The Futility of It All...

I guess I don’t ever change behavior until I reach a complete bottom, where I see the absolute, abject futility of it all.  Only then can I begin to make the change.

I have hit this fucking low on so many things.  Nothing so complete as seeing my whole love affair with alcohol as just a huge waste of a life.  I was literally drinking my life away, always telling myself that “this time it will be different!”  It was never different!  Well, wait, it was, it got worse.

I am hitting a new wall with another behavior in my life.  I suddenly realized today there is this other area in my life where my behavior is the EXACT FUCKING SAME!  And I am sure all of you could see it, but I could not.  I just so desperately needed to believe that this time it would be different.  It was never different.  Wait, wait, yes it was, it got worse.

Yes, I am talking about dating.  This morning as I sat down to write, coffee at my bedside, cat on lap, mired in the darkness of the predawn hours, I realized that I keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different result.  I am just sitting here and I realized that my dating behavior is EXACTLY like my drinking behavior!  It just keeps getting worse.  And I just keep telling myself the same tired, worn out story...”well, maybe this time, this guy, will be different!”  I am wrong every single time, perhaps for different reasons, but I am still wrong.  Does it really matter why I am wrong?  The fact that I am wrong, should just be enough at this point.

The only difference between my dating behavior and my drinking behavior is that I have believed that my dating behavior has gotten better.  But over here in the stark darkness of morning, I can’t for the life of me understand why I think that.  I had the worst relationship of my life at 27 years sober.  I willingly engaged with a complete nut job, then wouldn’t leave him when the fact that he was toxic as fuck and a complete liar was right there! I mean everyone else saw it, and so did I!  But I refused to believe it.  Repeatedly.  To my own demise.

That relationship took me to depths I didn’t ever want to go.  And the healing process from all the damage he leveled has been unfun.  My trust and ability to believe anything a man says has been pretty fucked.  Not that I was a true believer to begin with...but he really underscored the depths of a man’s depravity.  And I just kept refilling the popcorn bowl and returning to my seat in the front row of his fucked up life.  That is actually painful to write.

I have continued to date because I believed that perhaps, one day, I might get it right.  Find my person.  And I realized this morning that perhaps, for me, there just isn’t one.  Men, like booze, are just always going to be some other form of self abuse.  There isn’t a man that is going to come along and be different.  This is just me and dating.  Just like me and drinking, it is never, ever going to work out.  And I will admit, that the thought of having to completely surrender this idea is hard. And it makes me sad.

But I know a couple of things about hitting bottom.  I know that my life will be better once I accept this fact of my life.  Sure, I was totally bummed and in a great deal of pain when I put down the drink.  But my life got better, and better each day that passed without alcohol.  And I think I am there with the dating...I am in a great deal of pain and totally bummed but I think I just have to put the dating down also.  It just doesn’t work for me, for whatever reason.  And this whole, “intimacy and vulnerability is where I need to do my work” bullshit, is just that, bullshit.  I can do that work in other ways.  Ways that do not require me to just keep walking into the blades.  

Perhaps my life is about finding ways to connect to the people in my life without attempting to make it a long term love affair.  Perhaps, love affairs are just not for me.  Writing that makes me really sad.  Because I want one, I really do.  But I have to look at the evidence as it lays before me.  Me and dating just do not work, at all. Just like me and drinking.  I know that I couldn’t see the futility of my own drinking behavior for years.  I kept thinking that it would get better, but it didn’t.  And here as I sit, tapping out my pain and confusion AGAIN with dating, I can see that the two things are, in fact, the same.  I just need to stop.

So there is nothing else to do when you see the futility of your own behavior.  I mean to plod forward just seems abusive and dumb.  And while I may be pretty self abusive, I am not dumb.  And honestly, this is why I think I was able to put down the drink.  I saw, with a clarity reserved only for great spiritual insights, that my behavior was only going to lead me to more pain, sorrow and loss.  That is just the way it was for me and drinking.  And I only needed 13 years of that to be convinced!  I have been dating for 45 years and just now waking up to the fact that it just doesn’t work for me, like at all.

I am tired of the growing of hope.  The excitement buoying and then crashing.  My dating behavior is really like a wave crashing.  It looks so pretty and promising as it builds, but it always comes crashing down in the end.  It is inevitable.  And today, for some reason, I am more willing to accept that than I ever have been before.

Someone said yesterday that they admired my sticktoitiveness with the whole dating endeavor. And while I appreciated her perspective and insight, what really came to me was the complete futility of it all.  It just doesn’t work out for me, ever. And I am tired, and older and I just don’t want to have to do this fucking bullshit anymore.  I just want to be happy and safe and enjoy my life.  With this one glaring exception, my life is fucking awesome.  And I can see, now, this morning, that the only thing standing in the way of me being truly happy, is surrendering the idea that I can successfully date, or fall in love, or couple.  I just can’t. I don’t know why.  I have all sorts of reasons, just like I did with drinking, but who the fuck knows why I can’t drink safely.  And now, on this 12th of June, 2025, 30 years after I put the plug in the jog, I am similarly resigning from dating.

I don’t know exactly what that means.  I just know I have hit a wall that feels different.  And in three months, I could totally write that “it was, in fact, not different!”  But today, it feels different and I know that all change begins here.  At rock bottom.  The only place to go is up.  And that, for me, is going to be a decidedly solo adventure.

Again, still.

Me, reviewing the futility of my own dating behavior!