Mahnmut

Марина's dating profile showed a gorgeous, exotic, and fashionable woman, with a practical side that I enjoyed. Well-fitted dresses and Eastern-European features, bright eyes and curled blond hair. We began a very introspective run of messages, surprising us both with the level of intimate detail about our current states of mind and romantic situations.

"I'm trying something new this time around," she wrote. "All of my relationships have been with really strong, narcissistic men. There was no room for me to exist, and they weren't interested in me beyond my ability to feed their narcissism. The entire time I've been alienated from myself. I've been doing a lot of emotional work this spring, and it's allowed me to start existing on my own. To take up space, to need space. I've been really loving it."

"That's fantastic!" I wrote. "Time being single has been really enlightening for me too. I don't think I realized just how little there was in my life, until this year."

"Oh? How much of your life have you been single?"

I thought for a little bit. "Since about the age of 18 when I started dating, I don't think I've been single for more than four months in one go."

"Wow. Are you unhappy when you're single?"

I was enjoying her blunt but pithy questions. "Well, I'm content to be alone, for what that's worth. Some things are great enjoyed alone. Solo bike trips, vacations, a good book, a walk in the woods. But I've usually had those while also in a relationship. And historically, it's just been really easy to get into one. I never stay single very long. I used to worry that was some kind of personality defect. But how can there be a right and wrong answer for a 'would you rather' sort of question like that?"

"Interesting," she wrote. "My dream is to get to a point where I am able to continue existing in a relationship with another strong, independently-existing person."

I asked her to take one of the toy personality quizzes on the dating site, and one of the keywords it spat out was "brutal", which according to the description meant that she was a blunt speaker with a tendency to end relationships suddenly. She gamely took that on:

"Well, I'm hungover today, because I was just on a date yesterday. It was the last one with this guy. I ended it for sure, and it felt brutal, but maybe that quiz means something else. Here's what happened, and you can tell me."

"Okay," I wrote. "Go for it."

"We met two weeks ago, and started sleeping together pretty much immediately. I needed sex, he's hot, it just all worked out, right? We really didn't have much in common. He's four years younger than me, and kind of ... untrained. But good in bed, so I was happy. Except just a few days into it, I was finding myself in a full-blown relationship with someone who had no basic manners. Like, he couldn't show up on time. We had a discussion about how important it is to me, and he seemed to get it, but then it happened again right after. He also turned out to be incredibly stubborn."

"Uh oh."

"So, this past week, we'd been having more and more fights, while also having sex constantly. And all the fights started the same way: With me criticizing him, for this or that, and him getting angry, and so on. Last night was basically the grand finale of that. But here's what I can't figure out: The way I was acting. Why did I care so much? So he's late; so that won't change; so what? Why did I feel like I had a right to criticize him that much? And why were these things irritating me so badly in the first place? I suspected it had to do with the sex, but it didn't really fall into place for me."

"Huh," I wrote. "That sounds like it got really intense really fast."

"It did. I'm incapable of having non-intense relationships. They start, they grow totally out of proportion in a matter of days, and then I start flailing looking for a way out."

It was a terrifying pattern. It was good that she recognized it as a pattern, but given that it had repeated just 24 hours ago, she didn't have much distance from it. I very much admired her candor though: She was genuinely trying to understand without glossing over her faults. I had to know more.

"How or why, you suppose, do you keep ending up with narcissists?" I asked.

"I think I know that, actually. Usually I'm attracted to people that I admire. For me that means people who are important or powerful, or have done a lot of stuff. People who are driven. But people who get these long lists of accomplishments, why do they pursue them? Because they want to feel important, powerful, etc. So I fall for people who are obsessed with themselves. People who care, people who are kind, people who collaborate and help others... I've been ignoring them. I mean, it's worse than that. They don't turn me on. The guy who's strong and super-confident, he's the one I fall for. Over and over."

"Wow," I wrote. "What's impressive to me right now is that you can be so aware of it. I think for most people, when that's the pattern, they have no idea what's happening."

"So what's your pattern?" she asked. "Why do you keep going from relationship to relationship without a break?"

I pondered that. "Well, when I started dating I was also just starting college. At that point there were just too many people to choose from. Any time I wasn't claimed by relationship status, someone new was right there in front of me. But what is a relationship in that context anyway? Is it a relationship if it only lasts a month? And when you're 21 years old and want sex all the time - literally every hour of the day if you can get it - the only real dividing line between dating and a relationship might just be that you're too busy having sex with one person to have sex with anyone else. I don't know; I'm being kind of flippant about my college years really. I took it more seriously than that. But it was six or seven years of my life that was constant romantic experience, and I focused on that a lot. Way more than my grades."

"And after college?"

"Well, there was a year where I did some dating, not very serious, and then I met someone and we were together for about eight years. That led me all the way up to about two years ago, where it's been an avalanche of dating again. I think a lot of it has been re-calibrating myself. Figuring out what works for me, and what I want, after having a specific thing for almost a decade. I guess that means there's no pattern."

"Okay, but, why not take a break?"

"I ... don't know? I mean, setting aside the obvious fact that I like sex a lot. Perhaps I'm in a new era too. The era of 'just dating' instead of 'hell-bent on starting a relationship'."

"I think we might have that in common," she wrote.

Since we got along so well "on paper", we arranged a date, halfway between her home town and mine. I was acting impetuously, eager to fill my life with new romance to offset the old. Meeting Марина felt a bit dangerous.

When we actually locked eyes for the first time, in a run-down donut shop that was conveniently placed, the first thing that struck me about her was her height. She was much shorter than I'd been imagining. The second was that she had an accent. Russian, I guessed, though I was no expert. She also had a businesslike attitude reflective perhaps of her career. These traits gave her an intimidating presence that sort of sailed past me without impact. Intimidating women just didn't intimidate me these days.

The donut shop was our meeting spot, not our lunch destination. We worked one out and began walking there with no time wasted, and as we began walking I noticed the fourth thing: Her breasts. They were enormous, and she'd dressed in clothing that was tasteful enough that you'd conclude it "just happened to" show them off, rather than being deliberately chosen to do so. I hadn't noticed them from the online pictures, and perhaps she'd been deliberately minimizing them, which I could understand.

When we sat down for sushi and began talking in earnest, a more complete picture emerged. She was a successful, exotic, well-heeled, old-fashioned, extremely conventionally attractive woman, and she knew it. She had become very used to considering herself - mind, body, and all - as a high-value prize in the competition between the sexes, and for a dozen years, she'd been pursuing and attracting the sort of men who felt they deserved her as a prize, and driving away the ones that didn't want to compete on that basis. She had been caught in this feedback loop, expecting the loop to eventually close around a dedicated, affectionate, wealthy, powerful man, a fine house in the hills, and a regular string of exotic adventures. She'd dated investment bankers, globe-skipping mountain climbers, CEOs, lawyers, and kept up with them all, mentally and athletically and - I assume - sexually as well. She had found the promised adventure and tasted the wealth, but the dedication and affection, and overall the contentment, had eluded her.

And now she sat before me, a perfectly coiffed and absurdly buxom young woman, with an enormous calculating engine in her brain, developed and tuned for clashing swords with egotistical, competitive men prone to assholery -- and she was visibly struggling to keep the engine in neutral, lest it crash through a wall and throw our dynamic into chaos: For three hours, she peppered the conversation with subtle, slightly negative judgements of my opinions and accomplishments, and seemed to be waiting for me to do the same, as though flirting was an exercise in cross-examination to make the other person admit they were the lesser being. Was this the way she was by default? Was she stuck this way now?

To put it bluntly, I was left at the end of the date feeling like I'd been sprayed by a skunk. What amount of money, curves, or admiration was worth this absolutely relentless low-grade attack? Perhaps narcissists were the only kind of people who could stand up to it.

That evening she told me she was interested in a second date, and set up another meeting in the East Bay, close to an office where she worked, but a day later I called her on the phone and told her to cancel the meeting because I realized I wasn't looking forward to interacting with her again. She pleaded with me over the phone that she was really trying to be a different person, and if I saw her again it would go differently. I told her that I was sorry, but I needed to listen to my instincts. She accepted that, and we said goodbye.

I wondered if it was the first time anyone had ever told her "no."

It had been a strange moment of clarity. I was just getting back into dating, and I didn't want to set myself up for an instant struggle. People who were powerful but unkind had nothing I needed.