Halloween all year long

I'm ready to discuss the "to show or not to show your feelings" subject. It comes down to control. Let's face it, once we open ourselves up by expressing our feelings we're giving up a bit of control. The ball's no longer in our court.  I believe self awareness- the ability to look both inside and outside of one's self- grants the ultimate form of control.  With that ability we can fashion the version of ourselves that we want the world to see. It's Halloween all year long. We all do it. But by virtue of that fashioning, are we truly ourselves if we pick and choose and hide the rest? 

I think when we develop feelings for someone, those pretenses are exaggerated more than normal. We worry more and more about what the other person thinks of us and how they might feel if we do this or say that. Then a few months or even years pass, and all of a sudden the person you're with wasn't the person you met. A friend of mine had a fling with a guy who was definitely not a keeper- from the beginning she knew it and, as her friends, we knew it. But in describing the relationship, she said it was the most honest she had ever been with a guy. Why? Simply because the guaranteed absence of a future liberated her to be able to be herself. It didn't matter if he agreed with her opinion on discrimination to minorities in the credit market or that he never met her parents. I guess it could be called a fling.  Either way, according to this friend, its was a very honest fling.

If you're reading this and you're thinking, "Hey, I should start dating my friends. We already know all the annoying things about each other and yet we're still able to get along."  One word: Don't!

The gerbil wheel

I've been watching, reading, and listening to a lot of people's takes on relationships. A byproduct of my conscious decision to take a break from the dating game after the dissolution of my last relationship. A relationship I like to think of as a dress rehearsal for the real thing.  Of course that dress rehearsal was over a year ago and it squandered two years of my precious life- three if you count the past year. Maybe squandered is a harsh word- I did learn a lot from said ex and he did leave me with some great memories. But I digress. Basically, in taking the relationship break to "figure shit out" I'm realizing it's just another spoke in life's gerbil wheel. We expend all this effort to find someone, or get someone, or keep someone. Yet, at the end of it all we're left back where we started- only sweaty, tired, and alone.

Don't get me wrong, I believe in love. But I no longer believe New York City is conducive to finding Love. I've lived here most of my whole life.  In a place that has everything and everything is available 24/7, I feel Love is ill equipped to compete. If you're in that place where your interest is casual dating or casual sex, it's heaven on earth. But take heed, the pervasiveness of these predilections is the reason Love is so hard to find here. No one plays hard to get anymore, if you play that game the other party will go elsewhere to get what they want without going through the trouble. Foreplay's been relegated to text messages and dirty emails. I'm pretty sure we're so conditioned to instant gratification that we've forgotten, or maybe some have never experienced, the build up and anticipation that feels so good when we like someone. When we do like someone, though, making the decision to reveal those feelings or to keep them to one's self is a whole other battle.  After all, if it ain't broke why fix it by bearing our souls? But I'll leave that for another day.

Here is a link to a great talk on the science of love that may be of interest:
http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html