Just Showing Up

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
 — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut (1965)

The past few months have resulted in a slew of close friends experiencing personal tragedies of life altering variety – breakups that necessitate new digs, terrifying arguments that necessitate breakups, and coronary crushing losses that necessitate trips to see ailing or deceased family members. In each of these cases, friends turned to me. For advice, for a sounding board, for someone to listen, for a place to stay, for a trip to the airport. It's made me realize that despite the perennial state of single that most of the people I cherish exist in, we fill in the traditional roles of life partner for each other on a regular basis.
Amidst all this life mayhem it dawned on me that being the kind of person who shows up, who offers chauffer services and a comfy couch, who figures out appropriate distractions at necessary junctures are surely the qualifications I'm looking for in a life partner of the romantic variety. In holding myself to those standards, I would like to think I'll attract someone who values and lives by the same set. Sound logic, right?
Recent history is out to prove me wrong. Narcissism is a sharp-eyed, well-armored weasel who rides in on a dark and frothing bull named self-loathing. And self-loathing doesn't easily see someone else's needs, let alone cater to them. We've all seen Mean Girls...
I am regularly astounded by the realization that men who have treated me badly are clearly not the people they present to the world. I have a tendency to be attracted to the performer on stage, the person most engaged in the conversation, the kind of man who looks you in the eye unwaveringly. Too often I've seen that once you crack that charismatic shell, once you start paying a little more attention than the average flirt, you see the flicker of doubt flit across their faces. You see the fear when they realize you just might expect them to live up to their own hype.
Reading into this dichotomy a little more thoroughly, I found some alarming statistics. Mostly, studies have focused on body image and dissatisfaction with weight in females, but a few studies have compared male body dysmorphia to female body dysmorphia. A study from the Australian Psychological Society revealed that over the last 3 decades male body image dissatisfaction has more than tripled from 15% to over 45% in western societies. The authors go on to speculate that where once men had defined roles related to income ability and social status, those markers of self-worth have been somewhat eroded by the emergence of equal pay and social status for women. Consequently, the author's theory is that straight men's self-image has shifted fuel sources from their careers to their physiques. Social norms have convinced us that men are generally stronger than women, and their egos are aching to prove it now that the women around them have solidly staked their claim to advanced degrees and lucrative careers. It would be a curious study to see if there was a shift in self-perception affecting gay men over the same period. It could serve as a way to tease out if women being able to support themselves was really a culpable catalyst.
If I buy into this theory (jury's still out), I can't help but lament a society that teaches its citizens that the most attractive and important characteristics to show off to a potential partner are big muscles and a substantial pay check. I'd much rather bask in the mutual adoration of a shared partnership, where someone's concern for me and thoughtful attention wins the day (and night, obviously), and I don't get penalized for treating them with the same consideration and admiration. It seems the dating issue I run into and hear about most often is one of self-esteem. Men who have been trained from a young age to respect but still coddle women have realized that they no longer need to take care of and provide for a woman. These men have been hurt by women who had the ability to walk away when the situation was no longer satisfying. These men now don't believe that they will be appreciated beyond their facade – WOT stats, fancy car, stage presence. They are frozen in action, desperately wanting, but terrified that they might not be liked when the curtain falls and the lights come up. So they retreat, better to live to fight another day, right? And another, and another, until the fear of middle age supersedes the fear of being vulnerable or, more likely, they choose to be with someone who is not their intellectual or career equal.
I'm sure this pattern exists in equal measure going from females to males, too, and I realize I've slopped an entire gender into a single self-defeating bucket. But for me, right now, from my own myopic camera one and camera two (really, I'm super blind, guys!), this idea rings true. The closest I can come to beginning to fix such an intractable, entrenched societal problem like low self-esteem is to encourage everyone to go out of their ways to be kind to one another. Kindness is very different than being "nice". Nice can be false and flattering, aiming not to injure in the current moment; kind thinks long term and aims to be forthright and truthful in the interest of maintaining respect for and from the other person. To be more specific, don't ever ghost on someone or fail to show up. Call, text, send a carrier pigeon or a smoke signal, something, even if the news is bad. If your erstwhile romantic interest chooses to shoot the messenger, you've just freed yourself from someone who would not have been able to appreciate your perspective anyway. Showing up matters, even in a break up.