. And so, at least during high school, we never connected romantically; although I daydreamed about her often during class, as I watched her much more than I paid attention to the teacher. She was just so beautiful, and I’m certain I failed a few exams due to focusing too much on her.

She and I had a few encounters. But she’d never come as my date to school activities. True, we’d dance sometimes and she’d let me hold her hand once every several blue moons, though she never squeezed back. She’d allow me to nuzzle her shoulder during a slow dance. But her arms only rested on my shoulders; never drawing me closer. Not in high school anyhow. Once in a while, she’d even come out with me for pizza or movie, at my prompting of course. But she never invited me to go with her anywhere. Any activity where we’d be announced as a couple, she rejected. In fact, I had asked her to our tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade proms as well as numerous dances and field trips. But she always said no, though she said yes to others. This hurt, and the pains of her repeated,  chronic rejections followed me though many of the early years of my love quest. Let’s just call her   [First Love].   She really was that and to me, because   [First Love]   always came first. I would have taken her to the tenth grade prom. But I took the employee instead, since   [First Love]   rejected me. Nowadays, I don’t see the employee lady as second best even though she was not my first choice, because I ended up falling in love with her afterwards, once I realized just how memorable that prom date was. Still though, my feelings for   [First Love]   never wavered and I would continue chasing her for many years; long after the employee departed, and long after high school ended.

Of course I did more than just quest for a girlfriend as a student. I enjoyed repairing electronic devices and dabbling in amateur radio; I loved anything electronic. Additionally, I worked several little jobs as a teen, which included a kitchen helper, a telephone switchboard operator, and receptionist. I sold Christmas trees each December to raise funds for the school, and I played music at our dances. I also managed the school radio station and interned at KDKA radio in 12th grade. These jobs made me feel important and confident, and this I thought, gave me a leg up on the competition for girls. Though I loved the fun of this work, I did it to attract more girls as well. The jobs paid money and as I saw it, girls liked money and guys who had it. So anything I could do to make more of it, I did.

Electronics, specifically radio, fascinated me. This was a good thing too because aside from a few friendships, it was the only pursuit that distracted me from feeling sad for not having a girlfriend. I cried often after seeing girls I wanted hanging out with men I deemed beneath me. Yet those girls avoided me like I was beneath them! They seemed to view me as badly as I did their loser boyfriends. They saw me as the loser, and those losers as winners. Go figure. I didn’t get it. How they could want those cads and not me? I thought this was because I appeared ugly to them. Indeed, some of them said this to me. But over all, I didn’t believe them. So, I kept pressing for a good date. True, I got frustrated often for not finding good ones. But never did I consider my looks a curse, nor did I obsess over them.

I rarely used cologne or dressed up, and did little to enhance my appearance beyond the daily bathing, shaving, nail cutting, hair grooming, teeth brushing, and wearing clean clothes and deodorant. I was secure about my looks even though some said I was plain and unappealing. I never wore designer clothes, gold necklaces, or name brand shoes because I was fine and whole without them. Indeed, as I looked in the mirror to straighten my hair, I liked the guy looking back. He was reasonably handsome with much going for him, and he should be able to attract the girls he liked. Yet in high school, no girl ever desired him back. They laughed as he passed or scurried away on the street as they walked arm-in-arm with their thuggish boyfriends; those guys with the rap sheets that terrorized us civilized folk. The girls preferred these “bad boys” to him. To me: me who never had a police record; me, who got drunk only seven times in high school; me, who never beat up anyone; me, who had better grades; and me who had the promise of a good career in electronics. All these good things that I had, those losers did not. So what did they have that drove the girls wild? With all the jobs and good performing I was doing, I thought I should have been more attractive than the losers. But the girls disagreed. The fact that I wasn’t confounded and confused me, and I’d spend many an hour pondering why this was so through the rest of my love quest.

My powerlessness to answer led me through years of depression, which stretched way beyond high school, and sometimes, affects me to this very day. But as I entered adulthood, electronics kept me sane and made all this bearable. It gave me something besides dating to focus on. While studying, I could forget the nasty looks and words from pretty girls. So, I continued studying radio and TV repair into the mid 80s.

In fact, upon my 1979 graduation, I attended trade school for two years. There as well as at the school for blind children, I only saw a few ladies at Connelley that I liked, but more than in high school. There weren’t many female students in the electronics classes, although the school taught other subjects that drew more just down the hall. Still, I was too scared to approach any ladies. I liked one woman in my advanced electronics class. As usual though, I was too afraid to tell her. But she figured it out after catching me watching her a few times. Flattered she was, but not interested in dating me. So while I did well in trade school scholastically, I had still made no love connections. No matter though because two months after graduation in 1981, I was onto my next adventure; my first full-time job.

In August, I got a temporary job as an electronics technician, also in Pittsburgh. The first few months were hectic because I had no direct supervisor to teach me about the equipment I’d be repairing. There was no senior technician because that fellow had taken ill some months earlier. With him gone, his office soon filed up with hundreds of broken audio visual devices. So once that pile got real big, they felt compelled to bring in someone temporary to repair some it. So they hired me.

I was all alone with this mountain of malfunctioning projectors, TV monitors, and video cassette recorders. My mission: To fix it all. It was nice though, because no one pressured me. They understood that I, fresh from trade school and the only technician there, was in way over my head. Soon however, I could repair three to six items per day once I learned how things worked and how to order parts. Fortunately, most projects were simple — such as frayed power cords, broken belts, missing knobs, and burned out lights. Yet, there was much to do, simple though it was.

As in trade school, again I feared failing and so, spent many extra hours at the office and took home manuals to read over the weekends. I so wanted not to screw it up. Thus until the senior technician returned, I didn’t have time to think about women. I was all about the job at that point.

But ten weeks after I started, the boss man returned. I thought that I’d be laid off. However, the directors liked my work so much that they voted to keep me on to assist, until we finished fixing that massive pile of equipment. With two guys working, it soon disappeared. Then, they asked me to stay for over a year more, and I soon realized that I didn’t have to work so hard to please them. So I had time to resume my love quest, and resume it I did.

Four ladies at work caught my eye. I was still too afraid to say to ladies that I liked them directly. So I’d let them know by just hanging around them until they got it. Then, either they’d pull me aside and say that they knew I was interested and that they’d love to go out (which never happened at that job). Or they’d say sadly that they already had boyfriends and that, while they’d love to go out, they couldn’t. This always happened. I wrung out all four ladies this way, and you guessed it. None were available. So, with no one there left to pursue, that familiar ache of loneliness soon came back again. The excitement of the new job along with the hope of meeting a special lady there was gone.

To cope, I sought religion. Perhaps while following this story, you’ve wondered about my religious background. So let me say that I am neither religious nor spiritual these days. Though raised Catholic, as I matured, believing in things through sheer faith became impossible; especially once my beloved and devout grandmother passed away in 1980. I’ve always been a terrible follower, and so believed in nothing in my early twenties, simply because another said I should. I’m a concrete guy, and so, must sense it for myself to believe it with conviction. However, all of that notwithstanding, as a young adult I attended church often. In 1982, church was good. The people welcomed me and that felt nice. But it was just a distraction, for it left my heart still empty once the services were over. I enjoyed that temporary respite though, because anything (even church) was better than sitting at home on a pretty Sunday morning, alone, with nothing to do. With each passing year, I grew less and less spiritual. But it would be fourteen more years until I completely dismissed the church as a useful means to feel less lonely for having no lovers.

My interest in church came in spits and spurts. So after several months, church lost its appeal as this particular spurt came to an end. I knew that I’d probably not meet my lady there because all of them seemed to believe more strongly than I in God. The whole speaking-in-tongues thing and the faith-healing was just plain crazy to me, and so I could not respect women who believed so strongly without proof. Blind Faith and I never got along, and so I felt guilty attending. Parishioners questioned me about why I was going and suggested I stop until I “saw the light.” So I did stop going regularly in late 1982 once I realized that love questing in church would probably be a fruitless endeavor.

Currently, I’m agnostic – neither believing nor disbelieving in God. He may be out there. He may not. I can’t prove it either way; nor can anyone else for that matter. That’s good enough for me, but not so for women at large who generally believe in a greater entity that regulates their lives and helps them succeed when they follow his rules. They call me a humanist and one even said that I was a son of the devil and kept her children away from me, fearing that I’d corrupt their views about heaven and hell and how God wants us to serve him. I fear not the possibility of no life after death as they do. I’m fully prepared to embrace this if it turns out that way. But without strong faith and hope in a life hereafter, the love quest got harder; not because God was thwarting me, but because the women I encountered looked down on me for questioning. Staying true to my beliefs has cost me dearly in my love quest.

Long ago, I stopped arguing religion. Nonetheless, when I was a stronger believer in the 70s and early 80s, I spent hours a week praying to God, asking him to brighten my dark heart, and bring the woman of my dreams to me. Well, he never did, even after two decades of praying. Indeed I’ve done better in my search by myself, once I stopped believing that he’d do it for me. God was not going to win my love quest for me. No, if this would ever happen, I’d have to do it myself.

But I digress. So let me get back to my job.

Eighteen months into the job, in the spring of 1983, I realized that I could not earn the money I wanted fixing home entertainment devices. Nor had I found a true love at Pitt. It didn’t look like I would either, for I had quickly run through all the women in mine and surrounding departments. Like I said, none would date me. Though I made my own money, aloneness still followed me everywhere. Thus far, the women weren’t impressed with my achievements, hard to achieve as they were, and successful as I was at achieving them.

So when that tech position ended, I went in a new direction; to college for computer programming, a career that promised a higher wage, and would bring more desirable ladies to me, which it eventually did. But during the first two years, I made only three new friends because I was a bookworm. As usual, I was terribly afraid of failing, and since I’d been out of high school for nearly five years, rusty in my reading and writing skills too. So, besides the usual college level work, I also had to relearn many of those forgotten skills. This left little time for socializing between 1984 and 1986, as I spent most every hour outside of class studying. Even the summers were full in those days, as I took my Calculus courses during the first two summers, computer classes in 1986, and a writing class in 1987. Actually, I’m glad I didn’t meet a lady then, because I’d have surely flunked out. There wouldn’t have been time for managing both an education and a relationship although occasional sex without strings was nice.

I longed for my dream girl just the same. So much so, that I visited my first psychotherapist in the fall of 1986. For nine months, we met each week, and though I couldn’t put my finger on any particular insights I got, I did start feeling better about being alone, and less afraid to talk to college women. At times in therapy, I just wanted to get rid of the desire for women rather than satisfy it. No doubt you’re wondering, “How could you want something, and then wish that you didn’t?” Well, at this time the rewards in my love quest were so few, and the disappointment so great, that the longing had become painful, leading me into many humiliating situations and leaving me feeling ashamed. Often women reacted so negatively when I showed them interest that I began feeling that my desires were wrong. At 25 years of age, I believed that though the world was full of beautiful women, none would ever think me beautiful.

Now a few women agreed to date me. So I could attract some, but not those I really desired. I was so disenchanted with the love quest by then, that I’d have been relieved to find that why hadn’t yet found Her was simply because no such person existed. At least that way, my aloneness could not be my fault. That would have been easier to swallow than the idea that there might be some correctable thing wrong with me that was keeping them away.

The therapist listened patiently, offering a consoling voice. I liked discussing the love quest with someone who understood my pains of loneliness and the dilemmas of how to satisfy it. But he refused to assure me that She was just a figment of my imagination. He also assured me profusely that I was not defective in any way, even with my low vision. He thought that She was out there and that I just had to find her. He thought I was fine and that if I was going to ever find Her, I’d have to search harder and smarter. I’ll tell you how I did these things in upcoming episodes.

Therapy encouraged me to intensify my love quest efforts, though I left it with more questions than I had going in. I don’t know how. But even with those questions unanswered, I was, while not cured, markedly better. Maybe it was the therapist’s cheering me on or his unwavering confidence in me. I’m not sure. But I felt more confident asking ladies out. I had achieved the objective of that therapy, which was to get more women into my life. That therapy gave me a big push that got me very far along the journey of my love quest.

Meanwhile back at college, I also improved at the coursework, which meant that I could study less. So in the fall of 1986, I joined a computer users group of sixty students. We sent email back and fourth, and met each other for meals between classes. At night we partied, and so I drank back then, quite a bit. I was known for carrying this round black bottle that had the words “Get Bombed” printed in white letters on the side. I’d fill it with a quart of Jim Beam whiskey and take to many a gathering. In fact, this flask looked like a bomb and the girls seemed charmed by my tipsy displays as I held onto it. I did make a couple close female friends from all that. Yet this life style was not quite what I was after. I wanted them to like me for the sober me; not the intoxicated version. But thinking that I’d have to sacrifice my values a little to get what I wanted, I went along with the drinking for a good while. I attended all sorts of college parties, visited bars, dances, festivals, and hung around the student union, looking for ladies who would come to my bed and please me.

But, with my collegiate education nearly complete, I thought I might have to leave Pittsburgh for a job. So, I avoided serious relationships, though I ached for one. I knew that if I found it, that it would only be temporary. But I didn’t care. Anything would be better than nothing, even a one-night stand. Also, the ladies I met, while very nice, either did not attract me or vice versa. Yes, that same problem once more. I always seemed to interest the ones I didn’t care about. Nonetheless, I made lots of lady friends; a real change from life before college. So while college didn’t drop a dream girl in my lap, it, along with therapy, moved me closer to Her, for I had more female friends and was asking more of them out than ever before. The odds of finding Her thus, had improved much.

While I asked more for dates than ever before in a given year, I also got more love rejections. In a way, this was also rewarding. Rejections were better than nothing at all, as they proved that I had begun to master my fear of approaching ladies. The more rejections I got I reasoned the less afraid of ladies I must be. So the chronic rejections themselves became a measure of success in my love quest. At least now, I was hunting, trying different approaches, and acquiring the emotional scars to show it. So at last, in college, I finally managed to break out of my shell.

I finished school in 1988, with a Bachelors degree in Computer Science along with a minor in mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh; the same place I’d worked some five years earlier. From there, I went on to spend fifteen years, working as a software engineer for a fortune 500 company.

My hope that the computer field would bring more women into my life came true. Indeed, during my first two years, I met hundreds of women; more than in my entire adult life prior. Now that I had more money than ever, I could afford to try dating services, attend weekend-getaways, and go to dances and meetings with singles groups. I signed up for my first dating service immediately after cashing my first big paycheck. I then applied for a second one a year later.

Then in 1992, I bought a nice home after a few sweet raises. This, I thought, would surely impress the ladies and I was certain that only a little more time stood between me and my dream girl, who would, at any moment, waltz right in and complete my life. In fact, I bought an extra-large refrigerator, reserved space for her things in my bedroom alongside my king sized waterbed, and saved a spot in the garage for her car.

One day in 1994, a neighbor called as I was sealing my back deck, and invited me to his church. Eager to bond with my new neighbors, I forgot about why I had abandoned church in 1982, and I went with him, just to check it out. To my surprise, I found lots of eligible women. But soon, just as had happened some twelve years earlier, II quickly grew bored with it. I was no more a believer in 1994 than I had been in 1982. The truth was, I wasn’t there to worship. Instead, I went to meet women. That was it, and they knew it quickly. Once again, none would go out with me. Another strategy tried in the love quest, and another one failed.

Meanwhile, at work, I asked over a hundred ladies for dates, hoping that now that I was in my own home, they’d surely say yes. I invited them for lunch and hosted a couple team-building sessions and parties, so that all would see how well I was doing and appreciate how good a provider I could be. They came, they complimented me, and some stayed a couple hours. They liked my house and how well I kept it. But in the end, like my latest church stint, the big house and good salary never won any hearts. So no one ever parked her car in my garage. No one ever put her underwear in those empty drawers in my bedroom. No one ever brought any food to keep in my refrigerator for her next visit. I had instead, this cold draft that I felt against my face every night I ascended the steps to the second-floor master bedroom; a daily reminder that no one was up there waiting for me, and that no one I’d met so far wanted to be up there. So, after four years, with my dressers, garage, refrigerator, and heart still empty, I came to the conclusion that once again, a big change would be necessary to move me ahead in my love quest. I could not turn that great house into a wonderful home full of love thought I put every spare hour I had into the quest. I began feeling tethered to that house and soon, came to hate it there.

So in 1996, in that final year in the house, I came to look forward to Mondays and dread Fridays while my coworkers felt the opposite. They couldn’t wait for Fridays but hated Mondays. Why was I so different? Because I knew that come Friday, I’d likely spend the entire weekend alone, and that come Monday, I’d at least have people around me again when the new work week began. The loneliness burned in my heart. Career-wise I’d come so far. But socially, I ached as much as ever for sustained eroticism, and love.

As fate had it, I discovered Philadelphia, a city with way more single women. Some friends from there invited me to visit. So in December, 1996 I went, and loved it from the minute I arrived. Pretty ladies adorned every city block downtown. Plus, with the extensive public transportation, I could get to the social spots much easier than where I was currently living in Ohio. So, it didn’t take long to decide to sell my house and move there.

The Philly move turned out to be another big step forward in the love quest. For the first time, I could access thousands of women easily, without transportation worries. So I made friends, went to bars, boat trips, restaurants, skating parties, a trip to New York City, and any event I could to place myself among potential mates. One day even, I had two dates; one in the afternoon, and one that night. Each weekend, I’d pick a spot in the city, and then learn how to get there on the bus or train, and then go there, striking up conversations with beautiful strangers along the way. The thrill of learning a new city kept me from feeling too lonely, for the first year at least.

But after three plus years there, and only a few delightful but short-lived relationships (Cathy, Violet, Carol, Joyce, Karen, [Vee],   [Lynn],   [Tina],   Joanna), I was still alone. Now I did meet more women per year in Philly than in any other place prior, and I did have a few wonderful erotic encounters. During my last year there in 2001, I asked at least a thousand women to dance, and also launched numerous campaigns on the online and telephone dating services, where I contacted thousands more. I approached more women than ever that year. However, all but ten rejected me flat. And of those that agreed to meet me, only four wanted a second date. And of those romances, none lasted longer than a few months and all but one fizzled after just a few weeks. So while the move to Philly provided the target-rich environments I sought to move further in my quest, I left there in December of 2001 empty-handed, unfulfilled, and extremely disappointed. I was fresh out of ideas of what to try next and didn’t even want to try anymore.

This love quest had by this time cost me lots of money too! There was the move from Ohio, the loss of money when I sold the house, and all the household stuff I had to just about give away so I could downsize from that four-bedroom, two-story house with a double garage, to a two-bedroom apartment in a high rise building. Also in Philadelphia, the quest cost the most as I paid for most all my dates as well as my own drinks and transportation to the various hot spots around town. My desire for companionship was strong as ever, but after three decades, I still had no idea how to get it. I felt I had to do something radical but wasn’t sure what. But then, fate laid another clue in my path.

During my last year in Philly, I started having problems at work. The job was getting harder, I received no raises my last two years there. To add insult to injury, I still had not found my dream girl after thirteen years of building that career and the wealth that went with it. That’s when I surmised that corporate life was not for me anymore. All the hard work and extra hours to build a happy, successful life had not paid off though I had done everything a fellow was supposed to do to succeed. I got educated, held a good job for a long time, and set up several great living quarters. Unfortunately, ladies never lingered, if they even came at all.

I grew weary of the increasing pressures to step up my work performance. While I liked the raises and promotions which were more plentiful during the 90s, I found the rewards emptier and harder to get, the higher in the company I got. Working harder just didn’t make sense eventually, since all I had when I turned off the computer was an empty, cold dwelling. My place.

So the question occurred: Why fight so for a career whenever only cold rooms, a quiet kitchen, and an empty bed were my reward each night? I couldn’t answer this except to say that I shouldn’t. I understood that I couldn’t fix whatever was keeping her away, while working myself to death as a senior software engineer. I also knew that finding her was more important than anything, including making lots of money as a corporate big shot. Life was marching on too, as I was already well into my forties without having solved my happiness problem. So I promised myself in the summer of 2001 to either find my dream girl or die trying. If that meant devoting full time to the quest, then that’s what I would do.

It would be some months before I appreciated fully what that promise meant. But I knew right off that I’d have to free up lots of time to work on me. I would need to quit my job and learn once more how to live cheaply, at least until I found Her. But I agonized over doing this because the job treated me better financially than I could do on my own; guaranteeing me a spot among the middle class as long as I kept working. Plus, after reading hundreds of thousands of ladies’ profiles on the dating sites, it was clear that lots of women find richer men more attractive than those with modest incomes. So quitting would exclude me from consideration by many attractive women and thus, set me way back in my love quest. These and other truths made leaving one of the toughest choices I’ve ever made.

I suspected that I’d never find another position that paid as well; at least not initially. But so what? What good was the money if I wasn’t happy? Money had not made me happy to date. In fact, the joy of having it did not counterbalance the hardship of earning it. In the end, I was indeed worse for the wear.

True. The job qualified me for, and surrounded me with, lots of women. But simply being among ladies and having lots of money in my pocket and a nice suburban home was not enough. While the job exposed me to more women, the fact that I had it did not interest the ladies, any more than did my previous endeavors. They still saw me as, at best, too plain, and at worst, too ugly to date. The job with all its trimmings therefore, did not end this now-monotonous love quest.

Plus, and most sadly, women still looked down their noses at me, the same as they had twenty-five years earlier in high school. The fact that I was now earning close to ninety thousand dollars a year didn’t matter. The results of my approaches had remained essentially the same as it was in my teens. Zilch. I was still as lonely as I’d been in the 70s, yet still just as eager to win at love. Working so hard at a career just hadn’t gotten me where I thought it should, and I was ready to give it up in order to try something different.

So, in late 2001 I began preparing to resign: I saved money, moved back home with Mom, fixed up her house while I still had my software engineer’s salary, and spent thousands of hours journaling and mentally turning myself inside out. I looked for ways to change for the better, all the while seeking tools I could use to finally end my love quest victoriously.

This effort became my full-time job. Everything else, including my real job became a distraction. I substituted self-help books about relationships and dating for computer and software manuals. In the evening, time that I’d normally spend working extra hours on some programming project, I instead spent trolling the Internet for ideas and dates. My day job had become second priority, especially after business hours. Imagine that!

Now I’d planned to keep working for three years once I knew that I’d be leaving. But as the first of those years progressed, the job changed into an irritating distraction from my true purpose. That purpose, which I now understood since making the promise to myself in 2001, was to finally win the love quest. I wanted to really give the quest my all.

Though I had given up the extra hours, I was still putting too much time into the job, and too little into finding fulfillment in love. Not only did I wish to spend my evenings and weekends working the quest, but wanted to throw in the forty regular weekly work hours as well. As usual, the loneliness which had been with me since the age of twelve continued pounding at my soul, and I was getting really tired of it, and more eager than ever to find relief. From my history of many things tried and many things failed, I figured that I wouldn’t silence its doleful voice unless I could fully focus on it – something I’d never really done before. What else could I do?
It seemed like I’d done everything else. Let’s see. As I mentioned earlier, I:
• Acquired a good self image,
• Reduced my teenage fears of talking to women.
• Held jobs all through grade school and high school,
• Stayed out of serious trouble,
• Successfully completed high school and trade school,
• Held an electronics technician job for nearly two years,
• Completed psychotherapy,
• Joined the computer users group in college,
• Successfully completed college,
• Got a good job,
• Owned a nice home,
• Learned how to maintain a home,
• Attended singles groups and churches,
• Approached more than ten thousand women,
• Achieved a respected status at work,
• Earned close to ninety thousand dollars a year at the end,
• Which enabled me to give a lady a very good time,
• I avoided drugs and immoral behavior,
• I was stable and kind,
• Threw myself into lots of new environments and cultures throughout the quest so I might find the best areas in which to search.

But the one thing I hadn’t done so far was to completely devote my entire life to the pursuit. Up to this point, the love quest had always been more of a hobby; one that I worked during weekends and sometimes on weeknights. I’d never really gone at it full tilt before. Yet I knew that I would never be as happy as I could be unless I could find Her, and I was convinced that the way to do that the most effectively, was to sink every last waking hour into the search and into fixing myself.

So it came about some fifteen months after I began executing my plan to resign, that I did indeed quit. Was this too early? Perhaps. True. I didn’t make it to the end of 2004 as in the plan. I actually resigned in March of 2003. Nonetheless, I managed to pay off all debts and finish all the maintenance projects on Mom’s home too. I cancelled any magazine and music subscriptions I no longer needed, hauled away a ton of junk, and began saving coupons. This resignation was a pivotal moment in my love quest, and I’ll discuss more about this difficult choice in future episodes as well as what happened subsequently.

An all-time approach to this problem (as opposed to a full-time or part-time approach) proved to be grueling. So I devised a few diversions. One was part time DJing. Others included writing, computer repair, reading a lot, buying and selling on eBay, and watching classic movies. I enjoy watching Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Joy Browne as well, as my philosophies generally align with theirs. I’ve written numerous articles and stories which are, as of yet, unpublished. But they will be, in this blog and podcast. I’ll share some of my best works, which center on the quest. In fact, most of them do actually. Also, as in high school, I still enjoy ham radio, and hold an extra class Amateur Radio license (my call sign is N8UBU). Also, I got certified by Microsoft as an expert on various versions of their Windows operating system. Nowadays, I’m butler and caregiver for my Mom, who is recovering from open-heart surgery. I just finished re-plumbing her house last March and installing a wooden banister alongside the bridge from the parking lot into the side walk, so she has something to hold on to when entering. I do keep busy, which is one way of reducing the feelings of emptiness I discussed earlier. It’s not a cure. But it is good, temporary relief.

Perhaps my love quest talks will sound humanist or Buddhist in that they encourage us to tap our own inner strengths rather than looking to greater, outside, and improvable forces. This is my mantra now and it is an essential premise in my philosophy throughout the love quest. This should help clarify why I chose as I have as well as why I’ve tried doing much of it myself.

Through no other force than my own hard work and lady luck, I think I’ve found Her. But I’m not sure. I’ve enjoyed a wonderful relationship with [Emmy] for going on six years now, and prefer this association far over being alone. We get along quite well; we’re lucky if we fight once a year, and even then, we never yell at each other. We always maintain respect for each other and never go to bed mad. Although we have problems sexually that we’re working on currently, [Emmy] is among the most caring and understanding woman I’ve known. I have 95% of the relationship I’ve sought, and feel that once we work out the issues of eroticism, I’ll officially be able to end my love quest.

So since I’ve not yet actually won the love quest, I admit that I’m no expert. So while you’ll see many success stories here, you’ll see much sadness and despair as well. Indeed, the bulk of my experiences have been sad, sorry to say. For every one hour of joy I’ve experienced in my quest, I’ve probably had a hundred hours of pain and disappointment. In my search, sorrow has been a big part of the reality. Many have suggested that I express more of the joys than the sorrows. But to preserve the truest essence of my quest, I must relate completely my sad times because as painful as they were, they made it possible for me to have the good times that I do now. So I’d trade none of those sorrowful years away.

Not all the stories are sad. There are many pleasant ones. I’ll tell you about my introspections and the changes to my philosophy and approach to the problem that enabled me to reduce depression. In short, I’ll let you know how I learned to cope with being alone. Merely coping however is not ideal. So I’ve not given up. I hope through this blogcast that I can persuade those of you who have abandoned your search, to keep trying. In 2001, I declared that I would either win at this game, or die trying. You’ll need this same resolve if you’re ever going to experience true happiness, and I hope that through sharing my experiences and insights, that they’ll help you find the resolve to press on yourself.

I am no psychologist and have little formal training in this subject. My writings come not from any large-scale clinical studies or other systemic techniques for deducing human behavior. They come however, from my own three plus decades of experience chasing “the perfect woman”. So any advice I give should be considered no more than inspirational, and is not intended to replace bona fide professional help. This blog is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be construed as anything other than me, telling my story of my love quest.

What is “the perfect woman,” you ask? Well, stick around and I’ll tell you about my vision of her. But not now. However, I will tease you and say that the word “perfect” here does not mean absolutely without flaws. More on that in future episodes, along with much more about the struggle to find perfection and the many strategies I’ve tried, to get it.

So thanks very much for stopping by and I hope you’ll visit again soon. There’s lots more to say.

Tom Hesley
http://tomhesley.com/

A while back, I recorded an introduction for a chat line in Philadelphia. I described myself and listed my favorite activities — reading, programming, watching Star Trek, and the like. I said I wanted to meet tall thin women, and it didn’t take long for the hate messages to come. You’d think I’d threatened the pope! They called me shallow, superficial, and lame, and these are the nicest words. Even some thin women complained.

But what they didn’t get is that I can’t help what I like, and I like thin. Real thin. I learned this the hard way over two decades of dating the heavy. So I never want to try that again. I’m no bigot, but do wish to avoid any more disappointing experiences like those I’ve had already, dating “big and beautiful” ladies.

I’ve tried to see beauty where I wouldn’t find it. Often I dated the frumpy, the stocky, the plump, and the obese, only to find no excitement when they finally reached my bed. In all cases, I suspected at the instant we met that this would be the outcome. But I didn’t trust my opinion as a young adult and didn’t want anyone to say that I hadn’t given the relationship a fair chance. So against my better judgment, I waded into these murky waters. Then I struggled to get back out, because I felt guilty over hurting the women. I’d take months to work up the courage to say good-bye, feeling lousy about them and myself all the while. A couple times, I had to seek professional help to break away. What a waste of time, and money!

Though I found the Rubenesque unattractive, I had compassion for them nonetheless. Seeing them cry as I jilted them really tugged at my heart strings. But ultimately, it came down to either their happiness or mine, and though I struggled with this often, eventually therapy helped me to chose mine and make a break.

I’ve always been more attracted to the petite. Even as a boy of five or six, my eyes followed the lanky lady teachers around the classroom as my ears savored their every word. I wanted to hear what they had to say, and I got better grades as a result. I listened more to those with the ostrich legs, but slept more in buxom teachers’ classes. Or I’d peer out the windows, bored to tears. I didn’t choose to feel as I did. I just did.

There’s nothing immoral about a desire particularly when it’s the product of evolution and, not chosen. So please! Don’t punish me for my wants. They are after all, my nature.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Water Park Musings: 2010-06-02

Dear [Melinda],

But before I get to that, I’d like to make some initial comments.  I wanted to include a few definitions (for the words pity, compassion, and empathy) here for your consideration. Just follow the links to see them.

• Definition for Compassion
• Definition for Empathy
• Definition for Pity

Given these definitions, I’m curious.  You have described yourself with pride seven times during our conversations of late, as an empathic person.  Now it seems to me that compassion is but one small step further toward the display of the purest forms of kindness.  So let me pose the following questions:

• If it’s really true that you can effectively identify with the feelings and situational stresses of others (you are empathic), then I’m puzzled as to why you object so vehemently to he who asks others to show him understanding and compassion; particularly when that person’s hardships are well-documented?  When a person asks for help, he takes the guesswork out of empathy because the empathic need not figure out what he really needs if he’s forthright about it.  As an Empath, wouldn’t his frankness about his limitations make your job of walking in his shoes easier?  If it would, then why would you such admissions so abhorrent?
• Is it possible to be maximally empathic if you’ve never experienced a particular hardship?  For example, could you really understand what someone else is going through if you’ve never dealt with their difficulties yourself?  Perhaps to a degree.  I mean, we can certainly be kind to those so troubled without really knowing their suffering first-hand.  We need have never experienced a cold night sleeping on a Philly street for example, to know that he who does this suffers immensely.  But what about those hardships that aren’t so universally well-comprehended by the mainstream population?  Examples of these include: Mental retardation, most forms of mind sickness, and autism.  Would you be as empathic toward someone whose hardship you did not understand?   I ask this because I’ve noted that people (not you specifically) who boast of their empathy often come up short when asked to assist others that carry the most profound hardships.  I wonder if you’d therefore be so opposed to my pity-soliciting letter if you’d ever experienced legal blindness and bore the stigmas associated with it yourself?  This is strictly a non rhetorical question.
• Why would a person take such pride in his empathy, yet react with such disgust when another asks him to demonstrate his empathy by showing kindness to (or to pity) him?  I ask this, not to put you down, but rather to acquire a better understanding of my own discomforts surrounding the sending of this request for special dispensation to women.  Intellectually, I have no problem with my argument.  That is to say: When one is truly in need and has spent decades attempting to fulfill that need on his own but with only marginal success, then there’s nothing wrong with him asking for extra help  But emotionally, I’m not convinced.  Understanding your aversion to pity-seeking might help me eliminate my apprehension about doing it.  Either that, or I’ll learn that this is not something I really want to do.  I suspect that both our discomforts are based more in cultural more’ and superstition than solid fact-based reasoning.  Simply put:  There’s really no good reason for our objections except that most others find asking for and accepting pity distasteful. 
• Compassion and pity are perhaps the finest outgrowths of empathy.  That is: They give meaning to its admirable quality, just as the thrills of spending money and the personal betterment that such spending affords make it appealing.  People want money because spending it wisely improves their quality of living.  If one could never spend his money, what would be the point in working so hard to earn it?  Likewise with empathy.  What practical value is empathy that results in no visible acts of kindness?  Is empathy just a trophy that we keep inside the display case and boast about but never take out and demonstrate?  Empathy as I see it is a frame of mind that creates the motivation necessary for reaching out and exerting sustained energy to help the needy.  If one never extends a gentle hand however, particularly when he is asked to do so, then I submit that the presence of empathy in his heart means nothing.  Empathy in and of itself is no more than a good intention, and so it cannot by itself augment a person’s appearance of goodness to others.  Only his actions can do that.  So if he has empathy but does no kindness with it, then he might as well not have it at all.  Without its external manifestations (kindly, understanding acts), empathy is reduced to a trite triviality.  You can appreciate this I’m sure, since you say that love is defined much more by a man’s actions than his intentions.
• Are you really so empathic if you take such great issue with the help-seekers in love?  Now you’re an attractive woman, and by your own accounts, you’ve captivated the hearts of numerous men in the twelve years we’ve known each other.  This leads me to think that you’ve never experienced the levels of desolation that would make someone desperate enough to go pity-seeking.  There are those who go for decades without finding love.  But you don’t know about this firsthand.  Perhaps then, you think that they’re making their situation harder than it needs to be or that they’re exaggerating its defining parameters.  I’d urge you not to dismiss the validity of others’ problems solely because you’ve never experienced them yourself.

I’ve noticed that your attitude toward the word pity seems to have a negative connotation which I cannot find in its definition.  Please explain.  Apparently, this word has been stigmatized, and perhaps it’s time to dispel the stigma. 

Perhaps people distance themselves so strenuously from pity because it can suggest that those offering it are underestimating the capabilities of those to whom it is presented. I remember a software development class I took at work.  A fellow there was mulling over an assigned problem for which I’d already found the answer.  I offered to share my solution since the problems weren’t for credit.  But man, oh man, was he offended!  He immediately backed away asking, “I don’t need your help.  Don’t you think I can do it?”  I hadn’t intended to anger him.  I wanted to help (not shame) him.  But put off he was nonetheless.   He, like so many, viewed the acceptance of help, particularly from someone vision-impaired, as an admission of inability.  Heaven knows that our culture forbids us from admitting to our shortcomings, probably because no one likes to be underestimated, and he thought that I was doing just this by presuming that he might need my help. 

But pity in and of itself, when it’s offered for purely altruistic reasons, is a good thing as I’ll discuss at length below.   As such, I see nothing wrong with asking for it when the need is genuine and other means of satisfying the need have been exhausted. 

I’d also say that I don’t believe this strategy will work with most women.  After all, many other reasons besides prejudice, ignorance, and concealed compassion compel ladies to reject suitors before knowing them.  Men are similarly moved (or not) by women.  In my case, I would most likely not date an overweight female or one who is shorter than myself, no matter how much she pleads, no matter how heart-wrenching her reasoning.  This is not mere prejudice, because I’ve dated many heavy and / or shorter females and consistently found the experiences lacking.  In this case, my preferences come out of genuine experience and not from misunderstandings and childish ideals.  However, many people reject a person  without  ever having tried similar people before.  It always amazes me that so many teen-agers and young adults have such long lists of requirements of their mates.  They want ‘em tall, dark, and handsome of course.  But some of them get really wild.  One 22-year old black woman I recently read about sought the following:

1. Income of at least $150,000 / year.
2. Plays a musical instrument.
3. Works as a fireman or police officer.
4. Black male (No whites, Indians, pacific islanders, or Hispanics allowed).
5. Christian (no Jews, atheists, or non spiritual people allowed).
6. Must be between the ages of 21 and 24.
7. No brainiacs allowed. 

So I asked questions like the following:

1. What could a $150,000 / year man give her that would be really important to the sustenance of a relationship, that someone who made, say, $80,000 / year could not?  She didn’t know. 
2. Had she’d ever dated someone who did not play a musical instrument.  Her answer was no. 
3. Had she ever considered a computer scientist or a store manager?  No, she hadn’t. 
4. Nor had she ever gone out with Protestants and Jews. 
5. Did she even know what an atheist was?  She did not.
6. Why was she opposed to dating older men?  She told me that her sister had a bad experience with a 45-ish gentleman.  So this youngster concluded that all older males make undesirable lovers. 
7. Why did she want to avoid the more intelligent males?  Again, she never dated one but always considered them “geeky” and weird. 

Before she and I talked, this woman had been assuming that her experience would invariably be unfulfilling with each and every one of these male types.  But she had little firsthand proof of that.  Almost all her tastes in men were based on misinformation, disinformation, folklore, and myth.  Obviously, she demonstrated little capacity for independent thought, and she wound up sniffling in the corner on the floor once the extreme ludicrousness of her baseless, prejudging ways was shown her.  I’m certain that today, she views men differently and is more willing to keep her mind open for longer periods after meeting a new man. 

So many feel as they do because their parents taught it to them, or in the case of the young adult, they reject an otherwise suitable suitor because their friends do, not because they themselves have a real problem with the person.  Clearly, they’re missing out on potentially wonderful relationships because they resist the effort and time it takes to really give someone a fair shake.  Not only does this prejudicial prejudging hurt them, but it hurts those so judged. 

Sometimes however, these girls can be shown how needlessly restrictive and unjustified their first impressions are.  Some go down more easily than others.  But none accept this immediately in my experience.  There are many out there, where the only reason they say no is exclusively because of their misunderstandings, inexperience, and prejudice.   It is these that this letter asking for pity targets.  Now I admit that there may only be a few per 1000 women who would change their minds after reading the letter.  But at this point in my life, every little bit helps.  Picking up those few extra points in my favor is worth incurring whatever humiliation such a request for extra kindness entails. I know that practically none of them have ever dated a handicapped person before, or even befriended one for that matter.  It’s my mission to show them what it’s like.

Now with all that said, let’s get to your letter, where I’ll further justify this mission and further show why it has the distinct possibility of eradicating at least a little prejudice out there.

Yes, I know you disagree [that eliciting pity is a valid means of overcoming prejudice].  That’s why I asked that you pretend.  :-)

Yes, passive resistance works at times.  At others however, it can get you killed.  Just ask the blacks who practiced this prior to the Civil Rights Act.  Many suffered irreparable injury because they allowed people to beat them.  I wonder how effective they would have deemed this passive resistance to be after they’d become encumbered with the chronic pain and paralysis that so frequently resulted from the beatings.  There were surely many regrets. 

As we’ll see below, asking for help, and bolstering that request by citing one’s difficulties, is not the same as playing the victim. 

No no.  You’ve misinterpreted.  I’ll be sure, in the final letter, to clarify this point somehow, so that others won’t read it wrong as well.  But let me say the following:

• I consider myself most worthy. My level of self-esteem is not the problem.  I’m just frustrated that it’s taken this long to realize my dreams.  Believe you me; I know that I’m a good guy – upstanding, highly moral, honest, affectionate, thoughtful, responsible, and caring.  I value my health and take daily steps to preserve it: No drugs or alcohol, no smoking, minimal refined sugars, and no caffeine.  The issue however, is that women generally don’t see me as being worth as much as I know I am, and a big reason for that is that they spend no time getting to know me.  They rule me out before ever seeing where I truly shine.  I think you would agree that this is unjust, and a primary goal of any healthy and free society is to minimize injustice.     I’m indeed worthy of attracting women, and they should be [encouraged] to see that.  I believe whole-heartedly that I deserve them.  But historically, I just have not been able to interest the ones I desire.  Acknowledging this history does not lower one’s sense of self-worth however, and thus, it cannot be accurately interpreted as symptomatic of low self-esteem.  In fact, a realistic assessment of field conditions, which I believe I’m providing by acknowledging my difficulties, helps in the creation of a better solution to the problem. One cannot solve a problem by denying its existence. 
• I’ve “work[ed] on myself” as you call it, for nearly three decades now.  And after years of trying and failing to meet others’ expectations, I came to understand that I am good enough to exist happily.  If I didn’t think like this, then I would have given up on my dream long ago, and began to play the victim for real.  I would have accepted failure and made excuses for giving up the quest.  But resignation has never been my mantra in this particular pursuit.  I’ve never been pushed into inaction by the victim mentality of which you spoke above.
• I’d also point out here as I do elsewhere in this note, that merely believing that one is worthy to solve the problem doesn’t get the problem solved.  I can believe (to the point of arrogance) that I deserve a beautiful woman.  But that in and of itself, won’t draw them to me.  In fact, it often has the opposite effect.  Such extreme attitudes I find obnoxious, lacking in humility, and self-destructive, and I know that just about all the women I’ve known feel likewise. 
• As far as simply dismissing those who don’t agree that I’m worthy and attractive:  One can do this if there’s plenty of others to choose from that like him.  But when these people are very rare, then other options must be considered.  Educating the disinterested is one choice.  In my situation, I can no longer just throw them away because they initially are unimpressed.  As a simpler example, it’s easy to toss out the single bad apple from a barrel where all the others are ripe and healthy.  Even with half the apples rotten, just discarding them is still a practical approach because the other half are good, and there would be less effort involved in finding a good one than attempting to salvage the good parts of a bad one.  But when almost all the apples show some signs of rot, now we can’t afford to discard them because we’ll go hungry if we do.  Instead, we must find the least bad apples and trim the rotten parts away.  So while it’s tempting to say. “to hell with those who don’t agree,” I’ve been forced to hold my tongue because my successes to failures ratio is so low (approaches zero).  In other words, I can no longer say to hell with them.  Again, if it takes a solicitation for compassion to get through their walls of prejudice, then so be it.

I believe my paradigm to be proper given the history and circumstances from which it grew.  I’m worthy and respect myself highly.  That’s why I care so much about maintaining my health.  I just have no illusions about the difficulties I’m facing, and if I deemed myself as worthless as you suggest I do, then I’d not be chasing my dream girl.

While this may be outwardly true in the main [that people who don't believe that they're worth a high salary don't get a high salary], there are many cases where people insist that they’re worth a high salary when in fact, they’re not.  Yes, arrogance can work to a person’s advantage, particularly if the company needs his skills.  However, people who chronically overestimate their indispensability don’t inspire much respect among their peers and subordinates.  Their attitudes cause strife, hurt feelings, stress, and encourage a cut-throat mentality among the ranks which undermines the team-player ideal that most of today’s corporations embrace.  Sure, these self back-patters may win their fair share of battles.  But ram-rodding their way to the top right through the sensitivities and sensibilities of others is neither good for them, nor those working with them.  There’s little that’s more repulsive than unjustified confidence. 

Also, I’d point out that there are many other reasons that a person might receive a high salary besides his insistence that he’s worth it.    If he’s truly good at what he does, and if the company needs what he does, and if the company will profit by retaining him at the salary he requests, then they’ll pay him well and keep him.  Even if they perceive him as meek and unassuming, they’ll worry that if they don’t fairly compensate him, then someone else will.  So I’m certain that it’s not always the case that the humble do not make high salaries. 

Admittedly, a degree of earned confidence combined with self-assertiveness is necessary for this.  But these are frequently over-rated.   People place too much emphasis on appearing confident and too little time actually acquiring the skills and experience that would make them genuinely confident.  They spend all too many of their hours tooting their own horns rather than actually learning something to enhance their usefulness.  There’s nothing I found more off-putting as a technical leader, than when a new hire fresh out of college would come in, and within six months, expect to change the world.   These recruits acted like they knew more than the seasoned engineers, and thus felt that they deserved more money.  People of today just aren’t willing to wait their turns for cracks at the big chairs, and this is a major reason that I find the corporate structure so detestable any more.   The newcomers all too often cross the line from assertiveness to greed, giving unfortunate credence to the notion that the good guys finish last.  After all, the upstanding fellows wouldn’t stoop to such greedy and arrogant techniques, and so, very often, they do wind up at the back of the pack even though they’ve got many more valid reasons for their self-confidence than do the juniors.  The thing is that there’s more to acquiring confidence than just believing in one’s self.  Granted that this positive self-assessment is a crucial ingredient in confidence.  But without good reason to believe, such as the possession of highly sought skills or a well-established history of success, the self-belief is hollow and airy, and thus, it means little.  Unjustified exaggeration of one’s worth therefore, won’t get them a higher salary, unless the boss is extraordinarily gullible.  Attitude without the evidence to support it would in fact squelch a person’s chances at a high salary. 

Finally, in reference to your CEO, your past comments indicate that he’s not too likable.  He may have the dollars, but not the popularity.  So, how successful is he really?  Is he someone that you admire?  I’d also remind you that many of these overly aspiring individuals do not in fact, get what they think they’re worth.  As a result, they spend much of their lives unfulfilled and thus, unhappy.  I put it to you therefore, that overestimating one’s worth frequently doesn’t work as often or as completely as you might think, to secure him the best socioeconomic status.  It often has the opposite effect.

[Can the same be said of people in the process of finding a mate?]  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  This attitude doesn’t seem to have worked for numerous others I’ve known.  It seems clear that your health is failing you and that you harbor lots of resentment and dislike toward those in your command structure and elsewhere in the company.  You’ve left many, many more jobs in your career than I.  Now if you like switching jobs every two to four years, that’s cool.  But this makes you appear chronically unhappy, and intensifies my impression that you are no closer to living your life’s dreams than I.  So any advice you might give in this area seems questionable.  Again, be careful about appearing too self-righteous.

Given the fallacies of this I-think-I’m-worth-so-much-so-therefore-I-am approach to living, I wonder if it would in fact, be any more effective in winning the mating game than the more genuine down-to-earth approach that I use?  My impression is that women don’t like a guy who, through smoke and mirrors, leads them to believe that he’s better off than he actually is.  His confusion of aspiration with reality would make him appear painfully pathetic and disingenuous to any woman smart enough to detect it.  A more grounded and, in my estimation, better approach would be to be forthright about one’s strengths as well as his weaknesses, and then let the chips fall where they may.  True, the honest will not win as often.  But the victories they do secure are the most benevolent and least hurtful to others.   Even in Plato’s time, they knew that the liar is far more likely to win life’s finest gifts.  But does this make his unjust techniques right?  Do the ends justify the means?   I suggest not.

I think you’re exaggerating some otherwise very small semantic differences in word definitions.  Generally, the word   attractive   means someone who is pleasing and thus desirable.  It does not imply that the interest is just physical, or just mental, or just short-term, or anything specific at all for that matter.  It just means interest in general, and says nothing about the quality of that interest.  Now in order for me to want someone, I must be attracted to them.  Thus it follows that they must be attractive to me.  What you say next depends on this attraction, even if it does not say it explicitly.

[You say that you're looking for someone whom you want, and who wants you equally.] Well, for you this may be the correct mindset.   And yes, it may politely generalize the mating desire while concealing the underlying details about what makes for such mutual wanting.  But what, if I may ask, fuels this wanting [...]?  As I just said, as I see it, it’s attraction in some form or other. What else could it be?  So why not use the word attractive? 

You’ve commented on how much you admire my down-to-earth nature.  Well, one of the tenants of maintaining such a persona is being honest, forthright, and as transparent as practicable with others.  So, in line with that, I admit that yes, I do feel some desperation about this.  Perhaps this is akin to that redoubtable biological clock that women hear as they approach menopause.  It’s normal for desperation to ensue when someone believes that she’s running out of time to have a baby, particularly when she’s passionately yearned to mother for her entire adolescent and adult life.  So why not be honest about the desperation?  Desperation is a reality of human existence that our culture unfortunately sweeps under the rug.  Now I know that therapists galore advocate putting one’s best foot forward and to hide any negative data, particularly at the beginning.  They have popularized this notion and it’s become so woven into the fabric of our customs and practices that most people today can’t imagine living any other way.  But this approach has definite drawbacks:

• It encourages people to focus more on creating illusions of attractiveness than honing the traits that actually foster attractiveness in others, and as we’ll see, these creations tend not to last. 
• It gives them excuses for not performing their best.  For instance, why lose the weight if you can wear girdles that conceal those extra pounds?   Why avoid smoking when there’s makeup that hides the premature wrinkling and spotting that frequently results? 
• It undermines the longevity of love-at-first-sight (LAFS). You’ve noted how short-lived LAFS can be.  Well, a primary reason for this is peoples’ manipulative tactics.  Folks make themselves up, hide their imperfections, behave in exaggeratedly polite and yielding ways, and as such, create a more favorable impression than their real character warrants.   But they can’t keep up the acting for long, and once they begin to teeter and falter, so to does the LAFS they originally inspired in their mates. 
• As such, this misleading persona creates needless disillusion in relationships once the fakery falls away.  This generates more money for the therapists since people seek them for the quick fix, and therefore it calls into question the real usefulness of the best-foot-forward philosophy.  The disappointed want the therapist to tell them why they stopped loving their lover, and spend thousands of dollars for that answer.  But the free and best answer is that they fell in love with an illusion created by their lover.  Once the lover stopped creating the illusion for whatever reason, they fell out of love.  A large part of the mating game involves this bate-and-switch strategy of trickery; and it has for eons.  But in spite of the historic precedent of this “harmless” fibbing, I tell you that we’d go a along way toward alleviating today’s unhappiness if people learned to put their   natural foot   forward in the first place, instead of hoodwinking potential lovers into believing that they offer more of the traits of attraction than they actually do.  We’re programmed to exaggerate our good sides while shrouding the bad.  This may help us in the short term to get the girl, but over the long haul, it harms society.  How so?  Read on…
• Deception violates the Golden Rule.  People are always doing things to others that they’d rather not have done to themselves.  Surveys for example, suggest that people object far less to telling lies than they do to being victimized by them.  No one enjoys being played for the fool yet so many play others for fools and view this as acceptable behavior.  Now I do not mean to disparage women in general here.  But I all-too-often hear that age-old lament: “Wow, things were going so well between he and I. But as soon as we went to bed, he went off to find someone else.”   The women blame the men and their “shallow” ways. But I contend that females share the blame here because their own behaviors (which deceive the man until he gets them into bed – no hiding then) bring this about. 
• Deception promotes insecurity in men and women alike.  As women assimilate this game of trickery, many become ashamed of their bodies and are thus afraid to show them, even after many months of coaxing.  They learn that they cannot possibly interest a man without pretense.  Of course, a simple walk down South Street in Philly on a warm Sunday afternoon dispels this notion.  There, we find couples who do not prop themselves up on the weak stilts of body decoration.  Some wear no makeup, and avoid clothing that accentuates and detracts.  Yet men still walk with them and love them.  People don’t need all the goop because while it may initially snare someone’s heart, it won’t last.  This sort of thing is starting to impact men as well, now that male pedicures and facials are coming into vogue. 
• Lying needlessly complicates mating rituals.  It’s easier for all involved to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  Yet our rituals, such as they are, require a measure of creativity, in order to mislead and convince more people than we might otherwise, that we’re loveable.  And unfortunately, these measures seem to work somewhat. But this doesn’t make them ethical.  That is, the ends do not justify the means. 
• It promotes the excessive use of alcohol and illicit drugs.  With all the insecurity, defensive tactics, vengeance, and other stressors that current mating practices generate, people look for relief in the drink, the pill, and the smoke.  I’m sure you know the detriments of this behavior, so I’ll not elaborate further on them here.  I’ll just say that like the other mating instruments discussed above, the positive effects of alcohol in the mating game, in spite of its wide-spread popularity, are also most temporary, and most expensive.  When a person drinks, he feels good for, what, two to three hours?  Then he’s often wiped out for all of the next day and beyond.  And if he did manage to get a woman to come home with him, he regrets it as soon as he takes one look at her in the daylight of sobriety that follows.  Thus, the little story: At two o’clock I went to bed with a ten.  But at ten, I woke up with a two.  Not good. 
• Lying erodes society’s moral pillars. 

I could go on about the negative effects of the treacherous strategies employed by both men and women these days to find true love.  But so you won’t fall asleep, I’ll stop here.  :-)  I’ll just conclude that the problems you’ve cited with   love at first sight  [LAFS] may not in fact originate in LAFS itself, but rather, grow out of an unhealthy mating game in general.  LAFS is real and it can last provided that both parties maintain an open and honest air throughout their romantic relationship.  If they don’t, then it won’t. 

Again I feel compelled to point out that even with the best behaviors and attitudes, a man may still remain largely unattractive.  Remember those disfigured people I told you about from my high school?  As noted, many have the sweetest personalities, but are viewed as undesirable by their mainstream contemporaries.

I mentioned Maslow because I thought you’d know his work since he’s mentioned so often in corporate managerial classes.  Though he died in 1970, he’s still considered one of psychology’s most forward thinking and on-point clinicians.  His hierarchy of needs triangle, which is based on the idea that gratification is healthy and frustration is pathologic, really seems to organize well the progression of needs satisfaction in humans. His discussions reveal that one has not realized his maximal potential to be happy until all of the following needs are met in order listed below:

1. Food, shelter, and clothing needs.  Obviously, a person will seek food, clothing, and shelter before he does anything else.  Otherwise, he won’t survive.
2. Once those are met, then there comes the Safety needs.  A person must feel safe, without the fear of being harmed, in order for him to pursue the goals at levels 3, 4, and 5. 
3. The love needs (familial and romantic needs). Once people satisfy their food, clothing, shelter, and safety needs, they usually want to secure love.
4. The esteem needs (recognition from others).
5. Self actualization needs (Needs to express creativity, innovativeness at work, and such).

Check out Abraham Maslow’s book Motivation and Personality for a detailed explanation of this hierarchy. 

My point in bringing this up is that in order to be the best we can be at levels 4 and 5, according to the Maslownian school of thought, we first must satisfy our romantic associations.  If we do not, we won’t go as far or do as well at work or among friends in other social settings.  You’ve heard the saying that behind every good man is a good woman.   This is probably true because this good woman helps him meet his level 3 needs for love, and thus, he is unencumbered by loneliness and sexual frustration, and he can therefore do a better job at work and in his communal activities that cater to level 4 and 5 needs..

This is not to say that people without love in their lives cannot succeed in the other areas.  But true love has the effect of spicing everything else up by enhancing one’s enjoyment of all other activities, not just the loving itself. 

Finally, worrying about achieving the highest levels of happiness is indeed a worthy concern, for the following reasons:

• When one is happy, one is healthy or at least, is more predisposed to good health than when he’s sad and depressed.  He can more quickly and completely recover from more illnesses and can better avoid them in the first place when his immune system is uncompromised by the typical stressors of unhappiness.
• The happier one is, the higher his quality of life.  He gets along better with others because he’s more accommodating of their needs.  He would connect in more energizing ways with his neighbors, because happiness begets more happiness. 
• Society loses out when unhappy people die prematurely.  Unhappy people do indeed die before their times. Get them to be happier though, and they’ll live longer and thus, with more time for reflection and introspection, they’ll be better able to acquire wisdom and pass it on to subsequent generations.  The happier the current generation, then the more benefit it will bestow upon subsequent generations.  Imagine if we could have added ten years to the average lifespan one to two hundred years ago.  If Einstein had lived longer, it’s humbling to think about what further great contributions to science he would have made. The same with Edison and Bell and so many others.  Imagine all those undiscovered edisons and bells that never became famous because they died before they had a chance to utilize their talents.  Make people happier, and we reduce these losses.
• The happier one is, the more he’ll strive to help others find happiness.  When all of a person’s needs are satisfied, his selfishness fades.  He contends less with others for what he wants because by definition, his happiness indicates that his primary desires are met.  Happiness promotes harmony, and we certainly need more of that today. 
• The effects of disappointment are minimized.  The happier one is, the more firmly he can stand against life’s disappointments involving loss of a lover or family member, loss of work, discovery of a long-term illness, and so on.  The happier we are, the stronger and the more independent we are.
• Happiness promotes benevolence.  Happy people fight less and the need for hidden agendas and other forms of subterfuge all but vanishes. If people were as happy as they could be, then they’d have no reason to swindle their neighbors because there would be nothing that they’d want so badly that they’d consider it worth behaving immorally to get.  Without this trickery, people would have much less reason to fight.  Thus we’d see a more peaceful human nature develop.   

With all the benefits of maximal happiness to the individual and to society, it’s clear that attaining joy for all should be a primary goal of any enlightened nation that wants to survive longer than a millennium or so.   We should not dismiss it therefore, as “a big time-waster” [as you've done in your latest letter. 

In response [to your interpretation that I have this I-am-handicapped-I'm-a-victim attitude], let me make the following points:

• There does seem to be a perception problem here, I agree.  So perhaps I’ll use different words to express my sentiment.   The problem here is with the words used, but not with the sentiment itself.
• My code of ethics demands that I not hide the handicap or obscure its resulting difficulties.  It is what it is, and to do so would violate my down-to-earth living policy. Though people who have never experienced it would rather that those who   have   just keep their mouths shut, the truth is that I can no longer keep silent.  Whether a victim or not, the handicapped life is tough, and it’s time to heighten mainstream awareness of that fact.
• As noted above, thinking with clarity about the difficulties of being handicapped is not the same as using the handicap to justify one’s sense of worthlessness.  I’m realistic about the limitations of low vision but am not daunted by them, nor do I believe myself to be any less deserving of the fulfillment of my dreams. 
• Admitting one’s handicaps differs markedly from stating that he’s a victim.  People who play the victim tend to paint their situations as more grave than they actually are.  They look for ways to get over on the system and escape the usual hardships that most others must endure to achieve success.  These types believe that they deserve the prize without having to work as hard for it as someone else.  But that’s not what’s going on here.  I’m not attempting to circumvent my share of fair hardship in dating.  Unlike the child who fakes an illness to get out of school, I’m not faking.  My difficulties are real, I’ve carried them all my life, and it’s unlikely that they can be overcome without the support and compassion of the women in my life.   

No.  I’m not a victim; just someone who’s strongly motivated to get love from his dream girls.  If, by “straightening out this unhealthy mindset,” you mean that I must conceal my unique hardships, then I believe that the mindset that you’re proposing is no healthier than mine.

You may not ask in so many words for a pity party [when you ask your boss for special consideration when yuo're sick].  But you do get dispensation for your illnesses, and, by your own accounts, you accept it most fully.  You don’t have to ask, because current corporate policy provides this allowance.  You’ve commented often about how understanding your boss is regarding your frequent absences and how much you appreciate it.  And yes, I agree that employees should be treated this way.

The sicknesses you’ve endured are commonplace nowadays. They’re widely experienced by much of the workforce, bosses and subordinates alike. Thus, most people either know what it’s like firsthand to be sick, or they can imagine the difficulties a particular malady poses pretty accurately since they’ve known similar ailments themselves.  It’s easier for them therefore to understand and empathize when a coworker becomes ill.  As a result, they’ll often go easier on him until he’s better.  That’s today.

But there was a time when bosses were not so accommodating, and viewed workers who needed time off to nurse a cold as slackers, and denied them raises, bonuses, and promotions accordingly. Often, the sick were fired for showing insufficient dedication to the job or they were judged as too lazy.  Policies prior to World War II incorporated far less compassion than they do today.  If you were working during the industrial revolution a hundred years ago and got sick as often as you do today, your boss would have fired you long ago.  Fortunately thank goodness, times have changed. 

So how did the white-collar workplace of the 21^st century come to regard illness as a valid constraint to productivity, as opposed to in previous centuries, where it considered illness a grave sign of weakness?  This transition happened due to scores and scores of people challenging the status quo as follows: 

• Some unionized and through the collective bargaining process and other less savory practices, made it difficult for management to profit unless it acknowledged workers’ ailments. 
• Others, who had no union support, relied on the courts and legislature to understand their plights and to mandate a more compassionate work setting. 
• Still others, such as those working in small businesses who could neither afford a lawyer nor to unionize, had to plead with their bosses for the needed convalescence time.  In the early days of the industrial revolution, before laws forbade worker cruelty, any time off was granted on a piecemeal basis, and was only secured through the sick person’s begging the boss to show a bit of compassion. Whether or not the people actually received the time off largely depended upon how compassionate the boss was feeling at the time. 
• The rest kept quiet about their ailments, and many died before they should have because they couldn’t afford the time off to heal themselves, and they dared not ask bosses for any because they feared that doing so would tarnish their good names. 

The tyrannical bosses in the 19^th and early to mid 20^th centuries were neither compelled nor inclined to grant sick time, insisting that such requests were merely ploys by employees to avoid work yet still be paid.  These profit mongers were notorious for firing the ill without making any effort whatsoever to accommodate them.  And as a result work places were filled with apprehension as people feared confrontations with the redoubtable boss and wondered every day whether they’d have a job tomorrow.  You would agree I think that by today’s standards, such work conditions were horrible and would be tolerated by less people today than back then. 

But clearly, if folks hadn’t risen up and renounced such practices, the all-mighty profit margin would still be the supreme dictator of corporate policy today.  Fortunately however, due to the creation of organizations like The Occupational Safety And Health Administration (OSHA) and the Labor Relations Board among others, this systemic brutality is far less prevalent today.  The mistreatment of workers is no longer as profitable as it once was, and I contend that the seeds of this movement toward a culture of heightened compassion were made up of the meek and the weak asking for help from the powerful; by soliciting compassion and pity from them.  A commonplace tactic of the disadvantaged was to:

• Show their would-be benefactors the hardships they faced daily.
• To convince them that such hardships were debilitating, slavery-like, and torturous.
• And then to outline the changes necessary to reduce said hardships. 

Often, this tactic failed.  But very often, it worked.  The laws that created suffrage for women, rights for minorities, and safer working conditions for all would not have come into their current, advanced form without a measure of pity that the weak instilled in the powerful.  People in high places felt sorry for those beneath them in the social pecking order, and wanted to help make things more right.  Therefore, this phenomenon cements the role of compassion as among the most weight-bearing pillars in our civilized society.  I shudder to think what our culture would be like today if pity were completely excised from our history.  Without it, we’d still be as barbarous as in times of antiquity where the gladiator, revered for his brutality, drew more crowds the more violent he was.  If those countless thousands so brutalized hadn’t cried out, and if the influential majority hadn’t heard them and felt sorry for them, this practice would probably still entertain us today.

Now if you still don’t think that pity works to better the lives of those who ask for it, then consider the Jerry Lewis Telethon that was held almost every September during the latter half of the 20^th century.  This actor raised billions of dollars to assist those suffering from muscular dystrophy (MD) by letting the public see firsthand his deformed and decrepit beneficiaries. He graphically depicted their suffering; the braces they had to wear to keep their legs straight, their daily torment at being unable to bathe and dress themselves, and perhaps most movingly, the lives of solitude that those afflicted typically live.  People avoid them because without understanding, they perceive the hardships as too leachy, sacrificial, and otherwise too difficult to accommodate. But the telethon helped to dispel prejudice and showed potential benefactors that meaningfully helping the MD patients really wasn’t so difficult after all. Because the sick were willing to place themselves on public display and admit to the full extent of their hardships, they engendered monumental compassion which fueled an outpouring of wealth the likes of which hasn’t been seen since.  The able-bodied came out of the proverbial woodwork to assist once they better understood, and today, their generosity has resulted in numerous medical and psychological breakthroughs that reduce the pains MD.  These folks live far better today because they went to the rich and powerful with their hats in their hands so to speak, and asked for help. Does this asking make them losers?  I think not.  

Now back to my letter [asking women to temper their judgement of me with compassion] we’ve been discussing:  Virtually every woman I’ve encountered seems to reject me for among other reasons, ignorance and prejudice.  They’ve never dated someone vision-impaired before, and so do not know what it’s like.  They fear it because they don’t know it.  They detest it because of their misunderstandings about it.  Among the more popular premature assumptions they make and have communicated to me are that:

• I’m too needy.
• They won’t know how to meet those needs. 
• A legally blind man will consume too much of their time.
• I’m lazy for not having overcome my limitations by now.
• They wonder why I’ve not taken surgery to fix my eyes.  They believe, in their ignorant fashion, that surgery can fix all eye problems, and so conclude that I should have had it, and think I’m psychologically damaged because I haven’t. 
• They think me incapable of making a living.
• They assume that if I am chronically lonely that it’s exclusively my own doing, and therefore don’t wish to help.  They regard me as a bum.
• A modest income like mine currently, implies that there are seedy behaviors and questionable character traits involved. 
• They’ll have to put more work into the relationship than when dating someone fully sighted.  

I say it’s time to take a more active role in dispelling their prejudices by showing them that the more tightly they hold on to their faulty information, the more alone they make me.  This hopefully, will generate compassion in their hearts; at least enough to motivate them to take a closer look.  This approach is no different than those that the blacks employed to secure their freedom or that women used to acquire voting rights or that pre World War II workers used to evolve a more compassionate work culture in the post industrial age.  At some point in any struggle for justice, compassion plays pivotal roles.  So I don’t see any problem with taking steps, as is done in my pleading letter, to bring it to the surface.  Securing the same level of acceptance for the handicapped in the mainstream dating arena is no less valid a social problem than minorities’ struggles for civil rights or any other freedoms.  So why not use the same techniques?

Finally, where’d you get this idea that asking for help is identical to admitting that one is a loser?  Why do you imply that seeking assistance and understanding makes he who does so a loser?  Would you suggest that the Jerry’s kids on the telethon I spoke of above were losers because they sought extra measures of kindness?  The fact is: We need not be independent to win.  For example, successful people ask for and get help every day, whether it be in corporate endeavors or familial tasks at home.  In fact the most consistent winners, very often, most effectively delegate and thereby tap most efficiently the talents of subordinates.  They succeed by effectively asking for help, and they’re not losers for having done so.  In my case, I’m just asking women to consider my limitations and the rough time I’ve had before they choose to reject me.  Acknowledging a limitation and asking for help to overcome it makes not one a loser.

Well, if that [challenging and grumpy] attitude [you have when people bother you when you're sick] works for you, then go for it.  It seems though that you’ll needlessly upset bosses with this arrogant vent, and then, they won’t be as willing to cut you a break. I see several problems with this screw-you-if-you-don’t-understand-me attitude:

• It creates needless hostility and thwarts harmony.
• It makes you appear like you’ve got a chip on your shoulder. When you approach a boss this way, it sounds a lot like you’re blaming them for your problems. Not a good idea. 
• It ignores the concerns of others and as such, it makes you appear insensitive.  You’ll agree that the boss’s chief concern is maximizing productivity.  If you appear to dismiss his concerns as you seem to in this tirade, then you’ll likely alienate him / her.
• It makes you appear overly selfish because you are more focused on your own good than that of the team.  Ultimately, I agree that we must put ourselves first. But shouting this ideal with such powerful words is almost never wise.   
• It discourages others from empathizing with your position, particularly if you refuse to discuss your difficulties in a more inviting manner. This attitude of that’s-the-way-it-is-and-too-bad-if-you-don’t-like-it actually challenges people to resist you all the more.  Why should they want to accommodate a person who displays this kind of blatant disregard for their sensitivities?  You seem to expect their understanding here.  Unfortunately, another’s understanding is generally not a right, but a privilege that we earn through treating them equivalently.  Again, the Golden Rule applies, and I know that you’d be hurt if someone responded this way to you. 
• It drips of excessive machismo.  We’d expect to find this sort of attitude among young adult uneducated males, but much less so in educated, well-established females such as yourself.  Simply put, your words above do not become you.   
• People who go off like this are viewed as bad team players and as such, your success in most corporate environments will be seriously curtailed.  Since virtually every corporation utilizes the team-player mantra, disregarding team concerns, as you seem to do here, will probably mean needless difficulty and stress for you.  People will resist such colorful and negatively emotional language because it shows a distinct lack of empathy in you for them.
• It communicates your sentiments too loudly.  You know, in Ham Radio, there is a code of ethics when operating a radio transmitter that says: Use no more power than necessary to maintain effective communication.  It’s bad practice to use the maximum allowable power of 1500 watts whenever less than 1 watt would work well.  In short, it says: Why yell when a whisper will do? 
• There’s almost never a good time to employ the “F— off” sentiment. You might win a few battles with this, but you’ll virtually never endear yourself to anyone with this   your-concerns-are-trivial-next-to-mine-and-screw-you-if-you-don’t-agree   attitude. 
• People often use bristling bluster like yours above, to conceal their weaknesses.  Might you be doing that here?  If so, you’re not fooling anyone.  It’s widely understood that males, and yes, sometimes females, beat their chests and thunderously roar to deceive their competitors into thinking that they’re stronger and more menacing than they actually are. It’s an outgrown tactic of intimidation which doesn’t work well these days, particularly in white-collar work places where, presumably, the people are more educated and attuned to current serological trends.
• This implies that you don’t need your boss’s understanding.  But you do because it is generally he who decides the type of work you receive, how well you’re compensated for that work, and who, along with his peers, determines your rate of progress up the corporate ladder.  If you alienate him, you risk future advancement and perhaps even your job. 
• This rant just doesn’t make you seem very likeable. You could have conveyed the same sentiment with far less abrasive language than is contained above.  If I were going to say what I believe you’re attempting to communicate about your sickness, I’d word it something like this:  “Gee, I’m really sorry I can’t make your deadline.  But I’m very sick.  However, I promise that you’ll get my work when I feel better. I know you need it right away and I feel awful that I cannot get it to you sooner.  But if I attempt to do it right now, while I’m still feeling lousy, it won’t be of very high quality and you’ll definitely not like it.  I understand that you might not be able to wait until I’m better.  So maybe we could delegate the project to someone else while I heal.  “  Rather than the bluster it’s better to fully own up to our sicknesses / weaknesses / limitations.  With this more humble approach, you’ll find people more accommodating than you imagined. I’m sure.
• You act like you have no complicity in making your boss understand your plight.  But people can’t read our minds, and they may not understand, particularly if they’ve never experienced our difficulties. It’s unfair therefore, for us to mandate that they always know the depths of our pains and to automatically judge them as imbeciles when they do not.  The truth is that we do bear some responsibility for educating people about our peculiarities, and it isn’t always the case that someone who doesn’t is a hopeless fool that is incapable of understanding. We can’t rightly blame all of them for all their unawareness, unless of course they actively seek to remain in the dark once shown the light.  Your words above might be appropriate for example, if on three to five previous occasions, you tried more benevolent and gently persuasive tactics.  But to come out of the starting gate with them as your opening salvos makes no sense to me.  Sorry.  After all, there are those who, while not strongly opposed to embracing new knowledge, just haven’t done so due to prevailing circumstances.  They may misunderstand the handicapped for example, because they never went to school with them, nor did they grow up with a disabled family member.  But once they’re given a small taste, they sometimes accept it with great interest.  They eventually come to embrace it.  We can find countless stories like this within the numerous service organizations throughout the country these days like Kwanis International, Lions Club International, and churches of most denominations.  People want to help if they can be made to understand the following:

•  
  1. the legitimacy of the need,
  2. and then, once that’s been established, they need to learn how they can help. 

The ignorant can be transformed into the enlightened with the correct strategies, and I think my request for pity aids in this transformation.

Finally, how would you feel if as a boss, a subordinate took this tone with you?  You wouldn’t like it, would you?  Again, employing a variation of the Golden Rule would work well here.  Only treat people as you would like to be treated yourself.

I don’t see soliciting pity as bad advice in some situations.  A letter that begs for compassion is but one of many strategies for winning a woman’s heart, and it is not one of the first ones I would use.  But it is a reasonable last resort.  I don’t like laying myself so open, but if it gets someone to more fully appreciate my situation and show me compassion as a result, then it’s worth it.  Whether they come to my bed because they desire me or because they feel sorry for me really doesn’t matter to me; at least not in the beginning.  At least if they pity me, I get a better opportunity to fully make the case for loving me to them.

Yes, I agree that men aren’t created equal. However, you might feel differently about society not needing equality if you were to ever experience discrimination or, more generally, oppression.  Then, you might better understand why people take these desperate measures to counteract it.   

Yes, [...] I am me and [...] I have a vast set of talents to offer.  But highlighting the good does not mean dismissing the bad.  Realize that this is part of what makes being down-to-earth work so well for me.  I make sure that people see the whole me, and not just the static-free, colorized, admirable parts.  By giving them an accurate summary of both my good and bad points, I find it easier to live with myself.  If I’m not forthcoming about the extent of my handicap, then my conscience bothers me.  I can’t live with it.  I won’t, because dealing with a pesky conscience has long-term and grave health effects both physical and mental that so far, I’ve managed to avoid. 

I’ve picked my own route.  You’d be amazed at how many friends and family members think that I’m crazy for trying to find true love for as long as I have.  But it’s my mission and I’ve stayed the course.  It’s more important to me than anything else, except my health that is.  And like I said before, I will either find it, or die trying.

I’m only concerned about others’ opinions to the extent necessary to promote the sort of relationship I want.  They don’t impact my self-esteem these days.  Beyond how they treat me, I don’t really care what they think. In fact, my argument of desperation could be viewed as illustrating a very high self-esteem, and not a low one.  After all, I’m willing to buck the illusory rhetoric of self-sufficiency which so permeates the media these days, and to stand up and say hey, this is not the case.  At least, not for me.  I need to be loved by a true love in order to achieve maximal happiness.    

Well, I could write on and on about this but I think I’ve said enough for now.  Take care and write again soon.

Tom Hesley

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Dear  [Melinda],

Well, we may never fully agree on this.  I would urge you however, to check out the book list I sent you a few letters back  [here].  That chemical reaction stuff is   not meaningless   as I see it.  In fact,   it is supremely meaningful.  It is the spark that ignites the fires of romance, and it helps keep us tolerant of the beloved’s eccentricities.  It simplifies the getting along with the beloved through the bad-mood times, and is the primary reason why I’d want to get with someone as opposed to remaining alone. 

I’d submit that your disappointment with your   love at first sight   [LAFS] experience happened not due to any inherently superficial traits of LAFS, but rather because your man didn’t feel it for you at the same time.  LAFS always hurts when it’s not reciprocated.  But I don’t think that we can infer from this that since LAFS can hurt badly, that it is totally worthless as a spice in relationships.  If this guy had returned your affections, I promise that you’d be singing a different tune today.

Yes, LAFS often results in what you call the one night stand.  This happens because LAFS implies a set of assumptions that we make about those we desire.  We’re predisposed for example, to assume that life with them will be wonderful due to these feelings, even though we’ve not adequately checked them out.  But as we do check them out subsequently, we often find that our initial assumptions were unwarranted and just plain wrong.  A personal example:  In my teen years, I’d blindly assume that a particularly attractive woman would be wonderful in bed just because she looked good on the surface.  But usually (not always but USUALLY), this turned out to be false.  Yes,  LAFS can send the less seasoned on wild goose chases, as it did me, and as it did you.  But LAFS is like an opportunity.  Some opportunities are good, and very many are bad.  However to achieve happiness, we should ignore all opportunities just because many of them I the past turned out fruitless. 

Yes, I’ve read books like [The Torah], [which take a stand against LAFS and unrequited love desires.  They, as you suggest, often advise to follow one's mind because emotions and desires can lead the seeker to only short-lived highs, as opposed to long-term happiness.  But senses like the eyes only provide the data.  It's the mind that interprets it, and decides what it means and whether and how to act on it.  So any misleading that happens as a result of visual cues is generally not due to inadequacies in the eyes themselves,  but rather in the extrapolations that the mind makes from the visual information.  Any fallacies in the senses can be shown therefore, to emanate from fallacies of the mind.]    And yes, I do feel that [said books] tell an important part of the true love story.  I just contend that they don’t tell the whole story.  Check out this book:

• Why Can’t I Fall In Love   by   Shmuley Boteach

As I’ve said before and I’ll say more below, the feelings can indeed lead one astray.  But not always, and when they do not, the resulting relationship makes all the prior pain in waiting for it worthwhile.  In my humble opinion.  

Yes, you are right.  And, I wouldn’t want to [get] involved with someone unless all these underlying conditions are met [honesty, free of drugs, compassion, humility, healthy body, credit score above 700, and such].  All this stuff has to be right in order for me to move forward.  [LAFS admittedly, does not create the lovable traits such as these in the beloved; it's just a way for the seeker to identify that a particular someone just might have those traits.  Yes, LAFS is often wrong.  Thus it cannot be a sufficient condition for a successfully happy love relationship.  But it is a necessary condition for happiness in the sort of relationship I would like to find.] 

Yes, the initial chemistry can’t keep a seriously faltering relationship going.  But it can spur us onward to take the time necessary to determine the presence of these [other qualities in the beloved]. 

[Now] I can’t deny the workability of this delayed falling in love phenomenon [that you speak of].  Like you, over half the population says that they prefer this sort of slowly-grown love feeling.  But then, over eighty-five percent of the population believes in a god, whereas I do not.  Thus majority rule does not always make for   right rule.  All I can say about the slow discovery of love is that I’ve never experienced it, though I’ve tried many times.  Over the years, I’ve dated thin people and fat people, whites, blacks, Hispanics, short, tall, educated, and not, who did not initially attract me; some I spent close to a year with.  Invariably however, the result was that I’d end up having to leave because I’d dream about walking down the aisle with them only to wake up terrified.  My subconscious mind won’t allow me to advance relationships beyond the casual dating phase unless I feel deeply attracted to the person.  Such women indeed exist who make me feel like this.  I know that because I’ve been fortunate enough to experience a few [...].  These experiences, though few, have readjusted my expectations of women such that I can’t in good conscience, date those who are not beautiful from the start.  And I miss those pleasures in relationships where they do not occur straight away.  It’s like the disappointing experience of eating a bottom-round cut of beef once you’ve grown accustomed to eating porterhouse steak.  Relationships without that initial allure are big let downs for me. So I can’t do them. 

[So you say that you disagree with LAFS because of how it led you to pine over someone who eventually turned out to be not who you really wanted after all.]  But just imagine though, how good it would have felt if that someone that you pined over actually had the same feelings for you.  No, as noted, LAFS does not guarantee success.  [But it[ does however, make whatever success happens very much sweeter. 

Well, I can’t immediately speak to this point [about brain scans of schizophrenics and people experiencing LAFS looking very similar] because I’m unfamiliar with the details of schizophrenia.  I’ll read this article if I can locate it.  

As far as this yearning passion being short-lived:  Yes, in many instances it is.  But in many others, which I’ve experienced myself, it lasts, and lasts, and lasts.  It really depends on the two people involved in the interaction.  I believe the real problem with LAFS is that people over-react to it.  They assume that it guarantees success.  But it does not.  All those practical concerns about a lover must still be allayed like:

• Is he trustworthy, honest, and thoughtful?
• Will he hurt me tomorrow if I love him today?
• Is he a good provider?
• Do we have similar religious and moral values?

And so on.  No, LAFS dos not excuse us from getting these answers before escalating the level of intimacy in the relationship, though it does make such reckless abandon quite tempting. 

Well, it looks like we’ll just have to disagree on this.  My personal experience and research indicates that “yearning passion” is so much more than trivial instinct.

• First, it’s a very mental process.  That is: There are numerous assessments that one’s subconscious mind must make before it allows the [LAFS] feeling to occur.  If it finds any deal-breakers, it prevents such feelings.  I remember once in Philly, when I was weekend bar-hopping.  There was this pretty girl sitting at the counter, sipping a martini.  I wanted to get to know her because her physical form, at least from a distance, appeared to be everything I was seeking in that aspect of a woman.  So I walked over to converse.  But it turned out that she was mildly mentally retarded, and not finished college much less high school.  Though friendly, she spoke too loudly and her life concerns centered more along the lines of who would be helping her get dressed tomorrow.  Needless to say, these differed extensively from mine.  As soon as I knew this, her physical appearance lost its enticing aura, though her body had not changed in proportion during this exchange.  She retained the same face, height, weight, poise, dress, and scent. But once it was clear that we had nothing substantial in common and differed so much in terms of intellect, her allure, in my eyes, ceased.  Given this, and other experiences like it, I can’t accept that these feelings are driven solely by a lovers physical form.  Their mental aspects also impact this as well.  The Evolutionary Psychology books I listed for you a couple letters ago delve very deeply into this mating instinct, and show that it’s quite complicated.
• Yes, LAFS is very often temporary; but sometimes not.  Sometimes it lasts a year or two, sometimes a month, and quite often, it puckers out after but a few seconds close encounter with the beloved.  Clearly, LAFS can be temporary.  But is it always so?  the following questions come to mind:  Does this make it a totally useless measure of a person’s long-term potential to attract us?  I think not.  Why not?  Let’s discuss the process of peeling an apple, which should help us understand this transitory nature of LAFS better.  Often, on the surface, apples look quite enticing.  But peel them and slice them up and you then see what’s really inside.  Some apples have rotten cores or contain worms and bugs, and upon discovering these we don’t wish to eat them anymore, our desire replaced with revulsion.  So in this case, our interest in the apple was indeed temporary.  But other apples with healthy worm-free cores continue enticing us even when we cut them open and see their insides.  Thus, the condition of the apple appears to affect how we regard it throughout the process of learning about it.  Some appear wonderful the whole time we know them — from when we first see them in the store until that last delicious bite at home.  But others, while at first appearing to be delicious, lose their appeal should we discover major flaws.  So with apples, our interest does not always evaporate.  Nor does it with LAFS.  People, like apples have various layers that we must learn about before we can know that our LAFS is justified, and of course we set the bar much higher for a person that we’d consider loveable, than we do for an apple in order that we consider it delicious.  But the ideas are the same.  There are some people (rare though they may be), like the truly healthy and delicious apples, that meet our essential expectations from the first minute after meeting them, until death parts them from us.  It’s easy to find people who’ve been married for fifty years or more and who say that they’re just as much in-love today as when they first met.  So the point to all this is that LAFS does not always lead one to a bad mate.  Yes, often it does.  But on those occasions when it does not, the resulting love affair is most fulfilling, and can indeed last a lifetime. 
• LAFS is instinctive yes.  But I’m curious why you disparage instinct.  After all, without it, we and all other locomotive species would have never survived.  This is no clearer than in the case of human babies who are born with the breathing and suckling instincts.  Could you imagine the difficulties in teaching a baby how to draw breast milk into its stomach?  Without this pre-packaged knowledge, the baby would die of starvation very soon after birth.  LAFS I’d argue is a similar instinct (or at the very least, and instinct remnant).  It is the culmination of thousands of years of evolution, and historically, it’s been a quick way of identifying who we might mate with that would most likely perpetuate our genes in the most healthful manner.  Sometimes, instinct is good. 
• Procreation may, as you say, be the exclusive objective of the mating instinct.  But this is a big thing, particularly since so much of our biology is geared toward reproduction.  Thus, reproductive advantage [or natural selection in general] permeates human values.  So in trying to figure out just what our values are, it’s a safe bet that most people want to live and pursue relationship in ways that promote procreation.  It’s intuitive that a strong mating instinct is more likely to produce offspring than a weak one.  So if our interest is in perpetuating the race, then we should not trivialize the mating instinct, for it is those who ignore it that are lead astray I suspect. 

Yep.  I can’t argue there.  Certainly the actions that the members of couples take to demonstrate their love for one another are key to the overall quality of the love experience.  Having a wealth of shared experiences strengthens the love bond to be sure.  And finally, my experience with [Emmy] has enhanced my abilities to recognize and fulfill someone else’s needs.  Being useful to someone like [Emmy] and having them express their appreciation in return is quite the aphrodisiac, like LAFS.   While I would say that LAFS is by no means the ultimate form a love relationship might take.  But when built upon using those shared experiences to which you refer, the resulting relationship is tops. 

Yes, that initial passion that screams so loudly in the first months of a budding romance does become more subdued over time.  But I wouldn’t want to continue a relationship where it has disappeared altogether.  Whenever looking at my woman ceases to offer any excitement whatsoever, then it’s time to move on.  However, if we pick wisely in the first place, the chances of this happening are drastically reduced. 

[...] I’d much rather experience [love] than to [...] just talk about it.  [But when the experience of love is unavailable, then talking about it is the next best thing, and so, can still be quite stimulating intellectually].

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Water Park Musings: 2010-06-02

Dear [Melinda],

Oh, most definitely I want to stay in touch. Let’s communicate for a while and see how it goes. Philly is four hours from here by car (six by train), but perhaps when it’s warm, we could spend an afternoon in Rittenhouse Square or walking up and down South Street, and make a weekend of it. We’ll see.

[Emmy] and I met in 2003 and dated until early in 2004. Then we stopped for about a year and a half. However, since the summer of 2005, we’ve spent at least one week a month together, either here, or at her place, or at a summer camp we both attend. I care a great deal for her. However, there’s no sexual attraction, and shallow as this may seem, I want to be sexually enthralled with my mate. Otherwise, the relationship feels incomplete. The sexual aspects are just as important to me as her good character, much like both chocolate and sugar are required to create a tasty cake. Who’s to say which one is more important to creating the over-all goodness of the cake? I need them both.

Actually, [Emmy] lives in Pittsburgh, and we take turns visiting each other each month. She’s scheduled to come here next in March. Yes, if she went far away, I’d miss her, and if she were to die, I’d certainly cry the blues. Yet there’s just something missing. I’m convinced of that because back in 2004, I dated a Romanian ballerina for a couple months. Now that relationship had everything I wanted. She was beautiful and exotic, accepted me, was not put off by my low vision, and didn’t mind driving here to see me. However, she stopped communicating one day without explanation. I believe what happened was that she was looking for a way back to Romania. She used to talk much about the two of us going there together. But at 43 years old, I wasn’t interested in relocating much less paying to relocate her as well (she had little money). And I feared that once back there, she’d up and leave me. I was bothered by how quickly she began talking about us getting married. (after only a month of dating).

Funny. It was exactly what I wanted. But things started moving way too fast for me, and I cautioned her to slow down. She didn’t like that, and I heard from her no more. After our last visit, she refused my calls and emails to her went unanswered. Yet while that relationship didn’t last long, it showed me that the sort of happiness I seek is at least   possible,  and it gave me a better idea of what to look for to maximize the chances of recreating it. Unfortunately however, I have no such feelings for [Emmy]. Though I wish full well that I did, the reality is that I don’t. And since, as we’ve discussed, we don’t easily control who turns us on, learning to romantically love [Emmy], I believe, is impossible, particularly since I’ve not been able to manage it after nearly four years of knowing her.

On making the quest for   The One   one’s primary goal in life: Yes, I’ve heard that age-old refrain that says that your best chance of finding what you want is to not look for it, and it will find you. But I’ve never been good at just sitting back and hoping for the best. I’ve got to be proactive. Besides for a number of years at [work], I didn’t raise a finger to find Her, as I was busy building my reputation. Yet, she never came. On the other hand, I spent three plus years in Philly and [...] hit the clubs, bars, dance halls, and skating rinks nearly every weekend. Same result. She never came.

So today, I have no evidence to prove that either the passive or active approach is best. But in other areas of my life, like my career, I know that a passive approach would   definitely not   have worked. If I would have just put my feet up and waited for success to come, I’d still be waiting. I see no reason therefore to suppose that a passive approach to securing a good love relationship would be any more likely to succeed than a passive approach to becoming a lead software engineer would be. Since appropriate action (as opposed to taking no action at all) is usually what wins the worthwhile prizes in life, I believe that for me, actively searching has the best chance of yielding good results, though admittedly, it hasn’t worked for me yet either. You’re right however. Some people can indeed sit back and wait for it to happen, particularly if they’re very attractive. For such people, opportunity will find them without them reaching for it at all. But it doesn’t work that way for most of us. More on that at another time.

While I acknowledge the possibility of   willfully falling in love,   I’ve never seen it happen to me. At least, not yet. Instead, I tend to learn more toward believing in   love at first sight  (LAFS). That, I have indeed seen several times. In my experience, the most enduring and passionate love is recognized within the first minute or two of meeting. Contrary to popular belief, a slowly growing love is not necessarily the strongest, most binding love. Again, we can talk at length about my reasons for holding to this view later. It’s rather involved and takes more time to explain than I can spend this evening. But now, we’re treading into topics that I’m writing about in my book. So it’d be cool to bounce some of my ideas off of you.

Changing the subject a bit: No, you were a very good friend. Never doubt that. Yes, I responded to your mentioning our day in Cincinnati. At times, I even dream of it.

Well, I’m off to bed. Get lots of rest and I hope you start feeling better soon.

Tom Hesley