Chapter Sixteen

Fucked Up

We are all fucked up in one way or another. All of us. We appeal to one person and disgust another. Our mannerisms attract one and repel another. Our smell is lilacs to one and vinegar to another. With one person, sex is never-ending lust, and with another a total turnoff (“can’t get it up” in man-speak). Didn’t you ever think or share with a friend, “I can’t figure it out. What does she see in him?”

The real hard work begins after you find someone who’s as fucked up as you or similarly fucked up. You then have to navigate the similar fuck-ups, and that is work, hard work. Couples who’ve been together for a long time will exclaim proudly, actually boast, of how they’ve navigated the other person’s fucked-up mannerisms and gained equal understanding of mutual fucked-up behavior. They endure, with satisfaction and bickering, each other’s fucked-up ways.

Now apply this to a single person in the dating menagerie. As we grow older our patience for another person’s fucked-up mannerisms gradually erodes. With each passing week you try to endure the other’s fucked-up behavior as they try to navigate yours. You ask yourself, are they more fucked up than someone else? Was that fuck-up really worth trying it for another week, a month, or a lifetime? Are their fucked-up traits tolerable for eternity? Can I change their fucked-up behavior to jell with my fucked-up behavior, or do I need to change my fucked-up behavior?

The questions repeat endlessly, but ever so slowly fade into acceptance. Eventually, you look forward to sharing your life and growing old with that other similarly fucked-up person. And so you finally become a couple repeating, adjusting, or correcting past fucked-up characteristics and behaviors. When things get too fucked up between you two, you ask the Divine for help and everything seems to be all right again. You become a loving couple as you might have once been with someone else a long short time ago.