Dr Love and Mr Hide

Being alone became one of his many habits. He was not lonely. Knew only too well how it could be to reside with another in a quietly incongruous manner that led to a creeping loneliness that eventually made its way into a person’s bones. A cancer of sorrow that took a lot of curing.

He’d been free of that particular cancer for five years and felt that he had the all clear by now. There was no way of knowing these things. It was just a fair hunch. The best way to know would be to step outside the coral of those habits of his and find out where the lacks and flaws resided.

High time he went out into the world to discover who it was he had made of himself. It was questionable whether he was ready, but he had enough about him to know that one was never ready when it came to the significant moments in life, in particular, matters of the heart.

In his sixth year of freedom from a silent tyranny that sent him floating to the bottom of the river of life like a discarded rock. A rock that looked up towards the surface of the seemingly flat and still river and saw all the other rocks skimming along quite happily. He decided he really did have to break out onto the surface once more and present himself to the world. A debutante on the dating scene.

Life, like work, has a habit of getting in the way. He busied himself with anything and everything that kept him hunkered down and looking at his feet. Excused his behaviour because he at least wasn’t gazing at his navel. This industry of his made him fitter. He was in a state of greater preparedness. For what, he had no real idea. He’d come to that soon enough.

In his seventh year of splendid isolation he at last grit his teeth and took the plunge. To say he regretted the ice cold sensations of the dating scene would be a strange and wonderful description that lacked the size and shape of what he experienced.

The dating scene had hitched its wagon and headed out west. The territory it had annexed was not its own, and so there had been much conflict and bloodshed. He came along to survey a battlefield strewn with the dead and the wounded. He wasn’t sure which were the luckiest, those nursing wounds of animosity and anger, or the obliviously dead.

The latter would lay there on this hill forever and a day. That was his assessment and over time he felt he was proven right. They remained on the dating sites. Or they blended with the rotting landscape awhile only to return to stark relief.

He wondered where he was in this carnage and confusion. He had no way of knowing unless he were to disguise himself as one of the fairer sex and wander the fields of broken and twisted men.

There was enough on the profiles for him to establish that there were plenty of men who liked to show themselves off. Conspicuous success in their chosen images portrayed by fast cars and sometimes fast boats. Fit bodies situated in the gym. Topless and posing. The fish made him chuckle. Freud would have a field day with this. A demonstration of hunting prowess that also signalled a prodigious endowment.

The dating sights fell into different categories. He guessed this was to emulate the pubs, bars and clubs that had formerly been the key place to meet and chat to the opposite sex. Meeting people out in the world was now verboten. Only online was it permitted to meet a potential candidate for a life together. Via the portal of the dating site many wants filtered the detritus until only the viable remained.

And yet he saw profile after profile containing venom. He’d encountered this out in the real world many years ago. Drunk women poking him in the chest with their forefinger whilst projecting every slight real or imagined. He had known it not to be personal back then. Even as he examined the bruise on his chest the following morning. He was not those men. He was not like that. He knew this for a fact back in the day. Now he wasn’t so sure. He’d been out of this game for far too long and all the players had changed beyond recognition.

Now, men were conspicuously rude and predatory. He’d had to look up the initialisations in order to decipher what men attempted to inflict upon women. It all came down to sex. One Night Stands. Friends With Benefits. Unsolicited photos of dicks.

At first he was amused. How could a random photo of a penis lead to any positive result? It wasn’t as though a dick was aesthetically pleasing whatever its state. If a woman had ever told him he’d got a pretty penis he’d not linger in her company. And that would be her intended outcome. The prevalence of these requirements that men did not send sordid photos of themselves from the waist down led him to believe that there was a success rate with this strategy. He supposed a man knew exactly what he was getting should such an offering be positively received.

As his odyssey into the wild world of online dating continued, he marvelled at the nature that humans had now adopted. It didn’t seem natural to him. A straightjacket that once donned could never be removed. The machines were taking over insidiously and causing incremental suffering that would never be reversed.

The bios that ranted about the wrong sort of man were an inadvertent statement that that woman was continually choosing the wrong man. This put him off more than the negativity that oozed between each word. The auspicious start absented itself from these profiles. Instead there was an onus of proof required; I’m not like that.

Whittling the profiles down still left him with people who he would like to meet. Despite the vitriol and combative nature of most of the people vying for his attention, he remained optimistic. He only needed one good person who he could make it work with. He wasn’t greedy. One was all that it took.

He was realistic. That first date may not lead to another. Either one of them may not be feeling it. What he wasn’t prepared for was that he was one in a long line. That there were those who were habituated in their quest for The One. An endeavour of mythical proportions that was unlikely to end well were Achilles himself to come to the fore and pledge himself to such a woman.

Sitting through tales of previous abortive dates and fledgling relationships was interesting at first. But soon enough he tired of this fare. However it was seasoned, it was exactly the same underneath. Something about this drained his energy. Smacked of failing before anything ever started. The doom and gloom was getting to him. However much he smiled and cracked jokes, despondency stained his skin and he was glad to return to a home empty of such madness.

Far too soon, he would sit on his phone each evening swiping right and clicking likes with little discernment. This was a numbers game and that was all there was to it. He had no idea what it was like on the other side. Nor how badly it affected the opposing forces. His was an experience of rejection. He reached out thousands of times and was to consider himself lucky were he to receive any response whatsoever.

Of the paltry crop of responses, very few would go beyond a reciprocal like or swipe. He would take the time to write a greeting only to be ignored. Manners were apparently not required here. There were no feelings at this stage. Not in this land of the unreal. It was not clear when any of it would become real. There was no way of knowing when a worthwhile investment would be made.

The state he was in spoke to him of his commitment to this endeavour. He was low. Felt an overwhelming sadness. The screen of his phone was slowly stealing his soul. And he was letting it. He was hooked on the game by now and try as he might he could not cease the swipes and likes. Somewhere out there was a princess who would chance her lips on the skin of this frog.

Everyone deserved a happy ending didn’t they?

He could see their entitlement, but avoided his own. That there was human nature. A last vestige of it at least. He was following the herd and justifying his deteriorating behaviour with wilful ignorance. He felt himself better than those he observed stooping so low. Laughed insolently at clumsy attempts at differentiation; I’m sick of people asking how I am, what I did for the weekend or what plans I have for the evening! Decrying a polite opening greeting and demanding a novel marketing pitch. Wanting a piece of artifice from the outset so that all that could be built from there was a flimsy falsehood that would fall flat sooner rather than later.

Healing was another demanded criteria. This was something that was out of kilter with him from the very start, but he did not know why. On the face of it, it seemed perfectly reasonable. What he failed to remember was the Devil would sound reasonable when he crossed paths with him. That the worst temptations were delivered with a smile and an energy that attracted. Some things seemed like a good idea at the time, but they were never your idea. They just seemed to happen and the outcome of their happening wasn’t good at all.

There was something about healing that seemed to be a much wanted criteria; must be healed. Now, he knew this to be a ridiculous requirement. He’d never met anyone who wasn’t wounded in some way or another. Pain was a constant companion whether it was acknowledged or not. His browsing of bookshops told him all he knew of the pain of others. Horror, crime, so-called true crime, and jaunts into fantasy to escape the pain of living. At some point he encountered the Healing Journey. This sounded like a worthy pursuit, but it also sounded like so much bull dung. Sure enough, he walked around that grand edifice and lifted the curtain to see the small truth within. This was just another barrier to living. Why? Because living was all a healing journey ever was. Attaching fancy words and phrases to life to paint it otherwise was a dangerous deception. But then there was so much of that about. Too much as far as he was concerned.

He’d thought that dating in his fifties would be straightforward. He was approaching his twilight years. Time to sit on the porch in comfortable silence and watch the sun go down. Read a book and smile at the presence in his life. Pour drinks and raise a glass to a companionship that wasn’t possible during the industrious hustle and bustle of the career and child rearing years.

Dreams of peaceful companionship were shattered and battered by the online game of dating. The gamification of finding a special friend had rendered it a harsh and costly transaction. A brutal win or lose. The price of the transaction was self-worth. People gambled again and again for winnings that they believed they deserved.

And he realised that he was addicted. Rolling the dice incessantly in the pursuit of being wanted. Wanted, not for what he was, but for what he could portray. Everything was one dimensional. He began to understand the women who blew hot initially and then froze. A partial awakening to the futility of a dreadful game. They glimpsed the reality of it and withdrew. Problem was, they blamed their current beau for failing to deliver their prize as they had defined it. Didn’t look beyond that to see that no one could ever deliver everything they thought they wanted, let alone on day one of an interaction that was so far removed from a relationship it was laughable.

The dates came all the same. He’d chatted to these women online, exchanging numbers when a particular level of the game was completed. He learnt not to be premature in offering his number. There was a sweet spot that needed to be reached in order to be successful and move further.

He experienced excitement prior to a first date. He tried not to prod and poke it. He told himself it was nerves and he carried on with the game. The real part of the game. The familiar levels that he had been acquainted with so long ago.

This time it was different though. The dance seemed the same, but the steps had changed. In one respect there was an earnestness. A willingness to succeed. In another was wariness. A covert battering to have wants met come what may. It didn’t matter who was sat opposite you, they were the boss of this level and they needed to be beaten in order to earn the win.

He knew that the online battles had spilled out into what once was the real world. Reality was now a continuation of the online game. A life like simulation masquerading as the real deal.

He wanted to fight it, but how could he fight an entire world? Besides, he was already addicted to the fighting required for the game. A violent gamble that he was losing repeatedly. Losing himself into the bargain.

One night, having awoken at his now usual witching hour, he fetched up his phone and in the light of the beside lamp saw a reflection in the dark and dead screen of his phone. The image smiled at him, but there was no light in its eyes. Only a savage hunger. In that moment he witnessed his dark side and understood what he was doing to himself.

The split he was experiencing terrified him. A silent and insidious conflict that was nearing its end. He tried to deny the error of his ways, and in so doing carried on to the fearful conclusion of what he had started in good faith.

The Devil had made work for his idle hands. He’d forged a ravenous loneliness from his singular contentment. He’d made an idol of a woman that couldn’t exist and his dark half had emerged as he lost sight of all that mattered in this life. He lay there for an age, wanting the day to pass him by and the night to swallow him whole.

What have I become? He asked himself as he lay there and wept invisible tears for the loss of himself. He’d made of himself a creature that could navigate this broken new world. A psychopath that could provide the necessary illusion to lull unwary women into a fantasy. He wondered how long they might be trapped in that poisoned well of make-believe. The answer terrified him.

People stuck with what they knew and they were attracted to what was familiar. This appalled him all the more. He had willingly desensitised himself, sacrificing his worth for a chocolate coin he could never spend.

The carrot of a false dream dangled before him still, and he salivated at the prospect of reaching it even when he knew it to be a device that held no meaning for him. Just like any online game, there was nothing real about it, only the temporary high of winning something that had never existed. A trip into the light fantastical.

You attract what you are.

He knew this to be true now, and he dared to look in the mirror as the sunlight poured into the bathroom and illuminated every wrinkle and line on his face. He looked so old. He felt robbed of years that had never taken place. With a force of will, he stood before the mirror and faced the fact of himself. Stared at the shame and saw it for what it was. Not the be all and end all. Just one part of a whole that he was responsible for.

He'd gotten it wrong and it was scant consolation that so many others had stepped through that same door in order to hide from themselves and the reality of who they were. Looking for something that they were never going to find. No one was coming to save them. There was no quick fix in the arms of another.

Instead, you had to make the best of what you had. All of it. He smiled and the change in his face was remarkable. This was what he wanted. This was what he knew. Now the lines on his face were not of age, but of experience and there was laughter in that. A playfulness that he had lost in all those hours that he’d laboured to be something that he could never be.

He lost the smile and looked upon the tired man who had tried so hard to be something he could not be until he nearly became its polar opposite. Something he would have grown to hate had he carried on just a little further.

Again he smiled and gazed upon that aspect of himself. This he loved. This he could work with so very easily. He nodded now and became the serious and grim aspect of himself. This part was harder to love, but it was stubborn and it got the job done. This was his engine room. There was passion here. Sleeves rolled up and fingernails grubby with dirt.

“Shake hands, boys!” he was grinning now.

Maybe there was something to healing after all. Healing the rift within so you could play nice out in that big and nasty world…