Guys who don’t have much experience with “treat em mean to keep em keen” have a very different internal and physical understanding of what “mean” means than guys who are sometimes emotionally open with harsh sentiments towards the women who are bonded to them. It’s almost an insider vs outsider thing. Nice guys want to think of themselves as nice, and bad boys see nice guys as ignorant chumps who refuse to grow up and live in the real world.
On the other hand I’ve been troubled by being not-a-nice-guy before. I broke the heart of an infatuated virgin last year, and that didn’t feel good. Last night I had a very disturbing dream. An extraordinarily attractive young woman in my dreams had been with me for a few years but was now starting to act crazy and lose her bearings in this world, due to her being jealous and losing her sense of identity and place in this world now that she was not my one and only woman.
In the dream I didn’t want to be manipulated by this woman’s dramatic show of losing her mind. She was openly flirting with other guys, in a random and reckless way. Acting as if drunk. I kept saying “who cares. I know she’s hot, but I’ve already had that body for two years anyway. Let her go crazy. I’ll find a new girl.”
This sent her into deeper insecurity and despondency.
In the dream I was ambivalent about what to do. Should I just walk away? She was being self destructive, but was that really my responsibility?
Later I looked for her where she and some random guest had checked into a sleazy little hotel room. It was empty. The hotel staff told me that she had wandered out and they rechecked her into a “special” room. Apparently the hotel had a psyche ward.
The psyche ward was hellish, and I had to crawl through a tiny labyrinth to find her, covered in a tarpaulin, naked and catatonic. I pulled the cover off. It seemed to me that I was her only hope for rescue from her own insanity – only I could pull her back with my love. She needed that to know her place in this world.
I woke up feeling very disturbed.
I knew the dream was about M, but only now after writing this out do I realize just how tortured M had been on my seeing other girls. I had deliberately made myself the center of her world, and she did in some ways lose her bearings. And even today she still looks to me as the center of her life. In a wistful and less hopeful way.
Very disturbing.
And this same dynamic happens with other girls, ALL THE TIME.
All the time.
Girls threaten suicide. Girls get profoundly hurt and deeply depressed. Girls throw gigantic and reckless drama fits. One girl literally checked herself into a psych ward after a mental breakdown precipitated by my seeing another girl. After that she let her life go drastically downhill.
In my dream I didn’t want to be the chump who let other girls drama take over my free will. I didn’t want to be a slave to any girl. I didn’t want to take responsibility for someone else’s insanity; surely everyone is responsible for their own life and their own mind. Sooner or later, I reasoned, that girl would be fine.
And yet I intuited she needed my reassurance and love to be fine now. I cared that her insulting recklessness in dating around was a form of self harm; a type of cry for help mixed with a slap in the face insult. I cared, and it hurt to see her hurt. No matter how much I valued my freedom.
The reader might not get a feel for it from my writings, but in spurts I can be a profoundly romantic guy, who connects deeply with women. We can become intensely bonded. Men and women can form pair bonds that leave imprints deep into every crevice of awareness. They become a unit, and not whole without the other. Disrupting such bonds can be literally devastating. Horribly painful – living in hell painful. I’ve felt it myself many times. And I’ve caused it many times.
And yet I stubbornly insist on not merely casual sex with many girls, but on pair bonding with many girls at the same time. I insist on it, and I do it. That’s how I actually live my life.
