Resisting Temptation

I can resist anything, except temptation. – Oscar Wilde

The temptation has been removed, for now, but the very idea of this man is too compelling to resist.

Even if my lack of resistance has to stop at the borders of my own body, heart, mind.

I wonder, constantly, about the borders of his.

I want to meet him there.

What I Can't Have

Your problem, my baby sister told me, is that you only want what you can’t have.

This is not true. I assure you. There are plenty of things I want + can have. There are others than I want + already have. There are certainly some things I want + can’t have, but the can’t is incidental to the want.

I am sure of precious little these days, but I am sure of this: If I could have the thing that I can’t have, I would still want it.

This man – this ridiculous, captivating man – is on my mind. He should not be. He has a girlfriend. I mean, this is the worst kind of man. Forget what I’ve said about lawyers being the worst. That was all fallacy. Men with girlfriends=worst of all.

I did not know he had a girlfriend initially. And the chemistry was palpable. I could feel it; taste it. Nothing untoward happened. There was just…an intense connection, an obvious interest. Circumvented, naturally, by his admission, all right, okay, I um, have a girlfriend. And, well, while I am not sure that the relationship makes sense, and I need to figure that out, I am not trying to have an affair.

An affair? Who said anything about an affair? I am still stuck on I have a girlfriend.

That shit is tired.

So. I have ceased contact with this man. He is not the first man in this position that I’ve been attracted to. But what is there to do? I have been down that road before, and the outcome is never good. It's karmically shitty. It's bad juju. It's the wrong thing to do. Passion can always be resisted. If it's right, it will be right when it is right. And anything but a full-on contact embargo will lead to trouble, by the barrel. So I'm checking my own girl. Staying far afield of him is the right thing, it is the true thing, the honest thing. It is the only thing to do, really, even if it's not what I want.

I can’t have him. And I want him.

And that shit is tired, too.

A Disclaimer, and an Overview

I am two months and nineteen days into a year of self-imposed sexual and romantic exile.

It is not going so well.

I came up with this idea several months ago, while summering in bonny Tejas, as a means of a) focusing on myself exclusively without the drama or ridiculousness inherent to dating/men/dating men, b) purging myself of a great heartbreak which occurred quite some time back but which I had not yet fully emancipated myself from, and c) engaging in a one-woman social experiment.

Now.

Some friends rolled their eyes. Insisted that while I am indeed a) histrionic enough to put such a plan into practice and b) stubborn enough to make an honest go at it, I am c) self-deluding if I think that I can avoid the charms of the many men I encounter wholesale, for an entire year.

I, of course, falsely and indeed melodramatically interpreted this line of argument as a not so subtle character indictment, as if to say, You are too great a slut to reign it in for twelve months. Stop moaning and go get yourself the HPV vaccine, cos you're gon' need it.

But putting my personal anxieties about how whorish certain of my more Mormon friends may find me, I had trouble with their premise.

I mean, I am a law student. The only men I see on a regular basis, aside from my roommate, a PhD student in the sciences with a girlfriend, and my father (um, hi, Freud was full of shit, no Electra complex here), are law students. Law students are future lawyers, and lawyers are the worst kind of men. So the idea that I am going to be so compelled by the charms of these tightasses that I fall off the sexile wagon seemed patently ridiculous. And irritating.

Not half so irritating, unfortunately, as my other subset of friends, the squealing, the overeager, theknot.com readers. This group had a decidedly different take on my dating embargo. These people, also freaks, insisted unilaterally that someone I knew did that! And she found her husband that year! You will too!

I hate to disappoint, but I am not doing this to reign myself in or to stealthily catch some man off guard and trick him into marrying me. If either of those things happen, well, who am I to judge?
I did it, and am doing it, because I am _exhausted_ and I don't know how much more I can take before I snap on some poor unassuming man who just wanted to have a cup of tea with me, because he sips his tea the wrong way.

Yes I am unhinged. Moving on.

So far, my exile has not been entirely successful. In the days and weeks since its inception I have actually gone out with several men: a foreign grad student, a domestic grad student, a lawyer, a teacher, a small business owner. I have also developed a painful physical attraction to one of the aforementioned law students I referred to as freaks above, a brilliant man with a strong voice, beautiful hands, eyes the color of the ocean, and prematurely silvering hair. I have been seriously crushing also on a man I barely know, an older man, an artist (cough, cliche, cough), with a girlfriend (choke). (A contact embargo has been issued there.) I visited my college non-boyfriend in Brooklyn, and, well, um, yeah. Also, I ran into the aforementioned heartbreaker last month, and suffered the emotional equivalent of a self-executed creampie, spending the next three weeks acting the fool, heartsick, melodramatic, tearful, and pathetic over this stain of a man. They say that relapse is a part of recovery and I think that this is decidedly the case for me, certainly with respect to that man, who was many things, not the least of all human heroin.

So the embargo is on, but it's a work in progress. And besides, a trade ban is never complete, as my uncle's longstanding stash of Havana cigars proves. And an embargo may lift, under the right conditions. And although I fancy myself highly self-sufficient, I'm a woman, not an autarky. I am prone to mistakes, and accidents and...well, other things, too. Things better left unsaid, for now. Things that do no need to be named here.