Males gone missing

I thought my world had ended when Yukon, my beloved beagle, wandered off one day. Panicked, I called my sister at work and demanded that she come home and help me look for him. (She couldn’t come; nor, in retrospect, was it a reasonable request.) After I had spent a few frantic hours walking the neighborhood calling his name, Yukon strolled back into the yard, completely oblivious to the anxiety he had caused me.

That incident came to mind as I thought about how “Joe” came back into my life. We hadn’t seen each other for seven months when he called in April. When we went for a walk after lunch three weeks later, he held my hand, kissed me on the cheek and called me “honey,” completely oblivious of the torment I endured because of him last fall.

A wandering dog is easily restrained by a leash and a fence. Although we may try, a disappearing man cannot be kept present by ropes and railings, real or relational. In the past I might have tried -- by prematurely extracting some sort of commitment or confession of love. Of course, this is easy to say after a second and thoroughly enjoyable date (more on this later), but my intent for the time being is to enjoy each date or phone call as it comes and not look to a (human) man when I need reassurance. After all, what I'm really looking for is affirmation that I am a worthwhile human being. Depending on a relationship for such security is giving over a lot of power to a flawed human being who has his own needs and means for meeting them.

For reasons I can't quite explain, my recent trip to India has helped me get that affirmation from within. I'm an equally flawed human being, one who can be virtually paralyzed by self-doubt. And in some ways I am harder on myself than a beau might be. But by not looking to a man to affirm me, I'm not giving him the opportunity to determine my worth. That doesn't meant I'm going to unleash my dog or forgo relational boundaries, it just means that I'll strive to have boundaries that are appropriate in motivation and function. It's good to have a fenced-in back yard when you have a dog. It's good when a couple makes the mutual decision to be exclusive. But when it comes to your own sense of worth, you need an impenetrable fortress, not a chain-link fence.

Men gone mad

There’s a saying that’s so familiar that I need only say the first few words for everyone to know what I’m talking about: “if you love something ... ” I’ve done so much letting go in my life, especially in regard to love, that it’s becoming easier to do. But I haven’t had much experience with the “it will come back to you” part, despite how much I daydreamed, longed or prayed for such a return.

But I’ve recently had a couple of instances of the coming back part, one of which turned out to be unwelcome and the other that has yet to be determined.

The first came while I was spending a month in India. My roommate reported to me via e-mail a phone message from someone I’ll call “Steve.” He gave no last name, but I guessed it was the Steve I had dated about 11 years ago. We remained friends even after my less-than-praiseworthy break-up with him. He married within a year or so and we kept in touch through mutual friends.

To make a long story short, we met for coffee one evening to catch up on old times, or so I thought. But when his hand lingered too long on mine, that was my first clue that he had more than swapping stories in mind. “What about your marriage?” I asked. “We have a … good marriage,” he said, taking a little too long to choose an adjective to describe his marriage. I don’t mean to be unkind, but I wouldn’t want to do more than chat even if he were single. There were good reasons for my breaking up with him. I told him that if he wanted to invite me to his house to meet his two boys when his wife was there, I’d be fine with that. But I declined to meet with him behind her back. I hope something clicked in his mind to convince him to work things out with his wife.

That’s certainly not the kind of coming back to me I ever longed for. When the man I mentioned in an earlier post (I’ll call him “Joe”) seemed less and less interested in spending time with me, I decided not so much to set him free as to put myself out of my misery. So after weeks of hearing, “I’m too busy to get together with you,” I sent him an e-mail that went something like this: “This isn’t working for me. Why don’t you call me when you want to have a relationship with me?” Then, over the coming days, I deleted his saved voicemail messages. I deleted his e-mails, as well as my e-mails to him. I dumped the photos I had of him on my hard drive. I wrote up a witty profile and signed up on as many singles websites as I could find. I won’t bore you with those details, except to say that I found there were men on the singles websites every bit as non-responsive as “Joe.” I didn’t find any keepers there, but at least I wasn’t thinking about Joe.

Months came and went, including a month I spent in India. That could take up a month of blog entries in itself; suffice it to say for now that it was a tremendous experience. One of the best things about it was that seemed to satisfy that empty place in me that I’m always trying to fill with a man. The satisfaction lingered, giving me memories to savor when my mind wandered from the theology books I was supposed to be reading.

One evening as I sat at my computer, the phone rang. I let the machine answer, as usual. The male voice was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. When he identified himself as “Joe,” I was frozen in disbelief. It didn’t matter that it was April 1, because I couldn’t believe it was him calling, whatever day it was. I even had to play the message for a roommate later to be sure I wasn’t imagining it. I would have bet my last penny that I’d never hear from him again.

To be continued ...