Writing new blog posts lately is like crapping a pineapple.   Thoughtful points, clever turns-of-phrase -  I have to dislodge them from my brain with a pneumatic drill.    So when the muse visits, I have to capitalize on that brief moment of inspiration, because you never know when she’ll visit again or what form she’ll take.  Well, the muse is here RIGHT! FUCKING! NOW! and this time she looks  a lot like a dude named Peter.

Peter is a new reader (who probably discovered me through that AMAZING blog The Art of Manliness – thanks for the shout out Brett!) who was commenting on my text correspondence with Goddess, the woman who is partial inspiration for this blog.  Peter writes:

I’m sorry dude, but you’re not going to get this girl. Really. She doesn’t see you like that and she won’t. Apply the Brad Pitt Rule…(it) basically says that if G liked Chris, she would simply drop her “off the market” plan and just go on a date with him. If Brad Pitt would have asked her on a date, she would have said yes.

The logic of The Brad Pitt Rule (or Hugh Jackman Rule, or George Clooney Rule, depending on your taste) has proven to be as irrefutable as gravity,  which is why I was a strict observer of it in the past.  If I was fortunate enough to date a smart, beautiful woman,  it’s not because I was irresistibly suave or devilishly handsome.   Most times, I could never tell if a woman liked me or not unless she was being glaringly obvious.     On those occasions when I did go ahead and confess my affections, I was usually shooting blind, and it usually turned into a festival of pain.  That’s  why I gave up pursuing women altogether.

Now, I’m not ugly, but I’m no Brad Pitt. I’m not humourless, but I’m no Jack Black. I can’t bend it like Beckham, although I can bend it somewhat when bending is required.

  To be honest, I’ve been more than a little surprised by my luck.  I can only hope  my lovelife is evidence that there are natural orbital fields in dating, wherein everyone just gravitates to those most likely to love them.

I DO believe all the women I’ve dated to be inherently lovable. If they had one major flaw, it was  being unlucky enough to want me.   The miracle of predisposition and biochemistry had done most of the heavy lifting for us. You know that adage “nothing worth having comes easy”? Well,  with those relationships I had something worth having, and screwed it up precisely because they came easy.  I thought I risked nothing so I got bored quickly, and my thoughts would drift to the next woman.   It got to be  so that when the end  came, I felt bad but not that bad.  Oh sure, I may’ve pulled a Brian Wilson a few times, or tried to listen to “Blood on the Tracks” from start to finish, but I wasn’t really miserable so much as playing a miserable person for the sake of others.  After a while, I was glad they were gone. I had no idea how unworthy I was.

Even now, I can think of exactly one woman before Goddess (let’s call her pre-Goddess) that has inspired me to put in an effort, and the result is I think of her to this day as “the one that got away”.    It’s very likely she would’ve added little to my life except for misery, but I can’t help it.   I will unpack the baggage from that relationship in another post.  For now, it’s enough for you to know that pre-Goddess made me work for it, and that has made all the difference.

So essentially, I’m living proof that The Rules CAN work – the harder you make it, the more invested I seem to be.  To put it another way,  I tend to cherish the things I earn more than the things that simply fall in my lap, and that extends to women.   Mind you, these days we have a curious mindset about the effort required to start a relationship.  A lot of people treat love like economics -  trying to create scarcity around their “product”, even if their product sucks. 

They want other people to come to them, despite finding the ones who do  a little contemptible.   I have yet to resolve this paradox,  mostly because I’m endlessly charmed by stories from old couples like the ones in “When Harry Met Sally” – the husband meets his wife at the kosher deli and is consumed by a sense of destiny and she isn’t but through charming persistence she sees his quality and falls in love with him.   I dig those stories way more than the ones where two people meet and just KNOW.

Could that happen with G?  Frankly, Peter is right – all early indications are it is highly unlikely. But the same intuition that tells me tells me my chances for success are non-existent also tells me that Goddess is a person of character, and if there was ever anyone worthy of an effort, it’s her. I remember reading an essay by Vaclav Havel about hope.  Essentially, he said that hope is a state of mind, not of the world.  It’s not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

So you might say I have hope for Goddess – the idea of being with her makes sense to me, no matter how it ends.   I suppose a smart man would let G save herself for BP.  I’m not completely impractical, and perhaps at some point I will heed Peter’s advice and move on.  For the time being, though, I prefer to think G might be charmed by someone as dumb as me.