Shades of Grays

It's been a while since I have posted on here. Since I last blogged about dating and "love" a lot got shifted around for me in different directions and I find myself sorting through a vast amount of gray area as feelings are tricky. I have even gone back to the therapist my ex-wife and I used for pre-marital counselling as I had begun feeling overwhelmed  by certain patterns in the situation I was in. This was useful as I get overwhelmed when I don't understand something. It has been clear cut that in regards to this person I love my brain is shitty. I overreact, I act against what outsiders might say is reason. Love is fucking crazy, but why was I fundamentally unable to do anything but become putty in this person's hands.

There is a science to it and my therapist broke it down for me. When I met this person I was coming out a of a depression, most of which had been brought on by my divorce. So the chemical simmer was ripe for being what she called "love bombed" by this person. We sent each other a flurry of at least a thousand texts a week in the first month. So when the brain gets this kind of positive re-enforcement it wants more, not unlike the high of  cocaine. So this turned into a more compulsive form of attachment. Does this mean what I felt and my reasons for feeling that way were not real...no. Another dr told me the litmus test for real love versus a manic swing or other chemical discombobulation is judged by my actions. I think my actions up to this point have been rather self-less. Though by definition, love is a good feeling, as an addict I like good feelings so we are back into gray area.

The more secure you are the more ok you are with gray area. Aside from secure you could be insecure but have numbed yourself out with drugs or alcohol. This gives you more of a buffer. Other people can also be a buffer and combining alcohol into that equation makes things even messier. The darker clouds at the edge of the gray is the fear of getting hurt. Thinking I would be better off detaching than heading into the storm. My experience with the buffers is they didn't work to help me escape, but only reconfirmed how I felt about the person I was trying to emotionally distance myself from. Factor in mental health issues and things like the spotty self care that being in love can redirect you from and you have a formula fatal to the flesh.

But I am not turning this into a woe is me sort of thing, In the wake of my current situation, the pieces could be picked up and made into something else or I could cut my losses. What I can't do is walk away without recognizing what this person meant to me. Someone said if you are over her then it will be easier, but will still take time. Without the help pf drugs or alcohol which are no longer options for me anymore I do not know how to turn emotions off. It's just not something that is in my control. What I have been doing to process things is continue writing , one of the projects is turning the thousands of  texts we sent one another into a narrative. It might just be for my own personal use, never to see the light of day. So if you came here to read my pearls of wisdom on this issue , the ones I have are sparse and the only thing that rings true is the stay try to yourself amid it all , to not resent the other person or your self.

Warp Speed Ahead

I think originally started this post  a few weeks ago , but I'll go ahead and finish my thoughts here on this so I can move on to where I am at for better or for worse. Taking things too fast is a slippery slope. By taking it fast I am not talking about rushing to move in or get married , those are the more obvious ones that are bad judgement calls. This is a more subtle mechanization. This is less under conscious control unless you make a point of keeping the other person at a distance, For people with bi-polar disorder the new car smell chemicals can kick things into a higher gear and trigger a manic episode.It can be hard to tell the two apart. In researching this the best perspective on the difference between love and mania comes from Joseph F. Goldberg, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City “In love, a person thinks about the other person—their welfare and well-being are paramount,” he explains. “In mania, I’m thinking about you, but I might also think about how you’re a means to an end for my own self-aggrandizement.” So do you think of the other person or does this person make you feel larger than life? So gray area exists here , in that when I high on the clean car smell, I want to share the big picture of what my life looks like, so I want them to meet my friends. This is healthy enough I suppose.


I would say I stuck my toe in something similar recently, but truth be told I dove in head first. It's exhilarating to allow your self to feel when you have spent most of your life numbing out your emotions. This ;also came at a bad week where I had just gone off my meds, so life was in collision all around me. A couple of weeks ago  I was lucky enough to spend 36 with this person, but it's like running a sprint for an extended period of time after the endorphin high you are left panting on the ground. This left both parties overwhelmed and confused wondering what hit us. How did we get here and how did we get here so fast.I am still trying to figure this part out. How did it happen? I think it depends on how sensitive you are to other peoples energy. We took our blood pressure on one of the machines at Kroger and ;both of us scored high, she is only 27 and far from overweight. So our galloping hearts where racing in time to the beat of an unknown drum.

The fear that this can generate is similar to the dreams where I am flying. It is amazing to soar up into the air . The feeling of weightless in the ascent is powerful, but in most of those dreams their comes a time when I realize how high up I have gone. Then I look down and think "Oh Shit I am going to have  come back down, What is the choice? The stomach plunges with the decent, that I dreaded . The key could be to not look down, don't focus on the what if's that bring the fear. This is easier said than done. In fact I am still trying to sort out what do to, as the altitude combined with going off m y meds can be a painful combination, but everything has a cost. Love is not sane. At one point in time you were strangers and now you can't imagine life without them. That could be thought of as crazy. There is never a good time table to go crazy. I think going crazy gracefully and safely is the best you can do.

Set to Stun

We are picking up where we left off with the last entry which was....Why not be all in and allow yourself to feel without having to have the security of hard and fast rules and boundaries, which what those look like and where healthy expectations fall without having to totally destroy the luxury of your romantic pink cloud moment is some that I'll talk about in my next post. I was going to wait and post this later , but it's healthy for me to write about it. I would rather  sort it out rather than not jump on the thoughts while I feel like I have some clarity. I will point out that I was taken off my meds, and now I am on my old dose of Wellbutrin. So that might effect and make me more anxious. So boundaries, should exist even before you have the "relationship talk". But they are for you not the other person.

If you think you can control someone or feel the need to control some one you might not want to date at all. Your skin is not thick enough for it. You can say you do not have expectations  in regards to the person you are dating but that just isn't true. We have expectations in regards to everything. To not would be chaos. When flip a light switch, I expect for a light to come on. It might not if I haven't taken care of my end of things like paid the power bill or replace a burned out bulb, but I normally have those things in place so the cause and effect I perhaps take for granted is A + B results in C.  Now the slippery slope is we all have been hardwired wired by our personal history as to what this equation really spells out in regards to our interaction in dating. Some things we might agree on is respecting other to some extent.  If you are not into being respected then you might want to put away the dating App and seek therapy.

Then there is gray area, which gets wider and grayer depending on the level of adult communication you have with the other person. A reasonable expectation might be if someone says they are going to meet me or call me at a certain time that happens. But the gray area there is life happens, what if someone loses their phone, falls into a black out or passes out from exhaustion with every intention of calling or leaving or what ever the case may be. It's easy to then pass judgement and say this person is not responsible so  I don't want to fuck with this. I think it's healthier to set the phasers to stun rather than kill if you notice you are invested emotionally to a degree you feel the chemicals making you happy.

Sure life happening can be a buzz kill to those chemicals. What is important for me to keep in mind is to allow that person to have the space to be themselves. Eventually things will become clearer. It is unfair for me to expect someone to act in a manner that is not where they are at in life. I can choose to then meet then closer to where they are at, but you get into what becomes dangerous ground if you turn them into the person you want them to be rather than who they really are. Who they really are might not be who they show you through the things they say but  through their actions. If someone really wants to spend time with me then it will happen.

 I can tell you I like working out, that requires me taking the time to go to the gym. No matter how much I know about exercise if it's not something I take the time and follow through with the action of doing, then I just like the idea of working out and if I am really deluding myself I might wonder why I am terrible shape after all I thought about the gym enough, the gym must not work, I am the problem because no matter how much I think about the gym it never get better same lack of muscle tone. Picking up the weight and doing something is where it has to start.  So don't shoot to kill, just give very one enough rope to hang themselves or build a swing,

But there is a bit of a balancing act so I can see where a no strings attached no expectation rule works to some extent in the sense that ,if I expect to be disappointed or I am too attached to an outcome I will create that with the power of my intention. Which then turns into why am I always in a string of bad relationships when I am the one common denominators and it is obviously what I wanted or I would have made different choices gotten different results.How attached am I to the results and how congruent is it with who the are as a person. The dog will not quack. The duck will not bark.

Take Me to Your Leader

So what happens when the tractor beam pulls you in and the chemical shift begins to occur that sets off what I call the clean car smell. How do you know what is real and what is not in that regard. Well there are some physiological changes at play. Falling in love is similar to being on cocaine. There are people who are love addicts and just hooked on this chemical mix adrenaline and phenylethylamine as serotonin lowers. When it comes to this I think awareness is the key just as it is any mental health issue. Just because you are bi-polar doesn't mean you are not responsible, in fact in some ways it means you are more responsible because you know the causes and conditions that can send you over the edge.

This can be a very scary time, as you can make a choice of either

A- being guarded, coming off as too cool for school, using things like other relationships, drinking or a multitude of distractions to keep one foot in. This ensures that you are not going to get hurt, You are also not going to get very close. It is like the orthodox Jews, who keep the holy sheet between them to have sex. I was poly-amorous for a long time. When I first started the relationship with my now ex-wife we were in an open relationship. It took her saying that she was never really into the whole poly-amory thing to begin with, for me to question why I was doing it when at the time I really only wanted to be with her. Well it was safe. Granted if that is the path you are going to go down it was not honest of her to agree to participate in that kind of relationship if it was not who she was or what she wanted.

b- Going all in. This is new. The problem here is it allows you to get hurt. The pay off is you get to feel everything to the fullest extent. I think the key to this might some across as grim, realize this relationship will end. If it is going to end then you might as well enjoy it today. When you go to a movie you don't fret over the fact in two hours the credits will roll and the lights will come on. You sit back with your pop corn and enjoy the experience. This is what I would like to do and it does require some thicker skin.

So if you are going to go all in, what does all in look like ? When do you come up with ground rules? When do you become monogamous? Like the old commercial says "Why ask why? Bud Dry"  Over thinking and reading into peoples actions is crazy. It's great to feel like you can get lost with someone and spend infinite periods of time with them, But why put that in a box. Why not be all in and allow yourself to feel without having to have the security of hard and fast rules and boundaries, which what those look like and where healthy expectations fall without having to totally destroy the luxury of your romantic pink cloud moment is some that I'll talk about in my next post.

Getting to Know You

While things have changed  since I started writing this blog, I am going to stay the course and keep writing, even though I am happy at where I have come to and going to go with that. But this does leve the door open to discuss the early clean car smell of dating/ relationships and such. It also makes this particular entry that I started a few weeks ago feel a little weird but I'll go ahead and finish it as it's the proper point b to transition to after the first post. How do you maintain the parts of yourself that you don't want to compromise. Well when I decided this time around to dive back into dating I wasn't worried about the "getting laid" side.  Here is where most guys go wrong. This part is the most empowering as a man this empowering because there is nothing that can be help over my head or used as a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I am  typically pretty happy jerking off anyways as in the past it has gotten the job done better . Like the old saying if you want something done right you gotta do it yourself. But going forward if you like the connection you have with someone then sex can be a way to get closer if you open up rather than get drunk and close yourself off and just "hook up" But we are not going to talk about casual sex rather the getting to know you part of dating.

With dating profiles and not the shorter swipe school of dating that can be just as effective, you need to find a balance of selling yourself and being true to who you are. Coming from a marketing background, I know the importance of writing to your demographics. So here is the intro to one of my old dating profiles started off like this.

As a touring musician , when I am not playing in dive bars I prefer building blanket forts and watching horror movies to going back out to wade through drunks at in smoke filled club

I don't talk politics because it's about as real as professional wrestling, and after all it's not the puppet it's the hand. I support anything that can make this world more like a 80's Mad Max rip-off with roving bands of mutants prowling the streets. So I am pro-Apocalypse, after all it's the most metal thing that can happen.

I also feel that organized religion of western culture is the empty promise of a whore, and I typically like whores

I do practice disorganized religion and prefer my gods to be older than Jewish carpenters

So right from the jump you thin the herd. We establish music as a big part of my life. I don't want to hang out in bars and most importantly how I don't want to get dragged into politics or religion. This might seem harsh and alienating to some. Certainly not all embracing in the more politically correct millennials can relate to, but that is what I was trying to avoid getting into. My ex wife and I had some very different world views when it came to cultural issues. How ever most of the time it worked when we agreed to disagree. I have worked with people and been friends with people for years who never knew my views on this sort of thing. Granted religion can be more of a buzz kill due to the morality clauses and how they like to yell down from their pulpits for everyone to keep their pants on, so that one needs to be weeded out from the jump. Other wise when you are taken aboard the mothership who really gives a shit what your views are on Obamacare when the probe comes out after all.

Welcome Earthling

As you may or may not know I write for a few other blogs. I have come to the conclusion that this would be the best outlet to keep my personal life out of those unless it's called for in something like Cvlt Nation, where I delve into mental health. But after getting divorced the world of dating has been an odd realm to try to dip my toe into so this is going to serve as place for my observations and thoughts on this misadventure. I am sure there are tons of other dating blogs out there. This will obviously be different since it's coming from the perspective of some one in the mental health recovery community, who already has a outsiders view by coming from a background in the kink community. In other words I mix what would someone trying to go about this in a healthy way do who at the same time finds the blue print of monogamy to be even more outdated in today's culture. With one divorce under your belt, a sane person would think, OK been there done that got the t-shirt, so what are the other options. I am old enough that just hook-ups also fall under the been there done that and it bores me column. So what were are going to look aside from the odd quirks of dating is how we can do this differently and get different results. Anyone familiar with the 12 step model know in the personal inventory, we look at the facts about ourselves. It's easy to say all the people I have dated are fucked up or crazy, but I am the one common denominator in all of those relationships, so I have to take personal responsibility for that in future decisions. It is not that I am not going to be attracted to that kind of person. It is knowing I need to shift my perspective when entering into a relationship of any kind with them. We will look at the forums this dating will take place. The landscape on ritual of swiping has certainly made us Earthling more ADD in this department and people seem more disposable as a pixel. The language they use in their profiles. I found out if one of the first things they feel the need to bring up is the fact they only drink every now and then, chances are they might be an alcoholic since normal people just either drink or don't drink and there is no need to bring it up since it is not something on their mind that they need to control. I bring up the fact I don't once we are at a bar and they are wondering why I am not . If I see it's making things weird then I'll go ahead and tell them I am an addict and don't drink because it makes me break out into needles. Why not throw it all out and get out of the way sooner than later. Mental health issue I like to take the same approach with that we have it on the table and you know what you are signing up for. I will say it even gets so bad I have become suicidal because if there is on thing I can't stand is to find out they were dramatically down playing certain issue then it feels like a bait and switch. Fuck magical thinking of "Oh, they are a wonderful person" . Wonderful people are for Disney movies. What is the real person here and do I want to invest time in them going forward. So that is where we are going to take your protein pills and put your helmet on.