DoktorGlas
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User ID: 1338
Earlier this spring I met a girl on one of the many dating apps I reluctantly use. It turned out to be one of those life-changing romances you mostly only read about in novels. Most of the time I have trouble feeling comfortable around people, and yet the vibes here were totally instant. We hit it off right away and just sat by the town river cuddling and talking for several hours on our first date, and the second one went even better. I've only felt so instantly connected to and comfortable with someone once before in my dating life and that was a long time ago. After that we slept together, which I would honestly rate as one of the highlights of my life. My judgement is naturally clouded my hormones, but she really was perfect: more than I would dare hope exist.
You've already guessed what comes next. Soon after our fourth date she rejected me over the phone one evening when I was coming home from a trip (ostensibly because of my political beliefs, but you never know).
This has already been a less than stellar year for me due to job-related reasons, but losing her was devastating. I fell into a lighter depression, and I have been low, low, low since the day she left. Only the last month or so have things gotten somewhat better. I still think about her often and I still feel like something that could have been really special vanished for no good reason; but I can distract myself with other activities and sometimes feel like things are maybe okay. A lot of my moments are nevertheless even now spent listening to Townes van Zandt and thinking about death.
The ordeal has also got me thinking and reflecting a lot about my lovelife, especially since the intimacy with her was so exceptionally wonderful. I'm now in the later part of my twenties, and I have had sex a total of four times in my entire life (and that is including this encounter). This is about a couple of hundred times less than I had hoped to have by this point. If someone had told the teenage me that I was in for more or less a decade long dry spell I think I would've been horrified. But it has become this way gradually, day by day without a girlfriend and with no other willing partner, and only now when auditing the records of my life has it really hit me how badly things have gone. The aforementioned girl was younger than me, yet from the conversations we had it's clear she already had way significantly more experience than me in this field. Same thing when I compare myself with my male friends. I am obviously and painfully doing unusually poorly.
By many other metrics things are going decently well for me. At the same time I value women and sex highly, I can't help myself from doing it, and I remember looking forward to having sex when I was teenager. I have since tried my luck on dating apps and in my social circles, and despite all my attempts it now more and more looks like my younger years will soon have passed with very limited success with the opposite sex. Looking forward I am also not feeling optimistic. In particular the prospect of becoming 30+ and attracting women the same age who've already had their fun and now want someone "serious" to settle down with doesn't appeal to me. I don't want to be practical choice rather than a romantic one. I'm sure in this modern world it's terribly entitled and sexist of me to think like this, but I value youth and beauty in women, and it's something that I want to experience more in my life.
In the year that's coming I'll likely try to make some changes to my life and put myself out there, try and salvage the situation somewhat as best I can. I think history is a good predictor of the future when it comes to things like this though, and another miracle-woman like the one I opened this post with seems unlikely.
I don't know what I hope to achieve by posting this here, or what advice or encouragement I hope to hear. Still, a lot of your are cleverer than me: maybe someone here will figure out something smart to say.
DoktorGlas
9mo ago
It's possible to get away with murdering a high-ranking official even with a sloppier and more opportunistic approach; just have a clean record to avoid being identified by your DNA, wait until a reasonable opportunity presents itself and then take the shot. Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated more or less this way in the Eighties and the killer still hasn't been conclusively found, though one Christer Pettersson was put on trial (but acquitted in the Court of Appeals) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Olof_Palme
The real give-away of a nutjob amateur is indeed choosing a time, place and method of execution which only guarantees one casualty: that of the gunman.
The essay reminds me quite strongly of an old quote from the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderbergs best and most well-known work Doktor Glas:
"Ett nyfött barn är vedervärdigt. En dödsbädd gör sällan ett så ohyggligt intryck som en barnsbörd, denna förfärliga symfoni av skrik och smuts och blod."
"A newborn child is hideous. A deathbed seldom makes so terrible an impression as a childbirth, this horrific symphony of screams and filth and blood."
Pregnancy and childbirth truly are among the most hideous physical processes in existence. Everytime I watch a hospital series and a birth scene comes on, I feel the same revulsion as if they'd switched to a snuff film. It's telling that the Old Testament felt the need to explain pregnancy and childbirth as a punishment from God for an espeically egregious sin, and in a broader metaphysical sense the old story of the Apple of Knowledge and the plight of the female pelvis carries deep metaphorical truth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma
This is an existential problem which haunts me, and more so than usual lately. I see no solution – that is to say, a solution which cuts to the heart of the matter – to this, short of maybe artifical wombs followed by abolishing women as a sex. That idea has a lot of merits, and it would make the natalist position a lot more appealing if we could at least make it less of a travesty to create new people; but it is also a pipe dream which will obviously never become reality. I am at least grateful for the fact that I was born a man, and that I was thus spared the fate of being a sacrificial lamb of human reproduction.
Despite all this, it's unfortunately difficult to feel particularily sorry for women. The Female of the Species is more deadly than the Male, as the good Kipling wrote, and through their harsh sexual selection women have created what they are now complaining about (this is, again in a metaphorical sense, the aforementioned sin for which they are now all collectively being punished). Men obviously fare only a little better in the equation. The truth is, my friends, we are dumb and evil animals and for that reason we all deserve to be miserable – and so we are.
I end with another classic Doktor Glas passage:
"Jag hade alltid känt ett stort förakt för de dåliga gossar, som brukade rita fula ord på väggarna och planken. Men i den stunden var det mig som om Gud själv hade ritat något fult på den blå vårhimmeln, och jag tror egentligen att det var då jag först började undra, om det verkligen fanns någon gud."
"I had always felt great contempt for the scoundrel boys who used to draw ugly words on walls and planks. But in that moment it seemed to me as if God himself had drawn something ugly on the blue spring sky, and I think it was a that moment I began to wonder, if there really was a God."
I do not wonder. There is no God. We are alone.
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