Four Intrinsic Truths About Relationships

When I was in my twenties, I stopped dating for two whole years and entered a monastery to meditate on why I kept getting into such bad relationships. It took all but an afternoon to realize the common thread in everyone of those partnerships was me. Apart from the terrible haircut they gave me, I learned during my four hours of fasting, silence and soul searching that the criteria I employed in choosing a mate was wholly inadequate. You see, I mainly looked for one thing in a woman who I liked, namely, if she "liked me back." Clearly, this was not enough.

Up till then, I could always recall the date I met my present girlfriend because it corresponded to the day after I just broke up with some colossal bitch. I had an unbroken chain of atrocious relationships with an endless supply of consummate psychoses. It would be easy to fault women as a whole as some men do or chalk it all up to bad luck instead of blaming it on my own shallow manner in which I searched for the mother of my children. Certainly, it was my defect because last I checked I wasn't from a culture in which my parents arranged marriages. When I recall some of the knuckleheads I dated back in the day, I'm astounded that I emerged from the cesspool of youth unscathed.

I once dated a woman who in the summers constantly turned on the air conditioner in my flat without checking the outside temperature. Often it was colder outside than the temperature she set on the thermostat so she was using the air conditioner to heat the place.

Some women love drama. They find conflict in everything and make your daily life miserable. Once, after returning from the grocery store, my girlfriend at the time saw that I had purchased tunafish. Recently, she had seen a documentary about dolphins getting snagged in tuna nets.

“How could you buy tuna with what they do to dolphins?” she lamented.

.

“What about the tuna?” I asked, “The nets are there for them.”

She argued that dolphin's brains were as big as human's. I offered that if dolphins were so smart, they would be capable of avoiding a tuna net like the vast majority of mankind. She really didn’t care about dolphins, or the natural world for that matter. She had gone to a community college where she majored in psychology so there probably wasn’t much natural science in the curriculum. She just wanted to argue, so argue we did, about everything and nothing. When we broke up, I felt as if I had been paroled from daily, inane commentary.

Needless to say, at the tender age of 27, I needed to figure all this out so I took some time off to think. I had the foundation set correctly. I was looking for someone to spend the rest of my life with, a mother to children, a person whose goals were similar to mine. Who you marry is the single most important decision in a your life. It's not something you want to fuck up.

All this heavy thinking back then led to three intrinsic truths about relationships. These are things that should be unquestionably present. Here they are.

1. Must be free

Most women know a guy they adore who craps all over them. I call this dude the "end all, be all guy," (ea-bag). An ea-bag is often a woman's first love, first sexual experience and usually exhibits a host of atrocious behavior. He's a fuck buddy with an unlimited fast pass. "Big" in Sex in the City was an ea-bag as was Christian Grey from the Fifty Shades of Stupid trilogy. Women clinging onto the last jerk they dated or doling out a free pass to their ea-bag are not free. They are encumbered by the past and will never be able to form a healthy relationship until they unload their baggage and embrace self-determination.

2. Must be 100%

There are many complicated rules involving how you should respond to a text, tweet or other means of communicating via social media. If she is looking forward to a relationship with you, all the rules go out the window, and she will respond immediately as should you. When it's right, you both yearn to be together and will forego fool-hearted netiquette employed to give one person "hand."

3. Must exhibit morals

Once on a first date, a mentally challenged young man approached my date inquiring about directions. She was exceedingly kind. When he went on his way, she turned to me and said,

"What a dork!"

Apparently she gave him incorrect directions much to her amusement. At the end of the night when I walked her to her car, I noted that she parked in a handicapped spot without a proper plate. When I inquired about this, she explained that she did it all the time and never got pinched. People like her think the difference between right and wrong is getting caught. If this was her idea of best behavior on a first date, imagine what she was like after a year.

These three tenets were enough to guide me to a wonderful woman, who I married and had two children with. We've been together for 28 years. I no longer have a need for this list, but recently I've been thinking about it again which led to this addition.

4. Must have a good relationship with her father

A woman who has a loving and caring father will likely have a healthy outlook on relationships. Good fathers parent by fostering independence and self-reliance while mothers tend to nurture safety and wellbeing. To ensure that a young woman breaks free of her father and leaves the nest, nature has coded in that extra leg of the X chromosome all woman have instructions for mothers and daughters to fight just short of killing each other. My wife had a very close relationship with her father, who helped her in school with homework and science projects. She was his constant companion and assistant with home repairs when she was coming up. She became a mechanical engineer, then a software developer and finally a vice president for a global company. She attributes it all to her father's tutelage. I've seen her cry twice. The last time was when her father died.

So are there anymore? I think there is at least one more intrinsic truth about relationships. This last one is like the undiscovered element 119 on the periodic table just after the noble gas, Oganesson-118. We know it's there, but it's unobserved as of yet. College text books in technical subjects often treat a hard problem as "left as an exercise for the student." That's what the fifth intrinsic truth is. I recently asked some of my younger family and friends what was important to them in regards to selecting a life partner. A youthful family member offered,

"Nice bod."

This is a little too superficial and not in the spirit of what I'm looking for. A friend in his thirties suggested,

"Must be uninhibited."

Uninhibited is a word used by men in personal ads when describing what they want in a woman. They usually slide it in at the end in hopes that it will go unnoticed as in,

"Likes long walks on the beach, nature, going out to dinner, movies. Uninhibited."

The problem with uninhibited is that it actually means "must be willing to do my best friend too."

A young colleague once offered,

"Must have a good vibe."

Many young people believe that vibe is a window into your soul. If you're an upbeat person, your vibe will be good. If you're an uptight ass hat, your vibe will be bad. You can't see vibe. You feel it. Vibe is a reflection of who you truly are.

Brad Pitt, good vibe
Andy Dick, bad vibe

In practice vibe has got more to do with fashion than one's inner being. A man has a good vibe if he goes to a coffee house to read poetry, has a man bun or wears Jesus sandals. A woman has a good vibe if she drinks soy tea, has a tattoo of her grandmother's favorite saying on her wrist, or cares intently about tree sloths. None of the things will necessarily help you find a soulmate so forget about vibe. Besides, Brad Pitt extruded a good vibe for decades, but as a husband he turned out to be a major tool.

Someday someone will look out the window and gaze at the friscalating dusklight, take a deep breadth then pull out their phone and post words of wisdom on living and loving for the rest of us to follow. I just hope they do so before being banned from social media for going against the suggestion that Jill Biden would make a good surgeon general.

Editor's Note: Originally published on February 13, 2018.