One Year Monk

xkcd on the public serivce of Valentine's Day

If you aren't reading xkcd regularly, you should be.

Are you One Year Monk material?

The proposition that the One Year Monk has set before himself is this: The One Year Monk will find that he has done more fulfilling work and had more fun at the end of a year in which he has not devoted his best energy to pursuing women. In other words, no dating. No sex. No Hollywood love. 

Just because that sounds crazy, though, does not mean you aren't One Year Monk material. 

This blog is for you, if...

-If you just can't buy the notion that there is someone out there for everyone.

-If you suspect you might have bigger things to do with your life than find a roommate to make babies with.

-If you've never, ever had a Valentine's Day.

-If you are beginning to suspect that the costs of Love outweigh the benefits.

-If you have ever wondered whether companionship might be less a need and more an addiction.

-If you feel like you are missing a sense, an ability, a power that enables you to find love and you don't want to spend any more time trying to "fix" it. 

-If being okay with being alone doesn't mean being okay until you find someone, but finding a way to just be okay with being alone. 

If you can identify with any of those statements, then maybe coming on this journey with me will be of some benefit to you. I'd like to think it could be. 

There's one other sort of person who might be a good candidate for following this blog: if you think I sound like a dangerous ass who needs to be shutdown, then, please -- stick around. Call me out. Tell me I'm a fool. 

Here's what Dr. Helen Fisher says

Dr. Fisher says that the One Year Monk is an Explorer/Negotiator. This means that my personality is dominated by dopamine, but that Estrogen plays a pretty big role too. It also means that I am drawn either to other Dopamine heads or to people that exhibit Testosterone traits (Directors). 

Interesting, I guess.

Want to know what you are? Check it out: The Why Him / Why Her Test.

It would be cool if you told the One Year Monk your results, below. 

Some links on commitment

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off by Sandra Tsing Loh, in The Atlantic. Ms. Loh confesses to an infidelity that led to divorce. She makes a strong argument for doing away with marriage, but, as in the case of Against Love, the problem is what you do -- especially with children -- without marriage? There's the proverbial rub. Ms. Loh attempts to offer a sort of modest proposal at the end, but it's an obvious rush job with no practical value at all. At least not now. Not yet. It's a fun read, though. I laughed at this paragraph:

Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars. The main breadwinner, Rachel is really the Traditional Dad, but instead of being handed her pipe and slippers at six, she appears to be marooned in a sexless remodeling project with a passive-aggressive Competitive Wife.

Marry Him! By Lori Gottlieb, also in The Atlantic. A video in the attached depicts the editor of the magazine who says that this essay caused more letters to the editor than anything printed in the magazine in the last decade. The One Year Monk has a pretty different reaction to this piece than most others. The question isn't whether or not Gottlieb has it "right" or "wrong" at all. What are people so threatened by? She's offering her perspective for younger women.

In the video, she says it really well. She says, looking back on her 20s and 30s, she passed up on some guys who were definite 8s, when she's come to doubt that the 10 even exists. It's a compelling argument.

Anyway, The One Year Monk, you might imagine, has gotten some pretty harsh reactions when he has questioned the notion of having children or getting married. Saying things like that really threatens people. Folks, step off. We all have a right to live our lives the way we want. We also have a right to offer a bit of advice based on our own perspectives and life histories without you getting all up in our Kool-Aid about it.Especially if we offer it in the pages of a magazine that you can choose to read or not read.

Gottlieb had a funny paragraph, too. Here you go:

Take, for instance, books like Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man or Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, whose titles alone make it clear that today’s supposedly progressive bachelorettes aren’t waiting for old-fashioned true love to strike before they can get married. Instead, they’re buying dozens of proactive coaching manuals to learn how to strategically land a man. The actual man in question, though, seems so irrelevant that, to my mind, these women might as well grab a well-dressed guy off the street, drag him into the nearest bar, buy him a drink, and ask him to marry her. (Or, to retain her “power,” she should manipulate him into asking her.)

Anyway, let's hear from the other side before we give Gottlieb too many props.

For our first try in the counter-Gottlieb set, I went to Liesl Schillinger at The Daily Beast, who wrote Give up on Mr. Perfect? Executive summary: FAIL. Schillinger's vitriol here is transparent. She doesn't like that Gottlieb questioned feminism. She buys into the whole gospel. No critique is welcome. Fuck you very much, Gottlieb, she says. It's a silly little essay that falls prey to the same fallacy as most romantic advice writing: she generalizes.

Most of page 2 is devoted to the notion that there are some older single women out there that are living it up and happy to be solo. She thinks this is some kind of gotcha. Please. I guarantee you I know what Gottlieb would say about that, because she didn't write the book for them. She wrote the book for women who want to be married. I mean, in fairness, Gottlieb posits in her original essay that any single woman over 35 is getting anxious. I suspect they are, but some are also anxious and not-anxious at the same time. Some have chosen to ignore the anxiety and live it up. Good for them. That's how The One Year Monk hopes to go out, too. He is also anxious. He is also trying to ignore it.

But just because Gottlieb advises women who want to get married to think about Mr. Pretty-Great over Mr. Perfect does not make her a Feminine Benedict Arnold. Sigh. No funny paragraph in this one.

Jessica Grose in Slate is a whole other story. Her piece, What Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him got wrong about single women, is considerably more compelling. She focuses on the statistical data to see if Gottlieb is making much ado about nothing. She points out that college-eduated women are seeing diminishing divorce rates, that women who marry later get divorced less and that women who are married and have been get depressed more often. All interesting.

I don't think it helps if you are one person in this sea. You're not a statistic. You're lonely. You want to be married. Again, The One Year Monk argues that you'd be more content if you didn't fall back on love for your fulfillment. You don't have to live that way.

That said, I think Grose's piece shows the most sensitivity (even more than Gottlieb) to the notion that different people need different things from life. Compound our inherent American individuality, then, with the facts of our condition in life. It's a bit of hash. Anyway, Grose's last sentence is good for a laugh, so give it a skim if you're curious but read every word of the last paragraph. Nice payoff.

All of the four pieces really come down to this question: how can we construct society so that we'll all be less sad. It's not: how can we be happy. It's: how can we ease off the misery-acceleration-pedal? The One Year Monk, but he thinks that all four pieces assume that the answer lies somewhere in how we construct the arena of Love.

The One Year Monk doubts we'll find the answer therein.

The problem of romantic advice

The problem of all romantic advice columns, from Dear Abby to Carolyn Hax's "Tell me about it" to Savage Love, The One Year Monk contends, is this: they assume we all have the means to succeed in love. 

The One Year Monk spent the last few hours writing in the Project's book. The book is so much different than this blog. The book is personal; the blog is a crusade. The crusade I'm waging on here is for the ugly folks, the awkward folks, the self-conscious folks, the non-sexy. I'm crusading for those who are doomed at Love. There is an answer: give up. Life has a lot to offer you. Let go of this one pursuit. Win more. Do more. Feel more. 

You don't have a shot at Love? So what. You don't have a shot at the NFL either. You going to mope about that? No, you're not. You can deal with that, so deal with this the only way that makes sense.

So much of the advice out there is given by attractive people who have had lots of amorous success and succeeded with lots of people. They know that until very old age sets in they will always be able to find someone. They will not be alone.

If this blog resonates with you, though, it's because you don't feel that way. You don't really think you can find someone. It feels somewhat hopeless. You know what? Maybe it is. And even if it isn't, the last person you need to listen to is someone who's never had your problems. This is the myth behind romantic advice columns: that courting is a skill you can learn. For some of us, there's no getting better. It's something you got or you don't.

No one wants to say that out loud, though. But I'll say it. When I write in my book, it's those moments as a guy that just can't make it happen that I dwell on in there. So on here, as I read the little blog posts and newspaper stories by hot people trying to help the lumpen, well, I want to scream. And that's what I do. On here, I scream a bit for those of us who weren't born quite as gifted as they were. 

Don't listen to them. If you're like me, they've nothing to say to you. 

Linky Winky: Some blog posts I checked out today

Read-dating. Speed-dating with a bibliophilic bent. As silly as any other dating idea, but not bad.

Manly advice on putting a guy in the friendzone. It's true: the only clueless person in this story is the woman who believes a guy she keeps hanging out with ought to "just know" she isn't into him. Women. 

I was an abstinence only guinea pig. Curse you, George W., and your silly penchant for fear-mongering.

Teens all think they are going to die. OK, that's an overstatement, but there is evidence that they have a severe morbidity. Yet they keep screwing. Why? Talk amongst yourselves. 

Sex addiction: is it real? Or, is this the stupidest question posted on the internet today?

How to get over someone - advice from a guy and a girl. Caution: this advice is only useful for hot people. But who cares about non hot people, right?

My twitter page.

Robots can also be unlucky in love

In case you are a human being who feels like love is really hard, it may make you feel better to know that some robots have trouble finding girlfriends, too. Yes, even Transformerz.

You are not alone.

The Digits Log: FAIL. Facebook friending

As I think I've said on here, I'm working not to score digits. Of course, the question is: when are you getting a number because the person is a good contact and when is it flirtatious? It's especially hard to know in cases where it could be both.

Case in point: I scored digits yesterday that any young man would be very happy to get. I've been doing some work with another office a lot lately and the young woman I interface with is easy on the eye... to say the least about the most. She is also well travelled and well read. Compelling mix, no?

This weekend, on a lark, I friended her on Facebook. I figured we talk on the phone about once a week, anyway, so it made sense. I included a very professional note with the request: your office has been great, love your boss, thanks for all the help. Done. Nothing flirtatious about it.

I wasn't surprised that she wrote me back with her friend approval. She's very politic like that. I was surprised that she wrote me back and said it was great to hear from me because she'd like to hang out. She couched it in the idea that she thought I would have some good advice and contacts for her (I am appreciably older than she is and have been doing this work longer), but, still... she's a cute girl telling an older single guy that they should get together. It doesn't have to mean anything, but it's not exactly meaningless.

Of course I agreed. I gave her my cell phone number and she replied with hers. Bam. I have digits.

This won't amount to anything. I won't try and so it won't. Still, I did implicitly ask for her number by giving her mine. So it feels like a fail on the no-digits-quest. You be the judge. Phone numbers themselves are innocent, of course, but as that New York Magazine piece I posted yesterday attests: they are little portals to temptation.

Little victories

I've been really focusing on ways that I'm not fully honoring this project, but I've realized that I haven't given myself enough credit. In the last few days, I've passed on several chances to get phone numbers and get to know girls better. I'm not saying I definitely would have scored the digits, but I am saying that the odds were good. Been-here-before sort of moments.

First, this past Saturday I was out at a dance place. Not really many people were dancing, but these three friends. They were all kind of up on a dias and going sort of nuts. Madonna's "Like a Prayer" came on. I could not wait. I did it. We all sort of tore it up up there for a while. One of them was a real cutie. She and I chatted a bit. I had a party to go to. There were expectant looks as I said my farewell. 

I just left.

Second, I went to an organization I'm a part of this weekend. Afterward, one of the women I'd met a week before invited me to join her friends at a local bar. OK, I said. We all hung out. She even gave me a lift home. Again, no problem here that I offer to follow up on any of the social things we talked about. She was, after all, new to town.

Didn't. 

Today, I went to a lunch-hour social thing. Hung out a bit. Talked to people. There was a really pretty woman in the room who said she'd just arrived in One Year Monk's adopted city. One Year Monk knows his city well. One Year Monk believes she was giving him the big eye. One Year Monk was being pretty funny at the meeting.

One Year Monk did not offer any tours. 

This is all for the best. This all took an act of will. The truth is, in this modern age, you can suggest any sort of stupid, non-committal activity, and unless you have oozing sores on your face, most women will at least start talking to you about it. Getting phone numbers is not hard. Making them want to keep seeing you, that's hard. But numbers? Not hard.

That's why it is hard for me to resist not trying to get them. But I didn't try. So I didn't get them. There's three cases, just in the last few days. No way I would have passed on those chances before the project. No. Way. These are good examples of right thinking inaction. 

HEAD SCRATCHERS: Eye Contact

HEAD SCRATCHERS will be a feature here at One Year Monk. Things I don't get well. Hopefully, folks will start to discuss them and at least see different perspectives on behaviors they believe that they understand. One Year Monk probably won't get any better, but maybe you will.

The Head Scratcher I would like to start with is eye-contact. I'm pretty great at eye-contact. Ever since I heard that tip about how Robert Kennedy (that is, RFK) just looked people in one eye, rather than trying to look at both, it's been easy. So, I make eye contact a lot. I hold it. I pick an eye and stick to it and I try not to look away.

The reason I do this is because it makes you seem honest and trustworthy. Right? That's all the more there is to it. I thought.

Well, One Year Monk has been going to this bar lately with this really cute waittress. And he's talked to her a bit so we sort of recognize each other. He went their with a galpal recently and after letting the cute waittress take our order and leave us my galpal said, "I think she likes you."

"Really?" One Year Monk asked, "How could you tell."

"She was making a lot of eye-contact," my galpal said.

But aren't you supposed to make eye contact all the time with anyone you're talking to if you're a confident and non-shady person? Does it really mean anything besides that?