I’ve never been able to approach women, much less initiate intimacy. I’m a homebody with creative aspirations and no desire for children so being alone is not detrimental to me. Yet I’ve found that on almost every date or first meeting with someone, the anxiety/shyness always scares them away. My question: do you think there are people who would either not find this negative/unappealing or even appealing in a partner?
I’m thinking a community like Quirkyalone (www.quirkyalone.net) may be a good place for you. Created by an eponymously self-identified woman named Sasha Cagen, it celebrates the person who enjoys being single but is not against the potential for relationships, just on more autonomous terms. I know, the word is dismissingly cutesy, the movement occasionally feels manufactured to bolster Cagen’s other burgeoning eccentricity brands and with your severe social anxiety and mild OCD, you may be on the extreme end of the Quirkyalone spectrum—a Hyperquirkyalone perhaps. Still, your solitary nature will be shared and even appreciated. Then you can open up about the freakier shit.
Despite the above-stated misgivings, I really appreciate the Quirkyalone universe, including the book, which puts personal stories and faces to exasperating situations I frequently confront myself: when am I moving in with my boyfriend (when I can say for sure that it won’t end in a murder suicide), when am I getting married (when I can offer the benefits of Canadian citizenship to a beleaguered Iraqi widow), why am I always partying without my boyfriend (because he just got the long-awaited final issue of Y: the Last Man and he’d rather be at home reading it than watching me get drunk and make out with women’s studies majors). Why don’t people just ask what they really mean: “When are you going to mirror my choices so I feel better about them?”
It took more than one partner wondering why I needed to spend so much time “without them” (as opposed to by myself) to realize that people view time and how they are owed it in a relationship very differently. There are many assumptions made when you commit and if you’re like me, your anxiety is compounded by the fact that you just won’t live up to them and if you try to, you’ll become perpetually grouchy. I know I was a terrible girlfriend to just about everyone who wasn’t as independent as I am but judging by all the seething togethers I’ve met, this is not unusual.
AJ, I genuinely believe there is someone who would find your idiosyncrasies bearable and even appealing (see for example Clover Kim in the Quirkyalone book whose motto is “Solitude in Solidarity”) but of course, you must be prepared to accept theirs too. So just how mild is that OCD?
And just incidentally... I was at my friend Joe’s the other night and came across a couple of packages of Pop Rocks in his kitchen. “Don’t ever snort these,” I said to him firmly, having tried it with my pal PJ many years ago (hey PJ, if you’re reading this, do you remember why in the fuck we did that?). Joe countered with, “Have you ever given someone a blow-job with them in your mouth?” Joe never had but he’d heard it was sensational and you know what they say: you’re never too old to end up in ER on account of an urban sex myth calamity! I slipped a pack in my purse and later on told my boyfriend I had a column related assignment that required his participation, promising it would be more fun than when I took him to a plastic surgery clinic and put his balls up against a pair of prosthetic ones. “I dunno,” he replied, “that was pretty fun. I got to meet Dr. Stubbs!” After a bit of joking about getting his rocks off, we got down to business.
Prognosis? “It feels like a bit of number three sandpaper combined with pins and needles, like I’d been squashing my balls on my bike seat too long,” he said and promptly lost his erection.
