Being set up on a date by friends is a terrible paradox. It's briefly exciting to imagine meeting a brand new person who comes pre-ordained as attractive, intelligent, and beguiling by people you know and trust. That excitement quickly turns into disappointment when the vague premonition of the person turns into a fleshy, detailed reality. Predicting attraction is tough, and being friends with a person isn't always the clearest lens through which to view their relative merits as a partner. The few times friends have tried to set me I've almost always been uncomfortably reminded of my own shallowness. I usually feel mildly slighted. Can it be that my friends think I belong in the same pool of attractiveness with this foul beast?
There's no accounting for attraction. I barely understand what rippling threads pull my heart and loins towards the women I've fallen for, and it's seems the difficulty would only be intensified with a friend left in charge. The impulse to set up two friends seems more motivated by the need to join loose threads in the periphery than by a fully formed thought that these two separate humans would actually make each happier. It's more like an act of neatness. A few years ago my friend S, then happily in the midst of a relationship that would eventually become a marriage, suggested that I hang out with another of her friends whom she thought I would like a lot.
I met her for drinks (I'd write her first initial but I can't even remember it anymore – sorry S!). I knew as soon as I saw her that I wasn't attracted to her. She looked like a cartoon woodchuck stripped of her cel-shaded whimsy. Our conversation was doubly awkward, knowing that our meeting was not a product of our own devising. It felt like being a little piece on someone else's chessboard. We both agreed to come together as a matter of faith in our mutual friend, an act of blind trust and implicit desperation.
There's nothing that I want for my friends more immediately than safety. I want my friends to be well-insulated from the world, and swaddled away from any unnecessary stresses and traumas. I imagine a similar impulse guiding their process of selecting a mate for me, and suddenly I'm having a drink with the metaphysical version of a pair of mittens. Love isn't about safety or insulation. It's about one extended risk taken in slow motion. The implicit goal in dating is to find a partner for some longer period of time, and what's more risky than committing to someone for a long period of time? To speak without wavering about a future that is fundamentally uncontrollable?
Falling in love is like surfing a giant wave. You stand in the uterine pipeline, racing forward at superhuman speed, and in a precarious balance. There's no room to think about the precarious posture. A few inches left or right would be enough to send the whole endeavor in a tumbling disaster, roiling downwards to the ocean floor below. Your friends are like the nervous parents sitting on the beach watching you out on the open ocean, rising and falling in the giant swells and getting nervous. They wave you in, want to give you floaties for your arms, and a nice safe friend to go playing in the tide pools with instead.
I've been set up by friends twice. The first was when my high school English teacher told me that J up in the corner would be a good foil for my hairless poetic scrawlings. She was, for a little while. We had a lot of fun together, indulging long winding talks that were so preposterously self-righteous I wish there was a surviving transcript somewhere. Her pale blue eyes were merciless, and her thick hips and calves were tanned in a way that made me salivate subconsciously. I had an instinctual urge to want to taste her before I had the language or experience to articulate it. Then I fell off her wave and tumbled hard into the crashing undertow beneath. The second time was earlier this year. Swoon.
In both those cases, the set up was instigated by someone that wanted to see me challenged. I've become great friends with my high school English teacher, but while I was still his student he didn't much like me. His suggestion that I go chase after J for a few months was a mischievous one. I'm sure he must have enjoyed watching me squirm in an emotional scrum. What better way to repay his time for all those obnoxious essays he had been forced to grade than by watching me dangle from a thread of impossible love for a semester?
I've never tried to set anyone else up. The thought doesn't even occur to me. I don't think I'd have the heart to send anyone I care about off to dangle. And I don't think I'd have the heart to send them off for another milquetoast evening making nice with a stranger in the shallow end of the pool. Where would you even begin? Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.
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Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message
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Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating
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Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy
Sex Machine: My First STD
Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV
Love Machine: Let's Make Babies
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