to here at dustbury.com (look for a post “avoidance-avoidance”) and also at a place run by an Andrea Harris called Spleenville here.  Nina is still flogging me here.

NEW YORK, Feb 5 (Reuters Life!) – For most women, the choice between sex and a new wardrobe is simple — they go for the clothes.

Women on average say they would be willing to give up sex for 15 months for a closet full of new apparel, with 2 percent ready to abstain from sex for three years in exchange for new duds, according to a new survey of about 1,000 women in 10 U.S. cities.

Sixty-one percent of women polled said it would be worse to lose their favorite article of clothing than give up sex for a month.

“Some people say clothes make the man, but the right clothes can even replace him,” fashion designer, stylist and TV personality Carson Kressley from the reality TV show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” said in a statement accompanying the poll.

The study also suggested that clothes often wear better than relationships.

The average woman between 18 and 54 years of age has hung on to her favorite article of clothing for 12 and a half years, a year longer than she’s held on to her longest relationship.

Almost three-quarters of respondents, or 70 percent, also said they believed in love at first sight when it came to finding the perfect article of clothing, while only 54 percent of women were as confident in spotting the right man.

Nearly half of the women, or 48 percent, taking part in the survey by consumer products giant Unilever said their favorite article of clothing was more reliable than their man in giving them confidence and making them feel sexy.

Nina, who can’t figure out how to comment on this blog, fusses at me on her blog, Flibbertigibbet! here.

Just doing rough figuring, a boob job costs about $3,500, liposuction about $2000 and a tummy tuck about another $3,000.  Prolly take about a year to have the surgeries and heal up.  So, 10K and a year and presto! Playboy bunny.

Cost of a goofball becoming intellectually honest and emotionally available?  Priceless.  That service is not available.  Not for any price and not within any reasonable time limit.  If we could flip a switch and become a “grownup”, we’d a done it a long time ago.  If hearing a woman’s voice cavill could make us grow up, we’d have left high school, or at least our first marriage, grown up.  We didn’t.  We’re goofballs.

At least when goofballs set standards, it’s possible in the real world to meet the standard.

After writing the last post, I went to the grocery and bought some roasted chicken and on my way home, at 63rd and May, I thought “if I turn right, I can pick up some white wine to go with this chicken.”  Huh?  Where’d that come from?  Then: “Fuck wine, how about some single malt scotch.”  Shit.  That’s bad.  The first thought, OK, that happens to recovering alcoholics and we learn to just have those thoughts and let them go.  The second thought, the one about scotch, that’s an anomaly.  That’s the kind of drinking thought I only have when really depressed or really celebrating.  That’s a tougher one to explain and let go of.  Hmmmm.  Ate dinner and it was delicious and Sinatra really enjoyed the very tiny sliver of white meat I hand fed him.  Went to Starbucks for a coffee afterwards.  I couldn’t get out of Starbucks fast enough.  A gush of agoraphobia struck me when I took my place in line behind a couple of nondescript people.  Getting into my car, I was hurt, full of rage and nonspecific anxiety, a whole admixture of feelings, and mostly, and oddly, very very lonely, alienated, beyond alone.  I’ve concluded that the discussion about relationships is dredging up some ooookey feelings that I don’t want to feel.  I hate this, but it means I might actually learn something about my authentic self.  More likely, I’ll act out and really offend someone I love and care about and spend my way out of solvency and then hide in my closet until someone comes to help me.  Ya never know, though, do ya?

Nine days from Valentines Day and we’re fussing about relationships.  Coincidence or Irony? 

It’s amusing to me in the extreme that I write these fulminating and incendiary polemics on topics of life and death, war and peace, whatever, and not a leaf stirs in the blogosphere.  I write a few lines off the top of my head about love, though, and I get extended responses from MCARP here, Flibbertigibbet! here and Karmic Ironies here, a hurricane of bloviation on love and relationships.

A few quick notes about the responses …

Nina’s response is interesting to me in that she begins with the proposition that she will never understand men.  Welcome to the club, darlin’, we don’t understand you back.  However, I can do for you what you cannot do for me on that score:  I can say in one sentence the key to understanding men.  If you would understand men, you must completely own and understand that we grow older but not up.  Oh, you may say, I have seen maturity in men.  Balderdash!  Perhaps we’ve made a mature decision about our transportation — a minivan, for example, instead of a two seater sports car.  That is not maturity where relationships are concerned and all you have to do is ask MCARP, a minivan owner.  I have personally made a great many mature judgments as a parent and as an attorney, but I readily admit to immaturity where relationships are concerned. Sorry, Nina, we do not mature.  Whatever act we had when we first began to get hair on our scrotums, we merely polish up that act over the decades.  If we were jocks in our teens, we’re playing tennis in our 30s and golf in our 50s.  If we were writing poems in our teens to get chicks, we are now writing better poetry as a result of our English lit. degree and now we’re writing a novel when we leave our P.R. jobs at the local ad agency.  If we had a hot rod as a 17-year-old, we’re still fooling ourselves into believing that “muscle” on wheels delivers chicks to our side and perhaps we’ve bought a GoldWing just to prove it.  In point of fact, I believe that all those men broke up with you because you are a grownup AND EXPECTED HIM TO BE GROWN UP AS WELL.  It’s the most frightening prospect a man can face.  Don’t you think that there’s a good reason why men waste a year before telling you to shove off while you only wait 6 weeks or 2 months?  Don’t you think there’s a reason why we tell you some bullshit about the interior dramas we’re having while you, grownup as you are, can be simple and honest? It’s not that we think we’re entitled to a Playboy bunny, as you posit, it’s that the desire for a Playboy bunny is an expression of our juvenile and immature attitude towards relationships and women.  No matter our age, when in the company of men, we tell and laugh at jokes about excrement, flatulance and masturbation.  Farts are still funny to 50 year old men because we simply never got any more mature than when we first discovered those phenomena.  And, one last thing about the bitter joke lardass couch potatoes tell about the bunnies (other than mention it’s what they say to torture themselves about all the cultural cues they get about being less than because of their lard ass):  ask yourself how many women you know who are on some perpetual diet, getting their tits implanted and maybe even getting on a treadmill several times a week to tone up that ass.  Are men solely to blame for the Playboy bunny syndrome? 

For MCARP, a clarification:  there’s a reason “win” was in quotation marks.  I don’t see relationships as a zero sum game with winners and losers.  I do see that some people make the decision not to get into relationships and that they do so because they believe they maximize their happiness by avoiding the problems of relationships and by achieving and putting a focus on other goals.  In that sense, I believe they “win”.  On the other hand, I believe they are also merely devising another shape and form of the barricades and battlements I mentioned as having myself.  And, while it’s true that I said I think it’s a shell of a life not much better than death, I also said it’s my most likely next strategy.  Until it becomes my strategy, though, I’m with Westika:  better to love and lose than never love at all.  As much as I hate the pain of a failed romance, I also love the high of having someone with whom to share and grow and talk and get fluttery fingertips in the chest over.  From my perspective, my own thinking is so often off the beam that I NEED another person in my life with whom I’m so intimate that I can talk and bounce ideas off and get grounded in reality.  I can’t yet join you because I still hope and believe that there’s someone out there who can put up with my shit, leave me alone and be there (all at the same time, mind you) when I’m flailing about.

For me, and I don’t pretend to speak about humanity or anyone else at all, for me, part of the problem is that I am not just male, I’m human.  I’m a mammal.  I have all these conveniently placed nerve endings in my genitalia.  I have this perfectly servicable hormonal system.  I have this visual brain structure.  My very existence is formidably grounded in the fact of my physical being.  Most of the reason I’m on this planet has to do with survival of the species.  I was bred and had children because that’s what we humans do.  Fortunately or unfortunately, these instincts and physical structures, intelligently designed or evolved as they may be, had the unintended consequence of recreational sex not intended for procreation.  Whatever priority one may place on those facts, those facts cannot be ignored.  They are facts and they exist and they must be dealt with.  I will necessarily, as a fact of life, have some relationship with some women and that cannot be avoided.  I will necessarily, as a fact of life, want to have sex with at least some of them.   I can choose to have only non sexual relationships with women and to be frustrated in my desire to have sex with some woman, but for me that is choosing not to decide.  For me, that is choosing to deny my humanity.  For me, that is choosing gray over all the other vivid colors of life and love.  While I might have a perfectly lovely life in my career, while I might have a terrific set of friends (and I most assuredly do, including MCARP) that I find very comforting, while I might have creative urges towards writing that contributes much to my well being and serenity, to choose not to have any romantic relationship is the choice to cease to be human in that central sphere of human experience.  It is worse than death because in death we also have no relationships, but by making that choice, unlike the dead, we are conscious of the choice and its consequences.  One consequence of avoiding relationships might very well be that my writing is 2 dimensional when describing women, that my career choices sometimes lack balance and that my friendships are crippled by my immaturity with and about women (friends get very tired of hearing about one’s dramas, I suspect). 

Last to weigh in was Westika, our 20-something maven at Karmic Ironies. Ah, how I love you, Jazz.  First, stop with the defensiveness: not only have you already had more relationships than me, but also more complex ones.  In addition, because of that whole “boys grow older, not up” thing, you are also more mature than me.  I take your views very very seriously.

Here, for me, was the “money quote” in your blog post:

But here I am, not giving up, though I made that big decree a couple blogs ago. I love love too much. Whether it ends up sticking in a mutual-trust kind of symbiotic relationship or I end up floating around, happy in myself but willing to experience the pulls and explosions of what happens along the way, I defy the notion of regret. I defy the notion of settling. I defy the notion of making someone suffer for my shortcomings or being myself poisoned by someone else’s inability to notice moments.

Her head is bloody but unbowed, God bless the child.

For those of us who are older, even if not mature, though, we’ve faced some similar choices.  I will never be an NFL wide receiver.  I will never be an NBA point guard.  I will never be a U.S. Senator or candidate for president of the good old US of A.  I’ve made choices that foreclosed other choices.  When I choose to be with one woman, I’ve also chosen not to be with all the other women in the world.  As we age, we realize that more and more doors shut behind us.  That, and that alone, is what separates us.  You have many many more open doors ahead of you than we do.  We envy the hell out of your youth.

Even in your youth, I think you put your finger on something I tried to get at in my original post.  There is that theoretical possibility that the real me can have a real relationship with a real woman and that both of us can find happiness despite our filters of imaginary men and women that will always lie between us.  I do not think I must be perfect nor even fully mature to achieve this relationship.  I think it’s possible that the real and greatly flawed me can have a nurturing and loving and kind and understanding and sexy love relationship with someone who is also real and therefore flawed, but flawed in a way that fits my rough edges.  Here’s where the movies and fiction and poems get all entangled, I suppose, but it’s also where our hope lies.  I do know some people in long term relationships who seem to have discovered the trick to getting that done successfully.  They are rare, to be sure.  In some ways, it seems like the lottery.  Lots of people buying tickets, a rare few winners.  I give 2 bucks to Bookemdano every week for lottery tickets because I dream about having millions.  I ask women out on dates because maybe I’ll hit that one in 6.5 billion chance that she’s “The One”.  Actually, I don’t believe in soulmates.  I think my odds are better than the one woman in the 3.5 billion women in the world.  There are about 175 million women in the U.S.  I think I could maybe have a good relationship with something like 1.75 million, one percent.  Just guessing, I think I have about a 1 in 100 chance and that my filters for who I will ask out on a date makes my chance with any first date woman about one in 50.  My actual dating experience has been that at least two or three of the 50 women I’ve dated lifetime could have been a good match for a long term relationship and/or marriage.  And, in fact, I had a 30 year marriage, which isn’t bad all in all despite the fact that it ultimately failed.  I think I mostly beat the odds, Fate’s way of playing with my head, without ever hitting that ultimate powerball jackpot.

So, here we all are a few days away from the romance holiday of St. Valentine.  Many of you know that I do something unusual on Feb. 14.  I buy cheap valentines meant for grade schoolers and hand them out indiscriminately in public places on that day.  It’s fun,  surprising and revealing.  This year, however, I have no reservations for dinner and no jewelry being monogramed.   I’ll let you know, Dr. Phil, how that’s working for me when it goes down.

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