The company of those with contrasting personality traits provides far more entertainment than the camaraderie of clones. Some people take the same vacation every year, stay at the same place, schedule the same activities, order the same dish at the same restaurant they always visit on the trip. Some take comfort and pleasure in this. I have attended their parties and met their friends who all work in the same industry and I have listened to them carry on heated political discussions with people who share the same views, whipping each other until rabid in exasperation about the perspectives of people they would never deign to talk to.
I prefer the adventure of discovering new points of view rather than constantly reassuring my own. I would rather gather new experiences than relive a predictable pleasure of the past. Every one of my friends share a common fiber but have weaved totally different things with it and they have thrust me from my comfort zone into situations I would never have otherwise endeavored on my own.
Derek and I enjoyed a mutually educational relationship. He coerced me to try camping. I took him wine tasting. Together we watched drag races and foreign movies, ate hot dogs and lobster, and purchased khakis and cowboy boots. I gave him history lessons and he showed me how to change a fuse and through it all we hardly found grounds to argue because we never stood in the same boat to rock. We came from different worlds, and neither of us knew enough about the other world to judge. Yet we agreed on certain core points. Without this core to cling onto either of us could have easily let go, but with it, neither of us found it easy.
During this period, my friend Brenda desperately tried to save me from making what she deemed to be a lifelong mistake. Brenda had tried for years to find her Mr. Right. She had multiple online dating profiles, joined clubs to meet others who enjoyed the same activities, and engaged strangers in conversation seeking the one she would spend the rest of her life with. She would start and drop relationships with the frequency that others may change their kitchen sink sponge, always searching for the fit to her criteria. I could never tell her that she doomed herself to failure by the very act of setting her objective. If she found Mr. Right-out-of-the-box I doubted she would find happiness.
Derek was definitely Mr. Right Now, with what I felt to be an inevitable expiration date, certain as I was that at some point in time our differences would divide us. As every other one of my relationships eventually ended, I knew that this too would pass. This finality gave me the freedom to ignore where our paths diverged and continue down our common ground. But the incongruities that had eventually accumulated into the monolith that separated my other relationships stayed at bay, and it slowly occurred to me that perhaps Derek and I had more compatibility than I had thought, and maybe many of the traits that had attracted me to my other relationships had less merit.
This became more fodder for argument between Brenda and I. She asked why I should waste my time lowering my standards, and I hated to break it to her that she may be fishing for fool’s gold with all her clubs and criteria, when compatibility has less to do with the future than the past.
We all find ourselves blinded by those titillating traits that infect the brain like trends, crushes and catchy songs. These hooks catch, but without some protein at the end of the line the win dissolves into the everyday we feel shame for ever having an infatuation with. In the course of my first year with Derek, Brenda had four failed relationships. All four matched her perfect profile but all four failed on the same grounds that she had established.
Mr. Style was a model out of a magazine, superficiality at its most obvious. They liked the same clothing and home decor, they preferred the same social scene, restaurants and bars. But he had last read a book in college and preferred action over discussion, and Brenda was an avid reader and fan of long, drawn out foreign movies in which he fell asleep.
Mr. Hobby was a writer and a fan of film noir. She met him on a book forum and they spent their first date discussing the Russian masters. They attended art house cinema, author’s readings and a book convention, during which they had their first fight over the author’s intent of a novel they both had read. They met this author at the book convention and each heard him explain their version of the book during his speech. Moreover, he had signed one copy for them to share, and after this fight, the tug of war over the book began. They continued dating for a short while after this incident, but Brenda confessed, she started to get tired of talking about books all the time.
Mr. Idol had a big family network with a house on the coast and a house in the mountains and condo downtown to hang out in. He was an estate lawyer and Brenda was an appraiser and his friends were surgeons or helicopter pilots and he co-owned a resort in the Philippines with his sister and they donated half of their proceeds to the poor. Every weekend they went skiing or skydiving or wine tasting or sailing and then one day Brenda broke up with him. “I’m not in love with him,” she confessed, “I want to be him.
Mr. Agreeable lasted the longest. He let her take the lead and always assented with her judgement. They had fun together, but eventually she craved an opinion, even if it were contrary to her own.
After Mr. Agreeable, Brenda cancelled all of her dating sites and took a month or two to reassess. After too many cocktails one happy hour we found ourselves at her place at 7 PM with nothing else to do but rebuild her dating profile on a new platform. After the usual back and forth of opinion, I won her over with my value statements and she created the most pertinent profile in my opinion:
Brenda Nesbitt
I’m an early riser with goals I wake up to achieve every morning. I like my quiet time to read but do enjoy getting out after a hard days work, meeting up with friends for dinner, movies or a night on the town into the wee hours. I have a minimalist perspective, don’t like clutter or kitsch things and seek a long term relationship with someone who has their own goals, independence, and an appreciation for art, good beer and travel. If we have kids we will discuss how our appreciation for art, good beer and travel will have to change but we will cross that bridge when we come to it.