Here lies a setting not so unfamiliar, or so I hope; a setting that we have been a part of, or one that we are aware of. The atmosphere surrounding our two companions is dense with desire. In a moment, all is negligible except these two human beings of the opposite sex, that are getting to know each other in a quasi-traditional phenomenon we prefer to designate the mundane word, ‘date’. All seems normal; our humble and nice fellow Martin is enjoying a non-threatening cocktail with our fervently desirable and savvy lady Elyse. Sitting facing each other, Martin is drinking an illustrious Mojito Royal and our dear Elyse has requested an unusual, yet tactical, virgin Bloody Mary. Martin, leaning more forward than one would appreciate, expressing a closed body and a tender aggression that persuades Elyse to bring her slim shoulders back to her chair. Martin’s gaze is one of admiration mixed with smug success, while Elyse accidentally betrays a certain discomfort and almost haughty demeanour with her own. There are of course more to our two current subjects and the situation, much more beneath the appearance of the situation; the appearance deludes, and this delusion makes one yearn for an unfolding. One ardently desires to unfold the thoughts and agendas of each of our two subjects, and through this road perhaps build a better understanding. It is perhaps most rewarding and most noxious to attempt to bring to surface what is hidden behind phenomena. Non-the-less, it is desirable and by this desire one can proceed to the unfolding, head high.
Adjacent this scene sits an observer, a perceptual subject, someone that manifests the causations, elusions and illusions that are fertile in such ‘normal’ encounters. Try and imagine being able to see more and deeper than usual, not just what is present to you there and then, but what hides underneath it. Can we be bold enough to say that that is the truth or the essence of the phenomenon; why the phenomenon is? Further, can we be bold enough to say that our perceptive comrade, Mr. Jabin, serves as a medium for the unfolding? Mr. Jabin encounters this truth of the phenomenon and shocks our modest Martin and Elyse. Anyways, the rest of this post will proceed in dialogue format.
Martin: What a lovely night, don’t you think?
Elyse: I agree, it’s beautiful.
Martin: You know, when I asked you out, I was rather worried you would say no. There was something about you that put me in anticipation.
Elyse: What do you mean?
Martin: I don’t know, you appear very together and sure of yourself, so much so that made me question my self-assuredness.
Elyse: Really, I didn’t know I did that to people; you’re the first to make it apparent. I wonder if everyone feels the same.
Martin: I wouldn’t know, but I’m glad I’m of some use.
Elyse: …
Martin: I am sure you’ve experienced this question before, and who hasn’t, but I will try to make it as interesting as I can. What is your great contribution to our humble world?
Elyse: I don’t get it; you mean what do I do?
Martin: (Nods)
Elyse: Oh, I am a beauty consultant for a modeling agency; don’t know if you’ve heard of it – Slim and Slender?
Martin: Right.
Elyse: Yeah, I mostly deal with make-up and skincare.
Martin: How did you get into beauty consultation?
… After an hour and twenty minutes of two cocktails, endless probing questions by Martin and Elyse asking no personal questions in return; Martin will ask the most penetrating question that will pierce right through the date for these two. He gazes at his watch and proceeds…
Martin: How would like to go to a club? I have some friends that are meeting up in central.
Elyse: No thanks, I should really be getting home; I had a nice time though. I will call you sometime.
Martin: Why not?
Elyse: It’s just getting late you know, I have arrangements for tomorrow morning, and I’ve a long day.
Martin: Oh come on, a couple of hours won’t hurt. Plus you’ve got nothing to lose, you’ll meet new people, go to a lively environment, you won’t even feel your fatigue. I promise to get you back home a.s.a.p. to sleep in time for tomorrow.
Elyse: Really, Martin, thank you but I’d rather go home and spend the night in.
Martin: Come on, don’t be boring, and live on the edge a little. Come out and have a great time.
Elyse: You agree that all night I’ve asked you no questions, I’m sure you’ve wondered why; after all you appear to be an astute fellow.
Martin: …
Elyse: So here is my first and only question of the night to you, Martin. From this, I will know all I need to know about you – or maybe I already know who you are and what you are about, and this is just me seeking an affirmation. Tell me Martin, why do you really want me to come clubbing with you?
At this point Martin is flabbergasted, unaware of where that came from and fully aware of the intention. He sweats ever so slightly but inside he is steaming, he knows not what to say.
Martin: … I want you to come out and have some fun with me and a couple of mates; that’s all.
Elyse: Have fun with you and your friends? Or you hoping that they will sell you to me; tell me how great a lover and person you are. Or maybe your friends are just an excuse and you just want to have some fun with me?
Martin: … No.
Elyse: Listen, I am not stupid, I would have thought that my having no alcohol the whole night was obvious enough. I know what you want and I know what I don’t – you are the latter. Nevertheless I want to be sure, so answer my question, why do you want me to come out clubbing with you?
Martin: I…
Mr. Jabin: …Want to sleep with you.
Elyse & Martin: …
Mr. Jabin: My apologies, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but my dear you changed your tone so much and with such assured aggression that one cannot be blamed for their inappropriate interest. Anyways, I am Mr. Jabin; kids call me Mr. J – makes it easier.
Elyse: Elyse.
Martin: Martin.
Mr. J: Well, Elyse, Martin, I was wondering if I may buy you two another round? You both fascinate me and I wish to talk to you on the duration of the round. Elyse you’re drinking a bloody Mary right? And Martin, you’re enjoying a Mojito?
Elyse: Yes, virgin bloody Mary, thank you but I was about leave.
Martin: Mojito Royal, thank you but I think I should get going, I am meeting my friends in a half hour.
Mr. J: Virgin bloody Mary, now there’s something you don’t hear everyday, and Mojito Royal, I wonder what the difference is. Anyways, I urge you guys to stay just for this drink; you may enjoy what I have to say. The duration is entirely up to you, after all, it’s only one drink, and then you can leave. I even promise to pay for both your cabs.
Elyse: I don’t know…
Martin: You’ve got half an hour from me.
Elyse: Alright, I’ll stay too. What have you got to say old man?
Mr. J: Excellent. I must say, I was inspired by your honesty Elyse, and your forward yet reserved attitude with Martin. Martin, I was fascinated by your guile and subtlety; it was obvious that you cared about Elyse’s feelings. Yet both of you are here, both hoping for something, both carrying something with you and both attempting to get or achieve something. I will talk for a while because you’ve limited my time, so please I urge you to stop me if you feel that you need to say something. Was this supposed to be a date?
Elyse: Yes.
Mr. J: Then it clearly didn’t go very well, or rather as you both have hoped it would go?
Martin: No.
Mr. J: I see, so this is what you hoped for – that the date would go well, yet at the same time it isn’t what you hoped for is it guys? You both had different ideas of what you hoped would happen. Martin had a different picture of you before he came here and as did you Elyse, otherwise you would have not agreed to the date.
Elyse: …
Mr. J: Here’s what I think guys. You’ll both go away and think about this date. This is elementary stuff, you both know this. Both of you are affected by this encounter. Both, I would say, are disappointed by it. Yet, will any of you two ask yourselves why? Perhaps you both will and settle with the answer, “It’s her”, or “It’s him”. Once you’ve made this claim, there are two ways you can go, either, it’s ‘her’ or ‘him’ just the once, or it’s every ‘her’ or every ‘him’. You’ll both, or one of you, eventually come to the conclusion that it is the counterpart’s fault, due to the frequency of the encounters – due to the fact that it happens all the time and with many others.
Elyse & Martin: …
Mr. J: There will be one of you, and I am willing to place my money on Elyse at the moment, although this is usually Martin’s question, who will ask eventually “what if it’s me?”, and from that moment a whole new world unfolds. From there, the person that asks, either changes for the good or the worse. We shall not consider that phenomenon as that would take much too long. Yet, I want to bring this back to why this failed. If I ask you why, you would both say that it is because you are incompatible, or that the other is x, y and z negative things. I will boldly say however, that you are both wrong. Incompatibility is an illusion, and, x, y and z are false judgments.
Elyse: What?
Martin: What the hell?
Mr. J: Exactly. I thought the same when I first heard these words; allow me to elaborate. Let’s ask you then, Elyse do you like to be happy, to laugh, to be loved and to feel that you are successful in what you do?
Elyse: Yes, of course.
Mr. J: I see, how about you Martin?
Martin: Yeah, definitely.
Mr. J: So you both want the same things. I ask you then, where is the incompatibility in this picture? If you both want the same things out of life, why would you ever feel that you are incompatible? It is not in incompatibility, even if you show me something less universal and more particular about your desires that makes for incompatibility, it is still not the reason why this date failed. Again I will not go down the road of more particular desires and incompatibility, because that is a question regarding relationships, and this is merely a date. It isn’t judgments either; none of you have known the other long enough to make a real and concrete judgment about the other that stands. Even if you did, I would challenge you to think about the notion of change; no judgment about a human being’s personality is concrete, because that person can change. If it is none of these obvious and common things, then what is it? Why does most dating go wrong and rarely breed that most desired emotion of ours called love?
Martin: What if we do not care and just wish to move on with our lives without pondering on things so deeply? You know, some of us just don’t have the time to think about these things.
Mr. J: True, very true. You’ve spoken like a modern man; I respect your insufficient time to ponder on these problems. Tell me though Martin, how many hours a day do you spend thinking about these things, thinking about encounters with women; and with your friends, what you do talk to them about. Tell me, how long did you spend thinking about your last failed date, and how much time did you wasted on recurring thoughts that did nothing for you but inspire emotions you couldn’t control or you didn’t want? They say 98% of our thinking is useless.
Martin: … I never saw it like that.
Mr. J: The same goes to you too Elyse, unfortunately nobody is exempt from this, me included – obviously. We waste time thinking about our opposite sex, yet our thinking is never constructive, all we do is feed the already apparent polemos between the sexes. Polemos means war in Greek; I really like the word, there’s elegance to it.
Elyse: It’s true; all women converse about is men and they’re always asking each other ‘why did he say this, what did he mean; or why doesn’t he do this or that’?
Mr. J: Exactly.
Martin: Men too, but we don’t really ask that many questions about women; some of us though, just say nothing because we don’t have anything to say, or boast about our encounters. Makes most of us who are not that good with women feel inferior, and so we desire to be like the boasters. The only way we know to do this is through thought, we think situations to the bone, and we bleed them dry with alternate scenarios and fantasies – the ones amongst us who can think anyway, the ones that can’t just settle for calling women sluts or bitches and moving on.
Mr. J: It is curious indeed. The one thing we desire the most and spend most of our time thinking about, we can’t get right. We are truly ignorant. The boasters you mention Martin, fall under two categories, the liars, which is self-explanatory, and the lovers - although I would not expect a true lover to boast about his encounters with women.The latter are the more interesting, for they have mastered this realm we call dating with their seductive ways. For true lovers though, there’s something sacred between them and the feminine, a bond that they cannot explain and wish to not explain lest they lose it. They are master seducers, geniuses of the art of love – the one first brought forward by an illustrious Roman called Ovid. There is way too much to say about lovers, I wish not to go down that road. Instead I want to tell you guys bluntly, that dating doesn’t work. It is not your fault Elyse that Martin wants to have sex with you, and it is not your fault Martin that Elyse doesn’t want to see you again. Both of these dilemmas stem from a broken arrow, an arrow that is meant to represent the traditional and straight movement that a man should follow when he is to meet a woman – the arrow of courting. This arrow does not serve its purpose anymore, it cannot pierce a heart and cause love, it pierces a heart and causes misery, pain and polemos – after all arrows are meant for war. Unfortunately, courting is broken, it is wrong, and it doesn’t work anymore. You simply cannot court a woman from the off, wooing is reserved for a time where wooing was rare.
Elyse: But I want to be wooed.
Mr. J: Of course you do, only a fool would deny that, it is not what I was implying. Rather, who would you prefer to be wooed by, somebody you know well and you like, or a stranger you just met?
Elyse: Somebody I know well.
Mr. J: Precisely; and Martin is a stranger you just met. Nonetheless, back to courting. Courting has one intention, sex. No courting would happen if sex was possible without it. The meta-reason for courting is sex, regardless of the other reasons that stem or arise from it, such as love, marriage, relationship etc. The main motive for courting is sex. You both know this, if not consciously then unconsciously, that you’re both here tonight to negotiate sex; as if sex needs negotiation. You both want it and that is true, almost every human being wants sex at some point in their life, because if human beings didn’t want sex and were happy in themselves, then human beings wouldn’t exist. If I could have sex with myself and be satisfied, then there would be no need for you dear Elyse. So courting is about sex, and that means a date is about sex too. You’re both here carrying something, and that thing is this idea that this could lead to sex, and you both want sex otherwise you wouldn’t agree to be here tonight.
Elyse: Wow, you think really deeply.
Martin: Yeah, is this healthy?
Mr. J: (Smiles). You’re both here to negotiate sex. Martin is here to get laid and Elyse is here to get laid too, but Elyse has more to guard against. She has to guard herself against the non-thinkers you mentioned before Martin, the boasters too; not to mention other girls and their words full of humility. She is afraid of many things, things that you wouldn’t understand, because you’d have to experience them, as her, to be able to unfold them in such a way that you would understand them fully. All you can do is manipulate the situation and work around it (which is what the lovers do), never understanding it in its totality, for that you would need a revelation, an unfolding; and you cannot unfold what it is like to be Elyse without actually being her. Anyways, I digress, back to the point. Elyse has many things to guard herself against, and the situation she finds herself in is not exactly one that she finds easy to do that with. She is aware of what you are expecting Martin, she is aware of your presuppositions, your assumptions, about her coming on a date with you; she is after all, a rational being.
Martin: It is true, I was attracted to Elyse, but I didn’t want to sleep with her… see I can’t even say that because I did want to sleep with her; but not straight away you… I can’t say that either because I do… Damn you old man, I’m digging myself a hole here and you’re not helping.
Mr. J. & Elyse: (Laughter)
Elyse: No he’s right, I was fully aware that you wanted to sleep with me, I’m not an idiot, and it’s precisely why I came here tonight and let you court me – I was attracted to you too and I knew exactly how far we could go in my mind, but it didn’t go according to mind or rather it went as I would have expected. I was trying to make it obvious to you that I wasn’t going to be that easy, by acting disinterested and also not drinking alcohol; even the drink I bought was thought out. All was to show that yes I am interested but you have a lot of work to do if you are to get what you want. I did all this however, not realizing that it is what I wanted too, but… I don’t know what to say because anything I say will be an excuse or a masquerade for the fact that I wanted to sleep with you too. Mr. J is right. The thing is, we want sex too, so badly, but we are afraid of all the consequences that come with it, and for us there are many more than there are for you guys. I think that is why I am like this, but I don’t wish to be. I don’t sit there and think this through, no, it is a feeling more than anything - so ingrained in me that I don’t even notice it; it’s like second nature to me.
Martin: Wow, I never saw it like that. I am stunned. Here I was thinking all along that women are like this by nature, thinking that they don’t like sex as much as guys; or they are naturally annoying about it, but in reality they’re not. I see now that men brought this to themselves. Why didn’t I see this before…
Mr. J: It is truly remarkable viewing the faces of people who witness for the first time an aspect of themselves they did not know was there. The look on their eyes is at first one of horror, then this moves into despair as they begin to reminisce the countless times they’ve entered experiences without realizing that this aspect was ruling their actions unconsciously. Finally, after this turbulent and albeit painful catharsis, you witness a freedom and wonder in their eyes, as if they have gained their innocence back somehow, or almost as if they’ve winded back a few years right there and then.
Elyse: I don’t know what to say…
Martin: Me neither, I came here tonight to meet a girl; I ended up meeting myself.
Mr. J: There is so much more to say, but I think the rest of it you can both think for yourselves. After all, I cannot give you it all, some revelation is required on your part through your own thoughts and experiences. Time is up, I have done my bit here, and I’m eternally grateful for your time. Now, to your taxis, as I promised.
incognitio
