Falling in love and knowing how wrong it is.

Carmen's note: I wrote many stories about Roark the summer that we met. I include this one to show that I was fascinated by a man who didn't truly believe in love and had some major issues to work on before he could have a happy relationship.  I think, in hindsight, some wounded, insecure part of myself I was not yet aware of felt a deep connection to his depression and insecurities and uncertainty. This is the second story-the first was about a bike ride together in which he played games with the intent of keeping me interested. The italicized text was added much later once I found out more about Roark.

Romantic Relations: Failing the Vertical Line Test

“Will you be here for a second?”  Roark asks as we pack up after Attack the Track at the Velodrome. His tone of voice is slightly vulnerable as if whatever he is going to say will be worth waiting around for. He’s thinking that this is a not a good idea to ask me to dinner. It leads to dangerous ground for him, it will test his fidelity. His tone of voice isn’t the normal nervous because he doesn’t really care what I say. It’s guilt.

            I easily exchange my skinsuit for a red rose dress, pleased at how adept I’ve become at changing in front of people at cycling events.

            Roark walks back over to me as I linger speculating that he might say something of interest.  “What’s up?” I ask.

            “I try not to eat this late but do you want to get dinner with me? I’m going to go get food even if you don’t.” Did his qualification make it more about food than my presence, deflecting some potential embarrassment?

            My answer to his question was the outcome he’d hoped for. 

I smile as I follow his car downtown, pleased that my nonchalance that evening seemed effective at gaining a dinner date.   He’d been playing mind games on our previous bike rides, thinking that leaving me wondering was more interesting than being direct. Dinner is proof of interest. Dinner is proof of interest if one is normal and secure. Dinner with Roark was something else.

His dark brown eyes are not particularly unique but it’s exciting to look into them as we eat.  Our conversation lasts longer than our food and drinks. Realizing we are the only ones left in the bar we feel obligated to leave.

We lean against his car facing each other, our faces reflecting slightly different double versions of ourselves. I ponder if his reflection or his face is more attractive. 

 “Being open about everything is less honest than concealing things, ” Roark proposes another paradoxical theory of love. “I’ve told you a lot but have I really told you anything about myself that matters?” He does the half-smile smirk to indicate he probably hasn’t. He wants to warn me that telling me that he causes trouble is an understatement. I may think he’s being honest, I may accept his small mistakes because he’s open about them. He leaves unspoken some of the truly atrocious things he’s done. His honestly conceals a lot and I’m not taking his warnings seriously enough.

I think about it, wondering what I know about him. He takes pictures of abandoned buildings dilapidated by the weight of time because they capture him better than words. He empathizes with my students who choose laziness because it’s an easier explanation for failure than lack of ability. Laziness is relative to ones peers however. Laziness to Roark means doing 100 hours of work a week instead of the 120 hours the others are doing at his prestigious architecture school. He’s third best at everything instead of the best at anything because he can’t choose one thing.

 “I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I don’t know if I want to be an architect or a photographer or something else.” I relate to his frustration as I try to choose between journalism, mathematics or that something else career that will decisively answer the nagging “what do you want to do when you grow up?” question.

 “I don’t understand myself. I don’t have a clear sense of identity. My life is compartmentalized. I’m a different person in different circumstances. It’s hard to know how to behave when different parts of my life intersect. It causes lots of problems in my relationships.”  Roark has already told me that he doesn’t let people fall in love with him and that he has a low-self esteem. Roark lives in lies to people. Sarah doesn’t know how he feels fear. He’s afraid to let her see that part of him. He has a best self and a worse self. I only have a self. I don’t conceal. I wear my tears on my cheeks without feeling shame. I share my success and failure and guilt.

“You have to love yourself before anyone else can love you.” I connect his problems with a truth found in a guide to dating.  Falling in love is a quick solution to loneliness, purposelessness, boredom, and lack of confidence. Love makes me feel beautiful, desired, interesting and intelligent. However, love insists that we find these qualities on our own before he gives them to us. If we choose love’s quick fix we end up with self-confidence built on something other than ourselves, an unsteady structure bound to fall apart like the buildings Roark photographs. Love isn’t enough. Love is a bandage, a temporary slave. No love can repair our own problems. If we cheat love won’t keep us from doing it. It’s something else, something separate.

“I believe in love when I’m having a good day. When I’m having a bad day and don’t like myself it’s the first thing to go. I like things that are logical and that make sense. It doesn’t make sense to me why someone would love me.”

“Normally I would think that this statement fishes for me to tell you that you are smart, interesting and attractive, but I don’t get the sense that me telling you that would change anything.” I avoid explicitly complimenting him.

“Women can tell me that they love me because I’m good at art or intelligent but it doesn’t make logical sense. Why can someone love one identical twin and not the other?  Love is not about our quantitative accomplishments. Have you ever loved someone who was worthless?”

I consider a long string of boyfriends who were unsuccessful because they sabotaged their own brilliance with refusal to accept social norms. These men couldn’t pursue a mature relationship because of unresolved emotional trauma. As providers, as lovers, as friends they might have been worthless. They were certainly interesting however. I smile at Roark’s comment and laugh to myself. My smile reveals that I am thinking of something interesting and bratty enough to leave others to guess at it.  “I tend to think that the people I’ve dated have not been completely worthless,” I respond.

 “The possibility of loving someone worthless implies that love is not quantifiable.  Intelligence, attractiveness, honesty, humor, are not sufficient conditions to inspire love. When I’m too pessimistic to entertain the leaps in logic necessary to accept love it ceases to be a possibility.”

Roark explains his dysfunctional views on love with a reference to his past.

“I didn’t really like high school. Or to be more honest, high school didn’t like me.” Roark’s dad died. Roark was miserable. Misery may love company but a high schooler with a normal life is unlikely to react positively to that. Roark started pretending to be something else because no one liked the Roark scared by the loss of his father.  

Roark asked, “Do you believe in love?”

“I think that it probably exists.” I have to add probably since I can’t prove it.

“Probably? Haven’t you ever been in love?”

“Yes, I have.”

“How can you use the word probably?”

“My mother believes that romantic love is something that society has taught us to believe in that is really more of a hormonally charged experience. Abiding love takes more time to grow than people normally take before marriage. Her theory is supported by the divorce rates and in deference to her beliefs I added the probably. “He looks at me skeptically. “Okay, I believe in love,” I admit.  I’m an optimist.

It’s late and we decide to head home.  In a normal romantic relation hanging out in a man’s car for an hour in a dark parking lot would result in a kiss. Something was different but I’m still optimistic about Roark.  Optimistic?! Am I a fool. This is why I scare myself. Roark’s goal with me was to avoid kissing. How close can I get and still resist? Am I strong enough to avoid the beautiful woman sitting in my car at midnight who is willing to do what I want? Sometimes when something is different it doesn’t mean that it’s an exciting game. It means that there is a problem. He’s just too weird my mother says. There is something normal about kissing and if it’s missing don’t take it lightly.

The next day at the velodrome I think about how I can talk to Roark. “You have a really big camera.” I’ve wandered over to where he’s taking pictures of the race.

“It’s compensation.” He gives me a half-smile.

I wonder if he’s being serious or not. If it was true it might explain his lack of confidence with women, but would someone admit that?

He starts to walk away from me and I wonder if I should follow him back.  I feel left behind. He didn’t want to talk to me. I don’t want to follow him back without an invitation; it makes me feel needy. He turns around and points the camera at my face.

I’m shocked and realized that he wasn’t trying to leave. Taking my picture seemed like the biggest compliment Roark had given me, he was entirely focused on my face and it made me blush. I imagined that the portrait should be titled “Girl with crush on photographer.”

“I understand what you were saying that you couldn’t take pictures of happy people when you were really depressed.”

“The subject reacts to the photographer.”

Roark stares at me, holding his camera at his waist, trying to catch me off guard. I could hear the camera a split second before it took the picture and had time to wrench my face into some sort of flattered embarrassment each time. Roark doesn’t think he got what he was looking for. The experience is more intimate than kissing and I wonder if anyone watched it happen and now knows exactly how we feel about each other. (Do we know how we feel about each other?)

After I finish racing I try to change my gear fast enough to find Matt and escape the center of the Velodrome before the next race. I don’t make it and by the time I cross the track, he’s already gone, or at least not trying to find me. I debate calling him. Clearly he’s not interested in hanging out tonight but with my confidence bolstered by the photo shoot and sideline cheers I decide that I might as well call him.

He left early because he had to escape the social situation. He promises to explain on our bike ride the next day. We cancel the bike ride and get lunch.

Roark and I talk at a restaurant by the lake where he used to row. “Rowing suited me. It is a beautiful sport.” In rowing you suffer silently without letting your face betray the pain.

“I think you would like rowing. You like suffering on your bike.” We wander around the lake discussing the path to athletic greatness.

I remind him that he promised to tell me about his fear of social situations. “I’m hyperaware of how I interact with people.” When he talks to people it’s always a charade. He learned that people didn’t like who he was underneath, so he made something up.

“I left last night because I was really tired and I didn’t have the energy to put up that charade, to be confidant.”  This type of peculiarity is one I’d unwisely accept in a boyfriend, trading the hurt feelings of not being wished goodnight for the challenge of figuring out someone so complex.  Did he leave because the night is dangerous?

 “I don’t like social situations because they make me uncomfortable. If you say something to someone, the outcome is unpredictable. Depending on how it’s said, their mood, their opinion of you there can be wildly different results. The difference in the results can mean the difference between happiness and being really upset.”  Love isn’t a science Roark wants it to be.

Dating is not a function. If I could hold a ruler up to it, it would fail the vertical line test. One input in dating can result in many possible outcomes. There are enough paradoxes in love that even applications of the axioms is too complicated for calculation.

We end up at the parking lot again. We have lots of conversations standing in parking lots, reluctant to go home, not willing to make plans to go somewhere where something more serious could happen. I contemplate the inputs in our relation trying to draw a conclusion about where this is going.  The parking lot is safe. It absolves him from needing to exercise any real willpower.

“Well, have a safe drive and a good time at the lake with your family.”

I’m thinking too hard about mentioning kissing to respond.

“So you’re not going to respond to that?”

“My silence means that I was thinking about saying something but not sure if I should.” I can tell by their response to this statement if they really want to know.  “We’ve been playing games,” I state.

“What games?”

I wonder if he is just mocking me.

“Playing hard to get.  If you want to go talk to someone but don’t because you don’t want them to know that you’re too interested it’s less sincere than saying I think you are attractive and want to make out with you.”

“Is it insincere if you don’t know? Is being undecided a legitimate excuse for wavering? I’ve done just enough to keep you from giving up on me and losing interest. I haven’t actually made any decisions.”  Is he really undecided? He loves Sarah, Carmen.

“You’ve just caused trouble.”

“I need to apologize for that.”   He is apologizing for everything. For being such a hopeless cause, for purposefully seeing if he can see me and avoid cheating on Sarah. He wants to apologize to all the woman he’s fucked and fucked over but they are not speaking to him so he can only apologize to me and I don’t even understand why he is apologizing. He wants me to accept an apology for so much more than I even know about. It doesn’t work that way though. He can’t trick me into accepting all of his mistakes. I just end up confused, because as far as I know he’s done nothing. When I do get it, I won’t be willing to accept it any longer. He’s almost telling the truth. Trying to get me to be less trusting because he probably sees that in me. I trust people with my heart. He doesn’t really want to tell me what he’s done but someone he needs to warn me because I’m too innocent, too easily seduced, liked to, cheated on and it feels bad to treat someone so honest so badly.

“You don’t need to apologize.” I don’t want him to have to apologize because it means that I’ve been duped, or made a mistake to entertain going out with him.

 “You played all your cards right, you just picked the wrong person.”

 “If I tackled you to the ground and tried to kiss you would you let me?”  I just need to check that no inputs on my part will result in the desired outcome.

“No.”  This relation is certainly not behaving as expected.

“If this had been a different year things would be different. It’s been a rough year. I tried to kiss you but I couldn’t do it.” Roark is crazy. “I get obsessed with people easily and that is not what I need.  I’m saving you from more trouble by not kissing you.” He has something good in him. Am I being ridiculous to give him credit for saving me from himself? Is he the schizophrenic serial killer that tells his victim to run in a moment of clarity. That’s too dramatic. Sometimes we have moments of strength. We know that we cannot love, we know that we are too fractured, too shattered and we tell a person to leave, to escape before they are drawn into our madness.

Am I lucky that Roark is saving me from my own selection process?  I worry about the men I find myself attracted to. My mom speaks of her “people picker” being broken, her three failed marriages the result of a bad selection process rather than her own shortcomings. It can’t be all coincidence that I’m the most interested in the two men who don’t want to kiss me.

“What is your mom going to think of this latest conversation?”

“Probably she will go tell me to jump into a cold lake.” I know what my mom would say about Roark. Give up! Give up! If they tell you they aren’t ready for a relationship or think it’s a bad idea, believe them.  

ÒÒÒ

After a trip to the lake, I return to Seattle to spend a few more days on the track. My mother asks me if I saw Mr. Deranged when I return from racing. In my defense, I tell her that he’s interesting and that there is no harm in hanging out with someone interesting for a few weeks. “I’m concerned that you become obsessed with men who are emotionally unavailable. You flock to the wounded birds.” 

My mother is suspicious of a man who doesn’t want to kiss her beautiful, intelligent, kind daughter. If the outcome isn’t a kiss, the relation is just too strange to be worth engaging in.

My mom’s people picker has been refined. Something was seriously wrong, Roark was not normal or okay to date. How can I learn to figure this out more quickly? Why do I go for men who need to see counselors? If I don’t go for them who will? Are some of us just destined to be alone until we are ready for love? Alone seems to be a necessary part of life. How do people get married so young. Hormonally influenced reality perhaps.