party of one
This guy will never have a girlfriend.
I will never have a girlfriend either. But for a substantially different reason.
When discussing dating with any of my friends, I often joke that I have come to terms with the fact that I am going to die sad and alone in a rundown shack behind a grocery store with about 20 cats. This is an amazingly obscure reference even for me. If you want to know the significance of this comment you can read about when Kerry went south. But I must warn you, unless you really want to know I suggest you not read it. You will cry.
Personally, I have a rather tough time with the notion that having a ‘life partner’ is somehow a necessity. The existent of a lone individual out there in the wide wild world that is predestined to be your match may make for a good movie plot, but it gives me the creeping heebie jeebies. Larger forces at work manipulating my life toward some carefully crafted plot just fuels my sense of paranoia rather than giving me comfort.
Even if I did believe in soul mates, it would more likely be in the style proposed by Dr. Brian Weiss in his book “Many Lives Many Mastersâ€. A classically educated psychotherapist, Weiss was using regression hypnotisms as a treatment method for one of his patients. Telling his patient “return in your mind to the first moment that this problem developed for you†and expecting to have the patient recall some childhood trauma, he instead got a recount of an incident from several thousand years past in a previous life.
Further investigation led him to find that he himself had been present in this previous life and was a major influence to that patient back in that time. New age philosophy stops at this stage and claims simply that these two people were destined to be together as they had been together in previous lives. But full investigation by Weiss let him to conclude that souls didn’t just travel from lifetime to lifetime in pairs. Rather they traveled in clusters. A grouping of up to a dozen individuals would always come back together as a group. It is ’soul mates’ with an ’s’ at the end. Not ’soul mate’.
The relationships were not always good ones either. A child abused by a parent would come back in the next life as a battered wife being hit by her husband would come back in the next life as a solder tortured and killed by an enemy solder. Needless to say, finding your “soul mates†in that sort of setup would hardly bring peace and comfort to your life.
But even this expanded notion of soul mates still rubs me the wrong way. It still assumes that the basic makeup of a person is incomplete and that life will always be lacking unless incorporating these other souls. To me that sounds a lot more like codependency. If someone actually honestly believes that their basic nature is flawed and the only way to be ‘cured’ or ‘fixed’ of this flaw is through another person, then its unlikely the person will ever be happy no matter what person they try and use for a ‘cure’.
I realy love the spunky attitude presented by the website http://www.heartless-bitches.com/ What others may condone as arrogance, I admire as self reliance.
Maybe cats have it right in the first place. You never see a cat that has unquestioned dedication toward a single individual. Cats are way too independent for that kind of nonsense. You would never catch a cat whining and lamenting that if only they could find their one true owner that then life would be complete and they could finally achieve happiness. A cat can get by just fine on its own.
There is a situation in pathology known as “postmortem predation”. When an elderly person dies with nobody else in the house but a pet, the time of death can be estimated by how much of the dead body has been eaten by the pet. Ghastly, I know. But thats how things work. The thing is, however, that you cant just go by strict percentage. An adjustment needs to be made for how long the pet will wait until it resorts to this. For a dog, this is between a week to ten days. For a cat this is about 36 hours.
Cats have no loyalty.
This isn’t to say a cat will never form any kind of bond with a human. They will still occasionally let someone scratch their ears. On one hand this is not wanton self pleasure. A cat will not just go out and let anyone scratch its ears just cause it feels good. You gotta be someone rather close socially. On the other hand this is not ’soul mates’ either. A cat will not seek out its one true ear scratcher at the exclusion of all others. If nobody is around to scratch its ears, it just goes on with life on its own independently.
A cat will never have one true ear scratcher. I will never have a girlfriend.
I cherish my independence a lot. Part of it may come from having grown up in a small town. To everyone I knew I was never ‘Jack’ but always ‘the youngest El Frink kid’. My high school never bothers to hold a class reunion. Those who still live in the town always see each other every day anyway. Those who don’t still live in the town are thankful to have escaped and would never go back anyway. Individuality is a much treasured thing to those who have escaped from small town life.
Dying sad and alone in a rundown shack behind a grocery store with about 20 cats really wouldn’t be as pathetic as it sounds. At least I would be going out surrounded by those who share my values.