Three Five Five: Interlocutrix

 The phone sex worker I met last month and I have been exchanging emails and texts. I'll note right at the outset that I haven't engaged her professional services, and that I don't intend to raise that subject. 

She is a professional, and apparently a highly regarded one in her field-- the equivalent of an FMTY Girl. It would be disrespectful to ask for freebies. I don't ask friends who are chartered accountants to do my taxes for free, and I don't ask doctor friends to treat me for free. Professionals are paid for their skills, and to ask them for freebies is a sign of disrespect. I know her per hour rate, and she'd certainly be worth it. I know that she treats her regular clients well and does empathize with them, but there's always (as there should be) a certain professional distance with clients. I'd much rather be a friend.

She asked if I have either Zoom or Face Time, so I expect we'll be talking via our laptops. It's easy to sit up late at night and just exchange emails. We've talked about our lives and about films and music and places we've been. It's easy to tell her things, and I have missed the idea of email as a way to actually correspond. I've been saying here that I miss things like letters and long telephone conversations in my life, and talking to her has been a throwback to the days when people did exchange information and stories. That's the part of friendships and relationships I've missed most in the social media world. I'm a long-form sort of person, and I can't tell anyone anything important in 280 characters or whatever the text/Twitter limit is.

I can see why her clients-- mostly older, mostly monied --are willing to pay her rates. She is an excellent interlocutrix. That's her key skill. She can make a client feel safe. She listens, asks questions, is sympathetic. Phone sex, she told me the night we met is another world, and a fantasy world should not only have No Shame, No Limits, it should be...comfortable. 

Being good at phone sex is a rare thing. Being good at ordinary sex-in-the-flesh is probably a rare thing. It takes thought. Passion, yes, but it also takes thought. Anyone good at phone sex has to make his/her partner feel not just desired, but comfortable inside that desire. I've always been someone who talks during sex. I want to exchange information with a partner-- about how each of us is feeling, about what each of us is thinking, about what the physical moment reminds us of. One lovely young co-ed in my past laughed and said that what it all made her think of was a space mission and Mission Control. Yes...we may have done NASA voices the rest of the evening. Voices are lifelines, even during sex (or maybe especially during sex).

Phone sex isn't just two people masturbating while holding their iPhones. It's about world-building, about building worlds the partners feel comfortable inside. It's about creating and sharing fantasies and knowing that you're able to be safe and still explore No Shame, No Limits. My friend has those skills, and she's made a very successful career out of them.

I don't expect I'll ever find out about her skills first-hand, but I love the stories she tells (names and identifying details all omitted, of course) about fantasies she's been part of. And I do very much enjoy being able to talk with her about our lives. Voices matter, details matter, being valuable enough to be someone's interlocutor matters. 

Two Five Two: Beliefs 2

I have this from the same girl I wrote about earlier in the month, the girl who was supposed to be going to Pitcairn Island and Patagonia and Lhasa and Victoria Falls this year.

She told me this back in June 2016--- three years ago now. She'd vanished for a while at the end of 2014 and stayed amongst the missing pretty much all through 2015. And then she messaged me one night to tell me this:

I  have a few stories to tell!  I decided this morning that, fuck it, it's time!  I have a confession for you. I got married last year... It was such a whirlwind, running into him in Auckland when i was there for a long weekend, then spending every waking moment together, a proposal in Taupo, then married a month later!

It really was crazy... I didn't tell anybody. No one in my family knows, a couple of friends, that's all. It was never going to work long-term. and i knew that. he was a brilliant first husband though.

I was amazed at the story. She'd told me before she vanished that she'd flown north on a concert weekend and run into an old flame at a hotel bar. I'd thought she might be living with someone. But this was a confession worth following up. I did raise an eyebrow at the initial message--- a whirlwind marriage was one thing; a secret marriage was another. Just how would that work? How would she avoid telling family? How would she avoid telling HR at work? Wouldn't there be tax forms to change? How would she keep friends from spreading the story?

She told me more later--- that she'd recognized very early that the marriage wouldn't work, and they hadn't lived together for much of the time. She'd kept the house she was renting (or owned...which is another story) and went back and forth with her Golden Retriever from one house to the other. I might've have understood if she'd leased out (or sublet) her old house, but she was clear that she'd kept her house all for herself.

She never did tell me about any divorce. I looked up divorce law in the Land of the Long White Cloud, of course. It's a simple procedure, and inexpensive. You can get an order of dissolution if you've been separated for two years and apply for an order. The fee is something like $NZ 215.00. Which raises the question of whether she ever got a divorce and, if so, when? If they'd agreed to count the start of living separate and apart sometime early in 2015, one or the other of them could've applied for a dissolution order in 2017. She never mentioned it, never mentioned any divorce or any proceedings. I did think about so many questions. If he did indeed have (as she insisted) $10 million in the bank, wouldn't there inevitably have been a pre-nup? Were there community property issues? The purported husband was a successful businessman,  which to my mind means that there would've been lawyers telling him that he needed to protect himself. But she never talked about any divorce or any aftermath.

So here we have another story, and one that strikes me now as deeply suspect. Moving in with someone after a whirlwind romance is one thing. A marriage where one party has ten million ($US? $NZ?) in the bank is something else altogether. And a divorce, however amicable, isn't just something one forgets. She'd have been twenty-nine or thirty when all this supposedly happened--- and a chartered accountant. She'd know how these things work, and known the legal and tax ramifications...and so would any husband's lawyers.

My blonde friend in Wellington is like me: we both grew up living inside books and stories. We've always wanted our lives to be crafted and shaped like stories. I can understand her longing for a doomed whirlwind romance and marriage. A bittersweet tale to tell later. I can understand all that. But what if she can't escape the stories she's crafted in her head? What if she made up a brief marriage just as I believe she made up trips to Buenos Aires and Mt. Fuji and Shanghai? How do I ever ask her?

I'd like to think that someone reading this out over the aether will have thoughts....

Two One Two: White Lines

More archive materials from the past. I am posting these as messages-in-a-bottle, as memories from other days, from times when I was regarded as a good listener, as an interlocutor for lovely, sometimes self-destructive girls.

These notes are from a girl named Alessandra, someone I knew in another world, someone I knew when the century was still young. Some of the notes are about her friend-and-lover Alys--- yes, Aless and Alys. Red Alys, if I remember, with striking red hair. I have no idea where she is now. I'd heard that she finished university, taught English for a couple of years in Japan, and went on to law school and an MBA. I have a vague sense that she's doing something corporate these days, something in a high glass tower near open water, something that sends her overseas a lot.  I have no idea what she remembers about her past. The last time we spoke, we talked about Heath Ledger's death and a film Ledger had once made about drug life in Australia, a film from an Australian novel called "Candy".

I remember these stories, though, remember them from another, better summer long ago.

Oh, I wasn't happy with where my life was taking me in 2007. I spent half my time dreading going to class when I wanted to change universities anyway, and the other half actually in class and miserable.  I was isolated and doing tremendous amounts of coke alone-- in my private dorm room, in changing rooms at boutiques, in cubicles at the school library. I was in my first serious relationship with  a girl, one who had previously mainly been my best friend, and it was long distance. She (Alys, obviously) had been in a relationship with some Russian pre-med, eight-language-speaking genius, and I broke them up/she left him for me. She had a pretty bad coke problem at the time as well, and I was entirely emotionally dependent on her-- this accounted for MONTHS of being at one another's throats. 

While physically thrilling and fascinating to many, our relationship was beyond emotionally tumultuous, whether it was our age/immaturity, the distance, or the fact that we were two people who were already prone to anxiety who were strung out on coke 24/7, I don't really know. But it was a series of mind games and changes in voice tone resulting in both intentional cruelty and despair on both sides. I remember one night when we were actually together in bed, her becoming cross with me about something and saying that she wished her Russian genius boy would love her again-- I promptly took an x-acto knife and put gashes in my inner thighs. I hadn't been a cutter before, and I haven't been one since, but it was practically an automatic form of release.

My behavior lost that bit of exhilaration at being young and pretty and turned into a very bitter, very deliberate form of destruction that took its toll quickly. One acquaintance commented that when he saw me in Toronto in December '07, I was "electric"-- I hardly weighed anything, but was mercurial and alive, my eyes were huge and always darkly lined, and I was just burning with frustration.  By the end of my freshman year in May '08, all of that had taken a toll. I no longer looked electric as much as I looked completely haggard-- completely drained. 

Also, that particular highly-charged emotional restlessness made me emotionally dependent on others in a way that I generally try very hard to avoid. I'll always be a little reckless, I'll always be a little too daring, but I find joy in the balance of being those things as well as self-contained. I prize my ability to detach and withdraw more than anything.

Alys and I are still very good friends-- best friends, actually. She has a tendency to spoil me wildly, and we only recently (well, I say recently, but within the past, I guess, 6 months) have actually begun sleeping together again. It's easy to fall back with her--- it's easy and it's not fruitless, because I care about her more than anything else, and she's bright and very powerful in her own way. We just work at keeping things separate--- and who knows how well that goes, but so far (recently) we've managed.

Those notes are almost a decade old now. I have no real idea where she is now (Toronto? Vancouver?), and only hints that she's very corporate and flying to take meetings in cities filled with silent glass towers.  I'd love to sit with her over drinks in some neutral city and listen to her tales of her life over the last dozen years.  In the last exchange of notes we had, back years ago, she noted that Alys was returning to Halifax from Bermuda aboard a racing yacht with one of her father's friends, following up on the inappropriate glances she and her father's friend had been exchanging since Red Alys was in high school. I have no idea how that played out or whether there was any truth in it. I'd like to think it was true. Sailboats and posh girls and inappropriate affairs are perfect ingredients for stories.

One Eight Eight: Smile-Mask

When I was young, I read a lot of Marxist theory. I was good at it for a while, and I knew all the arcane definitions and analytical techniques that Marxism had developed on its own or absorbed from critical theory. I knew the terms of art--- interpellation, ideology, alienation, comprador capitalism. I'm having problems these days with something more personal: the idea of "emotional labour".

 I do understand that there's a difference between "emotion work" and "emotional labour". One is, I think, more about presentation of the self at work, and other is more domestic. I don't know the dividing lines. What I do know is that the underlying concept--- when it's applied to domestic, personal concerns ---leaves me even more depressed and exhausted than the labour-market application.

My understanding--- based on reading any number of the more political sex blogs ---is that "emotional labour" is used to mean male demands on women for emotional support in a relationship. It's a male demand, of course. The male half of the relationship demands that the female half provide emotional support and help him through emotional downswings. This is regarded as evil, since it's a male demand. I suppose I'd always thought one of the desirable things about a romantic relationship was that you had someone there who would offer you emotional support, who wanted to raise your spirits and help steer you through depressing moments. Oh, of course you did the same for them. That goes without saying--- loyalty and support in return, always. Always. But the hope-- for both parties ---would always be that in a romantic relationship you'd have someone who would see it as worthwhile, or as part of the relationship itself, to be there for you, to say the small romantic things you need, to offer solace and congratulations and care.

Reading the blogs about the evils of "emotional labour" in a relationship, all I can think is that there's no longer any room for such things. Once again, it's better--- best ---to remain silent. Never ask a lover for anything, not support, not solace, not kind words. Never ask, never expect. Never hope. The new rules call for silence and distance. No one--- and especially the male half of the relationship ---should ever display any emotional needs or ask for any emotional support. Never ask for anything that could be spun as a demand. Never offer anything that could be spun as condescending or smothering. Simply enough, never ask for anything.

There was a time when I believed that lying back in a lover's arms would be safe, that I'd feel safe and supported and loved. A relationship could be a haven in a heartless world--- a phrase Marx supposedly used about the bourgeois family. Haven in a heartless world---- a kind of blanket fort against the outside, a place where someone believes in you and supports you, where someone sees it as part of their role to make you feel better, to make you feel desired and loved. For the record, and to stave off ranters, I'll be clear: you do all that for your partner, too. Ride or die--- you give that to them just as they give it to you. Those days are over. The new rules make it impossible to look at a romantic relationship as a haven, or to think you might get--- or seek ---any support.

There are things I'd hope for in a Young Companion, and things I'd like to tell a lover I'd need. There are things I'd like to ask for.  I can't, of course. I can't even begin to say anything. I can't even hint. All you can do in these latter days is stay silent. Never ask, never hope, never expect.

SIxty-Six: Cages

My friend did ask me about the parts of contemporary visions of manhood and masculinity that "suffocate" and "marginalize" men. Well, that I'm uncomfortable ever calling myself "a man" has to be connected to that, doesn't it? That "manhood" requires constant re-affirmation, or that it's a title that can be lost in an instant--- those things count.

I've followed a few links my friend sent to articles about the failures and dangers of contemporary ideas of masculinity. I can't say that I'm too impressed with the articles. One kept invoking the idea of "hypermasculinity" in American culture, but never explained--- never tried to explain ---what the base line for masculinity was.  Calling something hypertrophied means nothing if you don't know what the ordinary--- normal ---form is like.

And there seems to be a failure to look at the history of the concept. The articles all tended to focus on the idea that contemporary ideas of manhood are linked to physical force and physical strength and assert such things should have no place in a "true" vision of manhood. Okay, well, that's a respectable argument to make. But you have to be aware that over the last three or four thousand years, manhood has almost always been defined in terms of things martial. Manhood was something that entailed being ready to engage in combat. That's certainly true in the West, all the way back to Homer. It's true in the other cultures I know anything about, too. Make the argument if you want that it shouldn't be so, that there should be clear alternative paths to being seen as a man, paths that don't focus on physical force. Make the argument that the older ideas are obsolete and dangerous. But I think you have to have to recognise that martial prowess has been associated with manhood across all kinds of cultures for a very long time and ask why and ask why that link has endured. Asking that strikes me as key to finding a replacement.

There was also a tendency in the articles to turn a critique of manhood into a critique of male sexuality, to critique particular forms of sex (e.g., penis-in-vagina heterosexual sex) as being so linked to ideas of being a "real man" that they were somehow oppressive and morally corrupt in and of themselves. I understand what the original intent was. The idea was to argue that other kinds of sex--- meaning largely gay male sex ---were no less "manly" than PIV heterosex. The critiques managed to go beyond that, though, to end up somehow arguing that enjoying or wanting to have basic PIV heterosex is a sign of moral failure, or at least a sign of failure of vision.

I might have to laugh here for a second. At least one of the articles I read kept attacking ideas of manhood for promoting "stoicism", which it took to mean a kind of emotional deadening. I can look at the bookshelf by my writing desk and see a copy of Gregory Hays' 2002 translation of Marcus Aurelius and what goes through my mind is that no one writing in the articles has the least idea what stoicism was all about. Let's just leave that aside for the moment.

There are suffocating parts to contemporary ideas of manhood. I've always thought the most painful one is how risky it becomes to have male friendships. Aristotle wrote long ago that friendship was the highest good--- no one male would say that now. To have close male friends after a certain age (usually somewhere in one's early or mid twenties) is to risk being thought gay. And not just that. I want to be very clear on that. There's the fear that other males would think you're gay if you had close male friends once you were old enough to have graduated university.  There's another social risk, too. Women might think you were gay, which would make hooking up much more difficult, and they might also dismiss you as a Peter Pan, as someone who still prefers "immature" relationships to a "mature" relationship with a significant other or wife--- i.e., to "settling down". I know that fear all too well. I've never married, of course. It's easy enough for anyone hostile to argue that I'm "really" gay, and that having male friends is a clear sign of that. I know that it's a fear that makes me afraid to still have male friends. I really have no male friends in the way I had them as a boy or as an undergrad---- people with whom you could share thoughts or argue about ideas, people you could go visit and hang out with. I understand about homophobia in both senses of the word, and I know what I've internalised. I know that I miss having friends, but I also know that I couldn't pick up the phone tonight and call anyone male and just...talk. There are girls I could call, girls I could talk with late into the night. Though...the girls who are my friends are almost all former FWB girls.  It's hard to know quite what that means. What I do know, though, is that I am afraid--- or at least uncomfortable ---with the idea of having male friends now. I hate having to feel afraid, and I hate being afraid of being thought gay... I'm not sure what I'm more worried about--- social mockery by people (meaning other males)  who'd think I was gay or having girls dismiss me out of hand as a potential sexual partner if I they thought I was gay.

Nonetheless, there you are. There was a time when men had friends, when friendship was valued. That's no longer true. And it does leave me sad.

There are other things, too. Fear of age, fear that as a gentleman of a certain age, I can't meet the visual and physical requirements of the contemporary of the muscle-carapaced, body-sculpted mid-twenties image of manliness. As a gentleman, though, should I need those things? Shouldn't I be able to rely on attitudes and values rather than on body armour? But...isn't fear of age something else altogether, something like fear of death, or of impotence in its generalized (and not just sexual) meaning of lack of power, whether that's vitality or the ability to attract girls?

There is so much here to think about. I hope my writer friend will respond, and I hope any of my readers will respond, too.

Sixty-Three: Distinctions

I found a blog post today that argues that we have to wholly re-vamp language in order to have ways to discuss relationships that aren't "problematic". The argument seems to be that Western culture applies the evil idea of binary division to love and that this inhibits relationships from evolving beyond the "problematic".  It's taken as a given that all binary divisions are evil, of course. The particular evil binary here is the division of romantic-sexual and platonic love. The argument I suppose is that all relationships, like all categories, should be fluid and amorphous, and that any fixed distinctions led to exclusion, marginalization, and oppression.

The blog post claims that a new language is needed to "accept the possibilities and realities of asexual romance, primary nonsexual/nonromantic love, nonromantic sex and sexual friendship, romantic (nonsexual) friendship, queerplatonic nonsexual relationships..."  Let's leave aside for a moment the very awkward word "queerplatonic"and just think about a very clear distinction here. Relationships either involve sex or they don't. They can change--- move across the dividing line in either direction ---but there is that clear distinction. A sexual relationship can be romantic or not, monogamous or not. But it's clearly different from a non-sexual relationship, and driven by different dynamics. And we do have words for all the things on the blogger's list. We know what FWB means, we know (even if the term isn't used much these days) what "romantic friendship" is. We've had those terms for rather a while.

I am baffled by "primary non-sexual/nonromantic love", mind you. Does that mean that there's some secondary relationship that is sexual/romantic? If so, isn't that just a way of saying that someone has a close friend and a lover? How is that not about two different relationships--- relationships for which we already have terms?

I have to say that "queerplatonic" is just an awkward and silly and unattractive word. It seems to mean a relationship between two people of the same sex that's emotionally deep and long-lasting but not sexual. But didn't Jay & Silent Bob give that the much better description of "hetero life-mates" years ago? And how exactly is it different from a close same-sex friendship, except in using "queer" to imply (or confirm the suspicion) that all close same-sex friendships must be "in reality" sublimated gay affairs?

Sex is a dividing line, and it always has been. Relationships where sex is or likely soon will be happening have a very different emotional content from those where sex isn't or hasn't or won't be happening. That's not just about jealousy, mind you. Even the most casual FWB relationship has different drivers from a non-sexual friendship, and has different expectations and a different sense of timing. Adding sex to a relationship, even in its most casual form, adds a very different set of questions, questions about when sex will happen, about whether it'll happen again, about how one's performance was assessed, about how third parties will treat the news. 

I have to wonder if this particular attack on the evil binary is based on a desire to see the power and distinctiveness of sexuality drained away, to argue that sex  should not have the power to define a relationship--- which is part of the argument that sex can be taken out of male-female interactions, or that intense sexual/romantic love is somehow unnecessary or suspect. There's a subtext here, and an agenda. We already have the vocabulary for different forms of relationship, so what's at issue is something more conceptual, more ideological.

Any thoughts on this? Are your own relationships hampered or thwarted by a lack of vocabulary to describe what you want? What distinctions do you draw amongst your relationships?   

Fifty-Seven: Alliances

I am a gentleman of a certain age, and  a lifelong bachelor. I style myself as an aging roué. Those are dangerous things to admit to, these days. Even more so when one admits to a preference for younger companions. Nonetheless, here I am: of a certain age, and never married. The question is always there, I suppose: why not? And, too--- am I capable of what's defined these days as a socially or psychologically correct relationship?

I dislike having to defend my never having married. I dislike the idea that the decision is something that needs to be defended. However, society as it stands here in the new century looks askance at the bachelor. To be a bachelor is to be assumed either closeted gay or, if one is grudgingly allowed to be straight, then assumed to have deep psychological flaws.  I took a long time at postgraduate studies, and I had a long series of short-term contracts and moved from city to city on a largely annual basis. I have to plead poverty and lack of stability. I might also plead habit, that one grows used to living alone. I've never wanted the standard marriage, but I have always wanted relationships, or at least wanted someone in my life.

There are things I know I don't want. I've never wanted things like children. I've never wanted to own a house. Anyone who's with me should know that. That life--- a family, a house with a yard ---never appealed to me. I'd be no good at raising children, and I'll never in this life have the money to support either children or a house and the life that goes with a house in a middle-class, professional district. 

I always imagine a relationship, a long-term affair, as involving long, long conversations. That's key, I think. Being able to talk with someone about everything, being able to just...talk. To share ideas and thoughts. All the best relationships in my past have involved long conversations across tables or over the aether deep into the night. I've always said that one thing I like about lovely co-eds is that they still live for and through ideas--- books, music, films, theory. I don't know anything about the things women of my own age talk about, and things like mortgages, local politics, business gossip, kids are just part of another, alien world for me. What I need is...well, talk. The kinds of talk I remember from university and grad school and academia--- ideas, things that offer up intellectual excitement. I could never be involved with someone who didn't care deeply about books and ideas and music.  

If I did have a lovely girl in my life right now, we'd, well... spend long hours talking. Take that as a given. We'd go out on Saturday nights to favourite spots. I wouldn't even feel awkward dancing so long as I was with her. Dinner, drinks, events in the art world--- all those things would be on the agenda. But it would always be a Saturday night--- Saturday night so that there could be Sunday morning coffee somewhere. We'd get up early and go down to be a latte-and-croissants couple in the city. We'd be a laptop couple, sitting with back-to-back MacBooks at our favourite coffee shop, talking and sharing things we'd find. That might turn into brunch, of course: Mimosas do make a Sunday. And there'd probably be a night during the week when we'd meet for drinks after work. Definitely that.


I think I've always needed the small proofs of being part of someone's life, the proofs of love. Private names, small shared symbols and rituals.  I need the things I see other people, other couples, do. I need to think that I'm doing the things that people in couples are supposed to do. Maybe that's it, or at least part of it. I'd like to have someone who'd want to meet for drinks on a midweek night, who looked forward to brunch on Sunday. I'd like to have someone who'd want to be seen with me in public, who'd be willing to claim my acquaintance. That would be a key thing--- to have someone in my life who'd be proud to be my acknowledged young companion.

A relationship... I'd like to be able to do couple things: dinner, drinks, coffee, being together at all the small events that pop up in a university town. I'd like to be able to do the things I see couples doing.

It's very hard to set out what I'd do in return, of course. I have my own doubts about my value and skills. But sometimes I do have imaginary conversations with an imaginary girl and try to market myself. Looks, money, social status, social skills--- I'll never have any of that, and of course my age is shameful all on its own. But I am polite, and I am a good listener. I'm not bad as a conversationalist about certain things, and I know enough to talk with some knowledge about a few things. I can be adventurous as a lover, and at the least, I do want to please a partner. I've never been someone who's a regular at dinner parties or cocktail parties, but I do have basic training in etiquette. I was trained to that as a boy. Pets like me, and grandmothers of a old school.  I never know what else to say. I really don't know what socially-accepted adults talk about or what they do. But I do make a good voice late at night on the telephone, and I'm not bad talking and flirting across a cafe table. And I am always, always fiercely loyal to people I do care about.

The socially-accepted definition of a proper relationship eludes me. I have a nagging awareness that whatever it may be in the eyes of the social gatekeepers, let alone in the eyes of the gender warriors and the Social Justice cultists, I'll never measure up.

I'm not looking for either a house in the suburbs or children. My vision of a relationship may be more like some kind of extended dating or an extended affair. Maybe that's what I want.


But I do want someone in my life who cares about me, and who knows that I care about her. I want to be taken as valuable, and I want to be valued. I want the proofs of love, or at least the public rituals and private symbols of being part of a couple. I want someone who shares interests with me, and who'll talk with me about the things we want to learn and know and experience. I want someone who understands about rituals and symbols and who believes in gentle affection--- and who believes as well in seeking out adventures with lovers.

I do want voices over the aether late at night. I want to talk and talk and talk. Those long late-night conversations that I used to have with the lovers in the past who meant the most to me, those conversations about all the things we were thinking about during the day... I miss those, miss being able to share thoughts and memories and hopes. I need a voice in my life. I need someone who looks forward to talking back and forth in the dark.

Well... Here's what I'm clear on. I miss voices, and voices are a key part of any relationship. I need someone with whom I can share things I've been thinking or reading. I need the closeness of someone who'll hold hands across a table, or wake up with me on a Sunday morning before we go out for coffee. I need someone who'll be there with me on a Saturday night for drinks and wandering urban side streets. I know that I'll never have a family or a well-defined social role. I don't mind that. I've known that since I was an undergraduate. Any relationship I have won't end up being what socially-adapted and socially accepted persons of my age are supposed to want.

Voices matter, though. And small private symbols and rituals. And someone who's willing to be seen with me in public, and who values what I have to offer. Someone who knows that she'll call most nights to talk, or even just to say hullo before bed. Those things matter. They've always mattered. I'm not good at defining relationships or even at understanding what a relationship is supposed to be under the Arbitrary Social Rules. I do know what I imagine would be part of any relationship for me, even though it may only count as "dating" or an affair. Voices matter, knowing that you're part of someone's life matters.

Perhaps I'm simply no good at this. I'm a good late-night voice, and I'm a loyal friend. I am at least a lover who's open to adventure and to offering pleasure to his young companion. Those things may not be enough. They may no longer define parts of what a relationship is supposed to be under the Arbitrary Social Rules.

I will never marry, and I'll never have a family. I could, however, wish for a relationship, for an alliance, for someone who'll sit across a table from me or look forward to the things we do together. I'm used to a certain amount of solitude, but it would be a delight to know that someone wanted to wake up with me on a Sunday morning or share conversations on a Saturday night in bed. An alliance--- does that sound more or less precise than "relationship"? Does it sound more or less acceptable as something a gentleman of a certain age should want? 

Fifty-Four: Courtiers

I was brought up always to be polite, always to be courteous, always to remember the social graces. That's a regional and generational thing, and one that's stayed with me.  I was taught, too, that courtesy and the forms of politeness are key parts of any courtship, of any date, of any seduction. I've always admired the eighteenth century style in these things, of course. I do admire the forms of politesse, and I like the idea of social ritual. Well-done social ritual makes things easier for everyone. The structure of the ritual lessens having to worry about things, lessens having to feel insecure or uncomfortable. The ritual carries you along. You have to think less, to worry less. That's quite an achievement in human societies.

Needless to say, social rituals have their critics. The rituals have always been held suspect as "inauthentic", and as class markers. Those attacks go back at least to the Romantics. There are other attacks, too, these days, and ones even more bitter than the old Romantic or Marxist attacks on politesse. The gender warriors have happened upon social rituals and declared them a marker for evil.

There's a current designator for evil in the gender wars--- "nice". To be called a "Nice Guy" is to be tagged as evil. "Nice" is not just "inauthentic", it's regarded as yet another element in "rape culture".  After all, the argument goes, being "nice" is a a seduction tool, a way to undermine girls' resistance and make them feel obligated to offer up sexual favors.

There's this much truth in that, that "nice" has its tactical side. I'd never deny that. ("Nice" may well also be what one has as a fallback plan, when one lacks physical beauty or social status) I was brought up to believe that one was always polite and attentive and courteous on a date because those things made it more pleasant for a girl to be around you. (I'm old enough to have been taught to carry mints or gum that you could offer to a girl on a date.) The equation seemed obvious enough when I was very young. If you want someone to be around you, make the experience pleasant for them. And, yes, one is "nice" as an enticement. To be polite and courteous and attentive is a signal that someone is worth your time and effort. A signal, then, and a clear one. It's not that you'd be rude or harsh if you weren't interested; you'd just be neutral in that case. To be seen paying attention is to signal that you're paying court. I have no idea how that came to be seen as evil.

I suppose it's all about the idea of paying court, about the idea of trying to evoke a response. The gender warriors dislike the idea of "nice" because it's about offering up something to a girl in the hope--- or the expectation ---that she'll respond according to the ritual. There's a deep hatred for any ritual that evokes a response, where the point of the ritual is to bring someone in to the dance. Is that based on the idea that ritual is intended to obligate, and that any social obligation is bad? Or is it simply that the gender warriors see all courtship and seduction as inherently corrupt and evil?

I was brought up to believe in ritual and formality, and to believe in social obligations. I was brought up to believe that whatever one's physical flaws, politesse goes a ways towards remedying that. Yes--- these things are tactical. But a mannered and formal way of paying court, and of making someone feel at ease in your company--- how is that ever evil? And how is it evil to create rituals to bring someone into the dance?

Twenty-Nine: Amitié

Classical writers regarded friendship as the greatest gift, and one of the greatest goods. Without friendship, Aristotle said, no man would wish to live, though he had all other goods. Friendship is a dying art, now. It's not something we're comfortable with. Sex we understand, and we valorise love in ways the classical writers never imagined. But friendship is something that doesn't fit well with contemporary sensibilities.

I seem to remember twenty-odd years ago, and stories in news magazines proclaiming that the 1990s would be the Decade of Friendship. I don't remember why. Was it that after the plague years, the AIDS decade, that sex was something we were afraid of? Was it that passion was supposed to have burned itself out it Eighties excess? I don't remember at all why the trendspotters announced that "friendship" would be so key in the Nineties. I certainly don't remember that friendship played a major role in that decade. What I do remember is that friendship as an art had faltered all through the twentieth century, and that it continued to sicken all through the decade.

We do understand sex, and lust, and we insist that the pair-bond, the romantic couple, is the standard against which all relationships are measured. Friendship sits awkwardly in contemporary eyes. It's too often seen as something that takes away from the pair-bonding that's regarded as the only serious or valuable kind of relationship. Time spent with friends is time not devoted to the pair-bonding of spouses. Friendship and its emotional ties are seen as...what? Competing with something more serious, more socially valuable, more mature. I think, too, that it's hard for contemporaries to see any kind of close emotional or affectional tie and not read it as somehow sexual. A close friendship is seen as really just a love affair that's being hidden or denied.

I'm male, and a bachelor, and I feel the loss of friendships keenly. Yet I know that I'm sensitive to the implication that to have close male friends past one's undergraduate days is either  willful immaturity or closeted homosexuality. It's male friendship, of course, that carries those implications. Friendships between women are celebrated as empowering, not as clinging to juvenile life or as subterranean sapphistry.

I'm told that Japanese culture still values male friendship. I'm told that in societies where the sexes are still not integrated socially, where men and women have separate social spheres, males can have friendships that aren't suspected of either being a way to escape domestic life/adulthood or a hidden gay affair. We expect a close relationship to be a pair-bond where two people share everything and "complete" one another. There's no room left for friendship past one's mid-twenties, for anything that competes with the domestic pair-bond.

There's a bit of fear here, I know that. I feel a certain amount of fear about being regarded as either a Peter Pan or a paederast should I have close male friends. I'm a bachelor, too--- a status already suspect enough. To have close male friends now is to invite raised eyebrows from women. To make--- or try to make ---male friends now is to invite even more suspicion, if not derision.

This raises the perennial question, of course: can men and women ever be friends? I used to say that so many of my friends were women, and that my friendships with them weren't simply stalled courtships. But the truth is that while, yes, my closest friends are female, they're all people with whom I have a history. Not ex-lovers so much as ex-friends with benefits. They're women with whom I once had affairs in passing, affairs that didn't stray into dangerous areas of passion. Ex-friends with benefits--- shared past, shared beds, and now still able to talk and trust one another and share confidences. It would never work if I hadn't slept with them already. It wouldn't work if I'd once been deeply in love and lost that. Lovely young companions who were once friends-with-benefits have become my friends. I know that the sexual past--- even where we don't talk about it ---is what makes the friendship work.

I wouldn't know how to have male friends here at my age. I wouldn't know how to have female friends with whom I hadn't slept already. I'm not sure at all how to define friendship or what I hope for from friendship. I hope that if you're reading this, you'll tell me about how you define friendship for yourself, about what you think of male friendship as such. I suppose I'm hoping that lovely and literary and thoughtful girls--- the Comp. Lit. graduate student who's always my Implied Reader ---will comment on this. What are we to make of friendship here in the second decade of the new century? Is it even possible to be male and still have friends?