Trouble, LaMontagne-style

"Yesterday I texted him. I said, 'I love you.' And he sent me back a picture of a cactus."
-Med Student

Sometimes we're not good at expressing ourselves, we men. Sometimes, we laugh and we kid when inside we're singing Dashboard Confessional and hating ourselves. I mean, I don't sing Dashboard Confessional inside because it resonates at the emo frequency that causes my balls to fall off, but some guys do I'm sure. Probably the gay ones do that, sing that Chris Carraba inside themselves. But in any event, we're reclusive with our feelings. And we're giving up - all of us, slowly but surely.

The girl I quoted above told me that at about 26-years-old her boyfriend told her he had gotten just tired of it all, tired of the dating lots of beautiful women and the constant tiring parading of mixed affections, and then all he really wanted was her, to be there next to him, be in love, be boring like that. Reminds me of Harry in that movie with Sally: "There comes a time when you just get tired of that whole life of a single guy thing. You go out, you do the safe lunch, agree to dinner, go dancing, you do the white man's overbite (demonstrates), you go back to her place, you have sex, and the minute it's over, you know what you're thinking? How long do I have to lie here and hold her before I can get up and go home? Is ten seconds enough?"

It's a beautiful picture, that giving up, isn't it? It's saying, "You're not really what I wanted, but then again, no one else really is either, so you'll do." Not very romantic I guess, but the romantic notion is one filled with inconsistencies anyway. Romantically speaking, the difficult times take place in the rain and the cold and they resolve themselves shortly thereafter with the overwhelming force of EROS, Aphrodite's overwhelming idol of love. Then everyone relaxes in a hammock on the beach and kids grow up without dysfunction and no one gets alzheimer's, or if they do, they heal it from time to time with the force of their love and the power of THE NOTEBOOK.

I was reading in a non-medical book last night (SHOCK!) and in it the author talked about Eros as being the one form of love in which the lover kept after it even to their detriment. They made eros sound almost like a drug, in that you would desire it even when it ceased to be a "good". I guess that's the excuse people use all the time, that they can't choose who they love in the "eros" sense, and so they're off the hook when it comes to the unhealthiness of that affection. But that's lame after all. You can't choose to love someone that you don't love, but I think it makes all the sense in the world to say that you won't love just one person in that way, and so if you're in an unhealthy spot, you got to get out of it, and trust in God or your own desirability or whatever you have confidence in to bring that whole possibility-of-love back around.

Personally, I think I'm one of those that falls in and out of love too easily. But as I'm getting older, despite my easily enticed eye, it seems like there are fewer and fewer women around of any integrity, beauty, or gentility, and the ones that DO exist are already married, which is to be expected and who can blame them? I'm a bit overly-preoccupied with this at the moment, because I'm 24 now and it really seems like if there's a time to worry about it, this would be it.

But it all comes back to that trusting. Man I hate that. There's nothing to be done. Nothing to be controlled. All there is is the trusting, the patience, the waiting, the knowing that you're a damn-fine-looking medical student and that somewhere out there is a girl that's not whacked-out-of-her-mind crazy that can carry on a good conversation and is a real tiger in the sack.