i have given up on, or aged beyond, this romantic love thing, and i have placed a moratorium on sex with other people. the whole sex/love conflagration had for me its ecstatic moments, and its decades of pain, rage, obsession. i wasn't good for the women i was with (jamie, rachael, judith, marion, from when i was 15 to 50) and they weren't good for me. i have seen it work out ok; i just haven't seen it work out ok for me. indeed, with the (possible) exception of the deaths of people i loved, it has been by far the source of the greatest pain in my life. i often mutated into an asshole that i myself despised. i was both jealous or controlling and actually betrayed, sometimes for years on end both ways round. i helped produce beautiful children, but you know romantic love is not strictly necessary for reproduction, and my reproductive years are over. anyway, at 55, i am less driven pillar-to-post by sexual desire, which was always to me necessarily connected to romantic love. (i've tried semi-casual sex over the last few years, because there were no other real possibilities, but to me it just seems wrong, not for you necessarily, but for me.) it has been a great relief to me just to give up and chill, despite the fact that i still experience a hole where the love of a good woman should, in my unreality, be. i'm gonna try fill that with asphalt.
no, this is not a plea for a date!
