On Love as a High Art and a Sport
Dispatches from the contemplative life
I have written this and rewritten it like three times, so enjoy,
All my life I’ve hated it, like hated it. Hate, hate, hated it. When people commented on it, or my parents and family and random people sought to compliment or praise me for it, I was either embarrassed, humiliated, disgusted or repulsed. I remember when a clerk in a Ralph Lauren store told me I had a “beautiful face,” and it struck me as so brazen and crass, even though she was just being nice, besides an old lady who’s a friend of my dad’s, I scoffed with distaste. I really can’t say how many times that kind of sentiment would ruin my day and make me never want to leave my house. How many times I’ve wanted to scream WHAT at people staring at me.
But now that I work in public, and I’m somehow getting better and better looking in my late twenties, I’m coming to terms, even if I’m still not reconciled, with the fact that I am a very handsome man, if only because I cannot avoid it denying it any longer. The attention is relentless. I am told how handsome I am every day all day long even more than how smart I am. I was even called “dollface” by two different women twice in two hours at work. But it’s one thing to have the dilemma of an appearance and a strong personality at odds with a reclusive, jealously reserved disposition, it’s another matter, too, when you’re such an anxiety sufferer that you’re obsessively preoccupied now with whether you might be too good looking.
Most pretty women wonder whether they’re pretty enough. Here I am, a guy who’s good looking enough in any case, agonizing over whether I’m too good looking, and like my drinking, it’s bound to catch up with me. When I tried wearing a hat lower over my face and growing facial hair to mask my features, it perversely, definitely made me better looking. Being rude has the same effect. There’s nothing I can do, I worry, to avoid antagonizing people with my physical attractiveness.
For my readers less attractive than I, who that may piss off, I beseech you to understand it is very possible to be either a man, or a woman, who is too good looking, whose looks threaten to tyrannize his or her life. Perhaps I have some comely readers who can relate. Comment. To give a description, despite my face—since I’m not going to post any pictures not because I’m too shy, but because I’m afraid of it detracting from my writing, but suffice it to say I look like Lord Byron sort of, if he had straight hair— I have a disarmingly nice smile and an arresting gaze that I’ve seen stop women’s conversations dead in their tracks, I am comparatively huge at six foot two with broad shoulders and freakishly big hands, and I am naturally physically strong and imposing, and I have a great mane of dark blonde hair. When my mom’s friend a year ago, and a friend’s mom several months ago, both beautiful themselves, who hadn’t seen me in years each ran into me, the first thing they had to say was “you’re so handsome.” I think that’s remarkable, like what with everything else I have going on, my appearance seems to affect people the strongest.
And being stared at all the time, such that it used to make me paranoid, being bullied sometimes, mocked and teased by the other men in your life for being a “pretty boy” or a “cutie” or one guy who called me a “present,” and one friend who told me my face made him want to “sit on it,” which is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever gotten, hated and scorned by girls whose affections you didn’t reciprocate, when your sister’s friends all want to hang out with you as much as her, and your friends’ moms and your mom’s friends just behaving strangely, as in doting and fawning, when not being creepy around you, people always touching you, and people always expect more of you and disappointed when you don’t meet their exaggeratedly high expectations, just because you’re good looking, everyone is trying constantly to set you up with their friend, colleague, daughter, mother, stepmother, and grandmother practically, oh, and everybody telling you how you should be a model or an actor, the most obnoxious thing I ever get is people expecting me to smile when I’m feeling sad on command, “you look good when you smile,” a girl said, like I look good when I don’t smile too, fuck off— I can say from experience, there are diminishing returns to being excessively good looking, especially if you never asked for it, and you don’t fucking need it, with bullying managers and headwaiters and gay man and perverts of all varieties, who, for some reason, can’t keep their hands to themselves—not that I don’t like it: look of course a big part of me loves it, you would be insane or dishonest to genuinely deeply wish not to be attractive, it’s just unnecessary, and if I were less good looking it would save me a lot of stress and allow me to fade into the background as a writer, and an observer, but no I’m always the object in the foreground of all people’s attention— because you’re a writer with no interest in modeling or acting, politics, or tv; and now that I have a feeling certain jealous men resent how I’m on a first name basis with all their pretty wives in the grocery store, many of whom do hit on me, or else come onto me involuntarily frequently in front of their spouses!— it’s not unreasonable, and it is not just my neuroticism that makes me wonder whether I don’t share the fate of people who are simply too good looking for their own good. Because I’m trying to write my goddamned novel, and I don’t fucking need this!
In addition I’m not stupid. I excel at the art of flattery. And I’m sort of a riot. I mean I know why I’m such a lady killer. Or “babe magnet” as I was labelled recently. I’m not pretending not to know that. Even men who are taller and arguably handsomer, I would outcompete them in the dating market—if I had any money—being devilishly irresistibly witty, and extremely intelligent, at the risk of intimidating a lot of girls who, they’ve even told me, are afraid I’m going to think they’re stupid. Thus if you can be too good looking for your own safety, there’s also such a thing as being too intelligent, and the loneliness and despair that comes with being too smart for your own good, but I’ll save my anxiety about being a genius and whether it prefigures my eventual decline into sheer madness like Howard Hughes or somebody for another day. With Valentines Day coming up, I needed to come clean at last never having ever spoken about them to anybody until recently, about my looks, and the taboo reason I disdain to date, because when you look like me, everyone hilariously feels like you owe them an explanation. Like if you’re so beautiful, then explain yourself young man! Why? Young lady, why are you so pretty! Explain yourself! I asked a pretty girl in the store if she ever felt like people didn’t like her for being pretty last week, and she said she makes people feel very jealous and threatened, and the first thing they demand to know is whether you have a girlfriend or single.
I have always been a loner. One reason is because I am very shy and inhibited and I always assumed the girls I liked were out of my league and bound to reject me which in retrospect is false and ridiculous, somehow it never occurring to me that the hottest girls in school whom I would regularly catch checking me out couldn’t be uninterested.
But that’s how I always felt until the last few years. Another reason is because I’m so smart and like any nerd who would rather read than hang out with friends and be social, I never needed love as an introvert, any less than friends, though I developed a social impulse late in high school that did make me crave seeing friends, and I will admit now I’m actually so lonely all the time I didn’t even know how lonely I was, which is also why I have a dreadful tendency to drink very heavily, part of coping with the stress, loneliness, self-imposed pressure and isolation of being who and what I am, such as being too smart with a thousand ideas flying through my head all the time, tortured about everything, and plagued by neuroses like OCD attacks, a number of phobias including dementophobia, the chronic fear of losing your mind, what Samuel Johnson actually referred to as his “morbid melancholy,” and gnawingly guilt-ridden. Which puts me in mind of another more taboo tendency of mine than drinking which is a pathological womanizing tendency (meaning that being an “excessive drinker” but never a full blown alcoholic, according to the distinction made by Harvard Medical School, but who could become one, for now I am also a seducer but not officially a licentious womanizer)—even as an introvert who’s chronically afraid of liaisons with the wrong women. Since a one-night-stand two years ago, when it dawned on me, after a number of encounters like it, I have sought to repress the impulse out of a sense of honor or pride, and I’ve succeeded. (Because to me the only worthy life is an honorable one. A life is not measured in terms of how much money you have, or how healthy, or happy, or how long you live, but only by whether you lived for honor and possessed honorable virtues, like chivalry, courtesy, magnanimity, which does have a great deal to do with treating women with a unique courtesy that your transactions with men on the other hand, certainly do not merit. I will write about living and dying for honor and the pride and blessing of living a Quixotic existence another day.)
So far.
The drinking, on the other hand, I’ve had much less success controlling, but I go to AA now, and after a terrible bout with the whiskey bottle that lasted for about six months, I’ve been sober now for a month. I’m just glad I never gambled, because I know gambling is next, and I’ve dodged all the poker invitations from friends telling me with what I know about the human mind, I would make a great poker player. Don’t make me gamble!
However, I think all it takes is for the right girl or woman or whatever, and the right circumstances, and I’m afraid of my serial seductions spiraling out of control, and I already lean on and depend on my looks and charm to feel better when I’m sad and distract myself from myself. They say alcohol sneaks up on you. I’m sure sex does too. Every addiction doesn’t strike you as an addiction right away right? And a waitress at work told me how AA meetings are a great opportunity to get laid. Jesus I said to her “No! I already have this problem at work!”
Sometimes I’m not sure what I’m so afraid of though, considering as they, the girls and women at least as much have every right to be as worried about me as I do about them, because with a womanizing tendency if not yet a problem, it was also a revelation to discover thanks to my therapist, that I am also a seducer, which is not to say someone who manipulates women for sex. That’s different. Such a person is a “user.” As a seducer in the tradition of Ovid the Roman poet, I am more interested in getting a girl to like me even than the sexual consummation of our love. I love sex as much as the next human being, but the challenge of getting there is a lot more exciting. I can’t tell you how many numbers, for example, I’ve taken that I never texted and never called. A friend at work saw me chatting up a beautiful girl one day and he texted me it was “like watching an artist paint his masterpiece.”
As a writer and an artist, who doesn’t need romantic love, I am pathologically more interested, to quote Ovid, in the “art of love.” For a “user,” like a jock or finance bro, a girl is a means to an end, meaning sex, a date, or marriage. For me, a seducer, the conquest merely of a woman’s affections is an end in itself, whether it ends in sex, it becomes a full-blown love affair, or she eventually slaps me in the face when she discovers how much of a scoundrel I am, or not.
Seducing someone for me or what some call “the chase,” is more thrilling for me than sex, let alone dating, which I have no interest in at all. It’s not that I never get attached. I often do, but I lose interest after piquing her interest just as often. I’ve botched my fair share, but I have the makings of a master at this indeed dangerous game, my most epic seduction yet being the girl on the plane seated next to me on a forty minute plane ride from JFK to I think Binghamton, making out within fifteen minutes of meeting her, after about four or five whiskeys at the airport bar, and she wasn’t even drunk like I was. She was blonde, beautiful, her name was Brooke, she had great legs, and she was a sorority girl and a comp sci major at Colegate. I texted her not long ago and now she designs computer systems for banks in NYC. She’s also a conservative. She loves Milton Friedman, she told me. She’s not my type (I’m sure it’s no surprise to you I prefer saucy brunettes, the darker the hair, and the feistier the attitude, the better), but I miss her. I miss them all frankly.
The danger, however, is the girl falling for you or incurring the wrath of a husband or boyfriend, and I tragically appeal more to women who are already in relationships longing for freedom from the fetters of the responsibilities of married life and children, than single women, except if they’re in their 30s.
Single, frisky, and lonely women in their thirties I pick up all the time, several girls in coffee shops (some of my favorite hunting grounds as a seducer, being coffee shops, they can be a turkey shoot, not to be crude, but public places of all kinds are excellent because there’s the privacy to be intimate but the space for you and her to feel safe as strangers; there was a gorgeous woman in her 30s once who stood and stretched in front of me when I was waiting for the train to Penn station who wanted me to follow her onto the train but I locked up, she was one of those too pretty coquettish types who scare me, libraries are sublime, and public parks, like once I saw these two women from a distance and came up alongside to pass them, then one said “how are you honey?” Then I went a little further ahead and sat down on a log and pretended to be sad, then sure enough they came up and asked me if I wanted to walk on with them, just like that) another girl who was almost thirty who worked in a deli whom I did it by saying nothing to her for weeks, and now there’s a thirty-one year-old single mom I know in the store who I’m pretty sure likes me. I hope she does, because I like her too, but she also has a son, and kids love me, but I’m sort of a bad influence on them. When I was a tennis pro, I was constantly losing control and swearing in front of little kids.
The reason I’m so alluring to women in relationships, assuming you can already guess why I’m so appealing to older mature women, is because, being a driven artist with a number of character flaws, insecurities, and substance abuse issues, is because I have a disreputable appeal like a pirate, an outlaw, or a bootlegger or something. They think I will rescue them from the trap of a dissatisfying relationship, and they can redeem me from destroying myself and squandering my potential. That was how my only girlfriend fell for me. Up until the very end, she believed she could rescue me from self-oblivion. I always play the role of the scoundrel and it always works. Someone even told me that’s what she likes about me, and she calls me “snippy.” She gave me a $20 Christmas tip.
I am fascinated with how sexy simply just projecting an air or what the kids call a “vibe” of danger, reckless abandon, and self-destruction is. I recently consciously decided to play up first my trouble with drinking, and my mood and anxiety disorders, as an experiment in conversation with my female, mostly married, supermarket friends, and the effect was dramatic. When I refer to studying abroad in Ireland as “drinking abroad,” or how I used to go to class sometimes with shirts on inside out and without socks, or how because of my OCD, I’ll read one article about young people getting colon cancer and convince myself I have colon cancer, women are delighted, intrigued, and endeared. It’s almost too easy. I need to stop. But I don’t know if I can help it. It’s too much fun, and working is so boring otherwise.
The irony is grim how people who don’t know I’m a seducer think I need love. Like when I start going off about how angry at the world I am, people say “just wait Jay until you meet a nice girl.” “Wait until you fall in love.” Like wait until a “nice girl” meets me, I want to tell them. I would be better advised to steer clear of love. Because I have a habit of taking all my friends’ dates and girlfriends too, so that my only friends left are good looking seducers themselves. People used to say Jay I want you to meet so and so. You don’t. You don’t want me to meet your girlfriend or your wife. Next time that’s actually what I plan on saying. Moreover it’s interesting how some of the women I know don’t desire for me to meet their husbands. Like I was telling one of my friends how I hadn’t seen her in a while, and she was saying how she had been making her husband do the shopping, and I said “oh well you’ll have to introduce me some time.” And I remember how she looked at me smiling, like the smile said it all, like that’s not going to happen. Another employee told me later her husband would probably beat me up. He was half-joking but half-serious. It’s really unsettling. I don’t really care though. Like I alluded to, because I didn’t choose to look like this, then I’m not responsible for the consequences whatever they are.
Have a Happy Valentines Day whenever that is. I think I should stay home. Not to make you fall in love with me too, but don’t hesitate to help me! If you have any advice for managing the curse of being too good looking, or the sin of making sport out of ladies’ hearts, comment, DM, or email me at njonesburkett@gmail.com
— Jay