Dear Alex, why you will never get married

You asked if you should get married. I said sure.
You asked if you should just find someone to marry. I asked, How do you think that would work?
You said you will go on some dates and just commit to someone. I asked about love.
You said men do not fall in love.
This was sad.
I asked are you sure? You said no. Maybe men fall in love. But you hadn’t, and you’ve been on 300 dates, and maybe there were a few you could have loved, but in the end, you didn’t.
I said this was sad.
I said maybe don’t get married.
The people in love—they are not faking it.
It is not a fake thing that they are doing. They did not decide they want to get married, and then found someone, and then said yes, this is it.
You need to be open to the idea of a life long partnership—you need your heart to be open to let the right one in.
But then once you are open to feeling you still need to feel it.
There is no reason to get married, because you feel like you need to. What of it?
What do you think it is for?
You marry when you want to look after somebody for the rest of her life.
You marry when you can’t imagine your life without her.
You marry when you don’t want her to leave.
You marry when you love the thought of having her children.
You marry when you want to spend every day with her, and you don’t want her to go home at the end of the night.
You marry when you want to.
There is no other reason to marry. What benefit is this to you?
Maybe you can make a smaller promise.
Maybe you can promise to look after her, until she finds somewhere else to be.
Maybe you can promise to pay for her medical treatment, if something were to happen.
Maybe you can promise to keep the baby, if she got knocked up.
Where are you in the negotiation?
Maybe you do not want to negotiate with God. Maybe you do not want to promise forever, until death do us part, with God as your witness. Maybe you cannot forsake all others, as long as you both shall live.
What do you want to promise? And what do you hope to gain?
You want somebody to love you. How hard are you willing to love someone else? How hard are you yourself willing to love? How hard are you willing to love yourself?

Dear Roman, is love worth it after all?

You had this idea—to find somebody you love, something you love, and to work on becoming a good thing for it. Not the right thing. Not the perfect thing. But good. A good partner, a good student, a good follower.

This brings to mind the idea that love is the central engine by which all things run. Not that love is a means—love as a means to feel attraction and have sex and make babies. Not love as an end in itself—love as a beautiful thing to experience many times in your lifetime. But love as an engine.

I wonder if you see it this way—if this is an inspiration for your thoughts. If you had gone deeper into this. Love as inspiration. Love as motivation. Love as sustained reason for being, for perfecting, for persevering. For preserving.

I look back at my life, and everything I ever did I did for love. I look at the black parts of my life, and those parts were not black because objectively bad things happened to me—but because of some tarnishing of the idea of love in my heart. Either through heartbreak, loss, betrayal. Self-loathing through inadequacy in protecting those I purport to love. The blackening of the heart came from this. A thick black crust formed over the soft flesh. But you can’t get rid of the heart. It still has to pump blood. It still has to feel. It is just harder on itself now.

Do you think it is a coincidence, that the heart is the engine of the body? That without this little engine life stops? Stuff comes in—air comes in through the lungs—but it does not go anywhere without the heart.

And if this is an engine, can it be controlled? Can it be developed? Can you train yourself to love deeper? Shallower? Can you train yourself to convert love energy into other energy? Electrical energy? Mechanical energy? Can you channel it and shoot it out of your hands like lightning?

I imagine you have gotten deep into this in your investigations. I imagine there is potential in this framework. Can you view love as energy? Love is not the machine…but rather love is the energy that powers every other machine? When you feel toxic love…you can convert it into something else…or you can turn your attention to another love to cleanse the first…suddenly unsolvable problems become solvable. Problems of abandonment, disillusionment now have a new set of tools for their resolution. You are not at the mercy of love taking you over, like a typhoon. Rather you can have some amount of control over it without hardening yourself to it, like a circus master controlling a crew of wild animals around her, the monkeys and the elephants all while on a flying trapeze. It is not a repression of energy, but rather you guide it around you.

Dear Roman, I learned how to want things and my new geography exercise

A friend was teaching me how to get anything I wanted. It is only two steps. 1) Figure out how to get what you want. 2) Ruthlessly pursue it. I told him fantastic. I am eager to get started. But how do you know what you want? He was shocked and attributed it to a difference in our personalities. He is a hammer and I am a cloud. But there is something more to this, isn’t there?

Everybody wants things. The question is how explicit it is, and if you know what it is.

It is important to want stuff. I have seen major problems when people do not want anything. I think you noticed this too—they start doing strange things. Going backward, going in circles, plateauing. In the worst cases, causing needless destruction. Or, alternatively, they start to want things they should not want—they start wanting to help a person, to change a person, or to make somebody else happy. Their focus stops being on themselves and starts being on literally anything else. They start to want love or belonging, not for the feeling of joy it brings them, but to feel belonging or love, in any capacity, from anywhere. They become detached from their values and eventually from their own bodies. 

I was like this for a long time.

I did not know how to want anything. I was not lazy. Far from it. I worked as hard as anybody. I got just as tired. Same dark circles. But I wasn’t steering it in any proper direction. It is not that I was trying not to want something. I was not pursuing a stoic or ascetic path. I did not throw away my belongings and decide that I no longer need anything. The psychology was not deep. I just did not want anything. It was really that simple. And so my motivation system ended up becoming completely messed up. I had to act towards something, but I did not know for what or why.

I found a trick. It is a simple trick that let me take control of my motivation system again. It let me orient myself again.

Here is the trick. It is one question.

The question is: Where do you want to go in the world?

You may have a list in your head. Rio, Orlando, Baku, Bali. Some of these words meant more to you than others. You may have words that pop up in your head without you even thinking about it. Dubai. Bombay. Why are these words in your head?

Stay with me here. Even if you think you do not want anything, you still have this list of places. What three places in the world do you want to go? Now go down the list. Why are those the place? Now name three random places. Why not those places? Why the first three and not the second three? What is the difference?

The exercise is simple, but you can keep playing with it and go quite deep. It reveals your value structure—both long-term and short-term. Perhaps you wish to go to Bali because you fantasize about seeing your lover there. Perhaps you want to go to Spain because that is where your family is from and you care about learning the reality of your roots. Perhaps you want to go to Patagonia because you want to go to the edge of the earth. Go deep enough and it becomes existential: What can you live without seeing, and what would you be very sad to miss before you die? 

Here is another exercise: Remember a time you were crazy. What were you doing then when you were crazy? What did you want then with such a passionate, uncontrolled fervor that your mind flew out and assaulted the air? 

Here is a third: What kinds of people do you not often talk to? Is it musicians? Is it engineers? Artists? Politicians? What happens if you talk to them? What kind of boredom would there be? What kind of excitement would there be? 

These questions help orient your values with the values of others in society. They can help you notice differences between people, and thus see yourself more clearly. If you go take someone and sit them down, and ask them what do you want? Some will have an answer but many will not know. They will not know what they want, let alone why they want it. They will not know why they do the things they do. But you can look at how they made their decisions. Why did they want to go to Rio, not Rome? Why did they choose to wear what they wore? What were they optimizing for?

Do not just assume that everything is an accident. Be closer to Sherlock Holmes than a universalist nihilist. If you see things that are different, how did they get that way?

This is not a prescriptive course of study, but it was helpful for me. This is also a different meaning of want and desire than the vernacular Buddhist conception. This is not about desire or attachment. It is rather seeing your internal motivation operating system—everybody has one, even the Buddhists. With the geography exercise alone—I can no longer be in denial that I want things—and am closer to getting them. I am curious if you find promise in these methods, or think of extensions.

Dear Thiago, let me tell you what it is like to be a pretty woman

You told me once that you were happy you were born a man. You would be better off as a woman—the world would be easier, and you would have more. But you worry about what having all this uncontrolled power would do to you. You would manipulate. You would coerce. You would use your sexuality to get things. I think that says more about the sort of women you interact with—the women you are attracted to—than women in general. You say you want to be a beautiful woman?

When I turned 22, every single man in my life decided it is a good idea to try to sleep with me. And to some of these men, I said yes. To others, I said no, but I said yes to freely and without knowing what I was doing. I thought that sex had the same transcendental meaning to them as it did me. I thought that if they wanted it very badly, then it must mean something to them. Why else would they plead so much? I thought that I was giving them a beautiful gift they wanted very badly, that only I could give him. I thought that I was spreading joy and beauty into the world with my body. When I heard that a man I once knew killed himself—I wondered—if I had slept with him, would he still be alive? You talk about the power of women, and I call you deluded. But your fantasy delusions do not run as deep as my real ones did. I thought that my tits and ass could bring a man back from the grave.

I learned fairly quickly, within a year, that this was not the truth. Sex was not what I thought it was. The men did not have the same transcendent view of sex I did. They did not live for their orgasms—they merely wanted them. I was not giving them a beautiful favor, but inadvertently training them to treat me, and other women, with less gentleness as they deserve.

“Do not worry so much. This is fun.” “I try to find intimacy, wherever I can.” What they are really saying to me is that my boundary does not matter so much. He wants to make something nice—why can’t I be on board? It took me a long time to figure this out—but I figured it out. The problem was not that I do not want nice things—it is that “nice” to me means something much different than it does to him. “Nice” to me is a much greater form of nice. Did you not hear about my desire for transcendent beauty? It is clear to me now that we were not on the same page. But back then, they were so insistent. So seemingly enamored—possibly even in love!—that I wanted to give my gift to them in this way.

Men who do not have much sex—out of no choice of their own—decide that women must be incredibly happy. Women can have all the sex they want. They think that casual sex is something they should have a right to, but do not, and women who have casual sex are feasting on a delicious fruit that only they have access to because of their gender. But this bountiful garden is not filled with delicious fruits. It is filled with poison. I remember the men I did not sleep with—the men I said no to, who were very insistent but who I had almost forgotten. If I had slept with them, what would have happened? Anything good? No…nothing good would have happened, for them nor for me. They would not have even remembered me, just as today, I strain to remember them.

This is something they do not tell you about sex. How it messes with your memories. How it messes with your conception of time and continuity. How you find yourself in the deepest intimacy with a man—but then you try to forget. You do not want to remember.

It is very destabilizing. To be wanted fiercely for your beauty. To have people obsess over you. And then drop you once they get to know you, and they realize they do not want you anymore. It is not traumatic, per se. But it is very destabilizing. It makes you not be sure what is true, what is not true. What is real and not real. What your identity is—how do people see you?

Sometimes I would go out and intentionally make myself unattractive. I did not want to be seen. I did not want anybody to look at me. I do not want the attention!

At some point I realized, if you are born with a superpower, you cannot hide it forever. You cannot let it control you, such that it might as well be a curse. You need to make the best use of what you have. Just as you cannot drink your nights away if you have a sharp mind, hoping to dull yourself into the blindness of things you wish you did not see—you cannot force yourself into ugliness, intentionally, and live in fear of the emotions other people feel for you.

Why do you think I write, under anonymity here? Like an ugly cretin, hobbled up in a cave or a basement. Why do you think I do this? Why do you think I do not show myself off to people?

I have been hurt too many times! And I do not want to do it anymore! I do not want people to look at me like they own me—all under the illusion of normalcy!

But I am coming out of my cave. Why would you want to live a cursed life? Tell me, what is there to gain, to live a life in pain like this? No…hiding is not the answer. The hiding is not where I will find what I was looking for the entire time: Transcendent beauty. But in my hiding, for some time, I may find myself again, and that is where I will seek consolation now.

Dear Roman, let me tell you why no man is rich enough for me

I was with a man the other day. It became clear, as he spoke to me on the park bench that he did not think he was rich enough for me. He never made it explicit. He never told me that he did not make enough money for me. He merely alluded to the things he cannot do. The machines he will never build. The projects that will never start. It was not meant in a condescending way, and there was no arrogance. He said it sadly—the way that only somebody acutely aware that his life is now measured not in years since birth, but years until death can say it. I did not like seeing him sad—I cut him short to remind him that he has plenty of money, and he reminded me that the things he wants happen to be very expensive. He laughed, and we looked at the browning leaves and his wolf-dog that ran through the park, and I felt him near me—his breathing, his composure, his well-executed attempt at a lifetime of decency—and he felt me—a girl with restless hope. There was nobody else in the universe. Nothing else mattered. But even in this circumstance, we both looked out into air and tried as hard as possible to avoid seeing each other.

If I looked at him, what would he see? He would not see naivety in my searching eyes. He respects me too much. But the look would make him sad. It is not an expectant look, but a look of wonder. And he is old enough and smart enough to know that whatever I see in him—that is not true. Whatever I am hoping for—he cannot give it. And he has lived long enough to know what is worth trying and what is not.

He does not want to see me because he does not see the way I see him. At some point something in his mind determined that as he does not have enough money for his own endeavors, he does not have enough money for me. He has not lived the life he should have. That because he sees himself as a failure, that I will too.

He hates himself enough that he does not look at me for long enough to see what I see. He does not see that all I ever wanted was for him to try. I wanted love. I wanted care.

The trouble with men with money is that money becomes an abstract concept. It becomes a status symbol of their worth. They are worth more than some men, but not as much as other men. They can unlock certain kinds of women—women talk to them now, instead of mocking them—but not every woman. They can provide mentorship. They are managers. They create jobs. They not only have money, but they move money around for other people. They not only have a livelihood, but they create livelihood.

And there comes the trouble. A man with money can provide me with a life with him—if he wanted to. A man with money can send me lilacs and lilies and lavish me with love—if he wanted to. A man with money can bring me joys large and small.

But he does not want to. A man with money wants to be loved for himself—for the strength of his integrity and his capacity to control chaos—and I want to love him for this. I do love him for this. But he does not let me in enough to show him.

He keeps me at a distance, wanting more and more from me without giving me anything—because he knows he can give me everything—and deciding he does not want to be the man to do it. Let another man do it. A richer man can do it. And he does not see that I do not want a richer man—I want this man in front of me, who refuses to look me in the eye.