A Few Good Men

A few weeks ago, I had come to a point in my frustration where I was literally hopping up and down in my kitchen. I have found that periodically thrashing and flailing in the safety of my own apartment can release negative energy, but this particular time, it wasn’t releasing nearly enough. I stopped hopping for a moment and fumed at my cabinets in silence.

I knew exactly what I needed.

I needed a man.

(Now ain’t that just a mouthful?)

I had, in the previous few weeks, wound myself into a veritable tizzy over a particularly good-looking guy at my gym. The hysterical tone of my thinking surprised me a little—I hadn’t gotten this worked up in a good, long while. In fact, I had sort of been hoping I’d outgrown it. Alas for dashed hopes.

Three days a week, while quietly doing my sets at the gym, my brain would be shrieking varying certainties at me: that he was totally checking me out; that there was no way in hell he was checking me out; that we were already dating and he just didn’t know it; and that it is vastly unfortunate that most therapists take the entire month of August off. In retrospect, I realize that my unusually high-strung reaction to this man may have been linked to my impending graduate school exams. Instead of freaking out about something with relatively high stakes, I would funnel my energies into an increasingly unwieldy crush. (Transference, anyone?)

On the afternoon of my hopping episode, the crush had reached fever-pitch, and I knew instinctively that I needed male intervention immediately.

Historically, my luck in romance has been hit or miss, mostly miss. My personality exists at the intersection of neurotic and assertive, so I guess it’s not entirely surprising that they haven’t exactly been lining up. Most of the guys I’ve dated seemed to have liked me against their better judgment; as if they couldn’t quite resist this maelstrom of bright affection and attention but eventually they’d come to their senses and realize I wasn’t worth the trouble. Whether or not this guy at the gym fell into this pattern was irrelevant, since up to that point, our entire interaction had consisted of spotty eye contact and near psychosis on my part, to which I was hoping he was oblivious.

Fortunately for me, a brilliant ray of logic had managed to break through the chaos in my kitchen, and I instantly knew that I needed a man. However, I didn’t need just any man: I needed one of my men.

In a fairly predictable phenomenon, where my luck with men romantically is crap, my luck with men platonically is quite unmatched.

It can’t really be stated any other way: I simply have the best men in the world as my friends. This is one of those unusual ironies that I really can live with: that I find myself surrounded by the most magnificent, good-looking, charming, intelligent, kind-hearted, patient men that humanity has to offer, and I will never be romantically involved with a single one of them.

Water, water everywhere—and not a man to date!

So often I find myself worrying, writing, fretting, and fuming over the state of my romantic affairs that I do not pay proper tribute to the men in my life—the ones who get me through any participle I may be able to throw at them and somehow still love me at the end of the day.

And so, I write an open love letter of a platonic nature, to the superlative men that I love:

...

Jeff: the best brother.

Jeff may or may not have known exactly what he was getting himself into by marrying into our family, because in addition to the incomparable love of his life (my sister), he also got a very enthusiastic little sister (myself). I have to admit that when he and my sister announced their engagement, my happiness for them was shamefully rivaled by my diabolical, personal joy that I would get the big brother I had always wanted. He’s patient, thoughtful, and always answers my texts. Obviously, it is most important that he makes my sister deliriously happy (which he does), but he’s also a wonderful brother. We didn’t even have to go through a mutually injurious adolescence to cement the bond.

Ian: the best date in the universe.

Ian crossed five state lines by three modes of transit to accompany me to my sister’s wedding to the aforementioned Jeff. Looking back, I think that I may not have even let the poor man eat his whole dinner, because I kept hauling him off to the dance floor (in addition to being polite and charming, he’s also the best dancer I’ve ever met). Ian is entirely composed of grace and ease, and as if that weren’t enough, he always smells good.

Jeremy: the most understatedly wise.

It was Jeremy I called on that particular, hopping day in my kitchen. I’ve known him since he was a runty, wickedly smart blonde kid with entirely too much attitude. I now know him as a tall, wickedly smart, gorgeous blonde man with just enough attitude to be the most charming breed of annoying. We’ve been friends for over a decade, and as a result, he was able to glean most of the pertinent details of my problem as I hollered at him on the phone, taking my own frustration out on his eardrums.

I eventually wound myself down, saying in conclusion: “Jesus, Jeremy, it’s like I’m living in a movie in my head.”

To which he replied, “Yeah, but hon, you’ve been doing that for years.”

There was something about the way he said it that made me want to break down in grateful tears. What I perceived as a character flaw of some sort, he perceived as a characteristic quirk. It is an incredible thing to have someone know you for so long, through so many of your incarnations, that he can easily name the things that are truest about you. In that conversation he also had another truly winning moment: we had fallen back into normal conversation and I was telling him about my most recent ex, specifically an incident in which the unfortunate man had made a sexist remark about me in my presence.

In the shorthand of our long friendship, Jeremy was somehow able to condense his disapproval of the remark and his anticipation of my reaction in one sentence: “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a minute to chuckle.” And he did.

Brendan: the truest soul mate.

When I was a junior in college, I had the most enormous friend-crush imaginable on a senior named Brendan. For lack of more adept descriptors, he was simply the coolest person I had ever met, and I wanted desperately to be his friend. He became aware of this fact somehow on my birthday, and promptly friended me on facebook. It was a running joke that his first birthday present to me was actively, electronically asking to be my friend. I was, of course, thrilled.

I have never met anyone whose deepest, nerdiest, and truest passions run so closely to my own—from devotion to early nineties movies like Clueless and Pretty Woman, to utter adoration of opera, to insatiable appetite for Crab Rangoon and Bourbon cocktails.

He made me dinner in ninety degree heat with no air conditioning on the day of my big job interview. He wrote me a postcard from Vicenza: addressed to Betty, signed Al. He looks like one of those impossibly stylish Italian movie-stars from the 1950’s, while somehow maintaining the appearance that he could chop down a tree on short notice if you needed him to.

It's times like this when a judicious swoon really is in order.

Chris: the best beloved.

My cousin Chris and I hated each other when we were kids. Little did we know at the time that our grandfather was constantly playing us against each other, talking exclusively about the excellence of the one in the presence of the other. When we were teenagers, though, we managed to put the pieces together, and when I looked more closely, I found a very wonderful person in the place of my previously loathed twerp of a cousin. Around the time we were getting ready to leave for college, he glanced over at me while we were doing dishes and commented casually, “You know, I’m really glad we stopped hating each other. I think you're great.”

Chris is one of those people of whose love you know that you are definitely unworthy, but you are so damn grateful for it that it all works out. Here is a man who flew half way across the country to pick up a moving van and drive it across the other half of the country to move me into my new apartment. That weekend, he would occasionally come and stand next to me, leaning his head over to rest on top of mine. This works because he’s about a foot taller than I am.

He has the most unpretentious and generous heart I have ever encountered, and by some miracle, I get to be related to him by blood and friendship.

Cal: quite simply, the best friend.

There is a pantheon in my life of men who will always come first (many are listed here), and the holy trinity which crowns this magnificent assembly consists of my father, my grandfather, and my best friend, all of whom share remarkably sarcastic tendencies and an uncannily similar expression of smugness when they’ve won an argument.

It seems strange and redundant for me to describe Cal’s importance in my life, as it would be to describe an essential organ.

Why do you value your lungs? Because I need them to breathe.

Why do you value Cal? Same answer.

Of course I value him for his innumerable good qualities—brains, wit, sarcasm, perceptiveness, understatement, dry laugh, patented zinger abilities… and the list goes on, but the list still feels inadequate to express how his entire independent whole makes me whole.

He and I have joked since the early days of our friendship (when both of us thought leather bracelets were the very height of coolness) that we share a brain; that though we were born from two entirely separate sets of parents, we managed to come out as twins.

Cal is the one who keeps me honest, in the way that only one who knows the geography of both your head and your heart can. Not infrequently do I want to kill him, which is only fitting for one I love so much, but ours is a friendship of implicit faith that he will never give me more than I can take, and that I will never go so far off the deep end that he won’t be able to find me.

...

I’ve come to the point in my life, which may indeed be a phase or may in fact be a revelation, where I am no longer sure that there is a life-long romantic partner out there for me. I’m sorting through cultural paradigms, trying to figure out what I actually want and what I think I can get, and as a result, a lot of surprising things have come into question, including the existence of The One. What are the things that I know? I know that the reality I live in is more authentic, and in the end more valuable, than a more streamlined, pleasant one I create in my mind. I know that miracles happen, but that I should by no means depend on them (this includes the advent of a permanent, romantic male lead). And I know, above all, the value of the good people I have in my life.

It’s too early to even think about “ending up,” though I often do. But really? If, in the course of my relations with the opposite sex, I end up with a life full of good men, even though none of them is a life partner, I hope I’ll keep in mind that such a life should be no cause for complaint.