30 October 2007 - Try now, we can only lose. And our love become a funeral pyre.

And now for something completely different: a Davisonian diatribe on love.
And like everything else that I have ever written, I'm deferring the first line to another writer.

I thought of that old joke: this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken." And the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much how I feel about relationships. They're totally irrational and crazy and absurd. But, I guess we keep going through it because most of us...need the eggs.
-Woody Allen

Over the past trillion years (2,500 if you listen to Kansas), God has played some cruel jokes on humanity. He filled the evil tree of knowledge with the enticing red, juicy apples as opposed to rutabegas or poison oak. He gave allegedly-celibate priests the authority to dictate our sexual mores. Then he decided to give Bo Jackson the greatest recorded athletic ability...except for a bad left hip.
But out of all, His cruelest joke has to be the fact that we, as humans, don't just want to find love...we're genetically and hormonally driven to find a mate. Our very basic DNA tells us to procreate and find someone with whom to spend time. The laws of nature compell us to embark on a path that will undeniably lead us to pain, suffering, heartbreak, near insanity, and an inevitable goodbye. And there's nothing we can do about it.
You might think it overly cynical of me to say that all love is doomed to failure; that today love is nothing but an excuse for Hallmark and See's to boost their first quarter revenue. But for a second, close your eyes. Picture everyone you've ever been attracted to. Now out of that no doubt gorgeous field, how many of them ever worked out? How many were happy departures? If you could do it over again, how many wouldn't you change?
Bingo.
Whether it be after one night in Cabo or three years shacked up, 99.9% of all relationships will fail. And if we've learned anything from Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, there's no such thing as an amicable break-up. Unless, of course, you find that elusive "one." But how many "ones" can there be out there? How many soulmates are there for each of us? And I mean real, Platonically conceived, Yuri and Lara, Tony and Maria, Rick and Ilsa, out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world-kind of soulmates...not someone you delude yourself into believing you love for the sake of simulated, artificial satisfaction.
I don't want to sound like a skeptic or a cynic about love. If anything, I'm as hopeless as the next guy (unless the next guy is Michael Bublé). But I've just come to realize that statistics are against us. If you're ever at Vegas and you have to bet on if a couple will stay together, don't take the over. And I'm not just talking about the K-Fed inflated divorce rate. I'm taking into account every one night stand, every childhood first crush, every date, every chance that two people take to stop being alone...and the majority of all of which will end in disaster.

Some say that love makes us do foolish things. Wrong. Love is definitely foolish, but it's because we're fools to even be in the relationship to begin with. Because we know that we're probably going to end up another tally mark in the L column. It's like playing the lottery or the slot machines. Only instead of giving up $1 to play, it's time, energy, money, devotion, the possibility that your dignity will end up in the garbage disposal, and the trepidation that like a thief in the night, they'll run away with your heart. Yup. Makes Cesar's Palace look like middle school casino night.

The big, clichéd enemy of relationships is (say it with me, people) "a fear of commitment." But it isn't commitment we're afraid of. We're not afraid of actually opening up to another human being. It's not because we constantly wonder if we could do better. And it's not even about settling down and salting the earth where our wild oats were once sown.
It's the undeniable fact that by "committing," we're putting ourselves in a position where failure is the silent, third party in the relationship. You've effectively loaded the remaining 5 chambers in Russian Roulette. You have two options: you can either be lonely by yourself and have no win or loss...or you can run the risk of being lonely with someone else, and understand that you've failed. You're jumping off a bridge with no bungy cord. And the odds of surviving the fall are probably better than finding true love.

But there's a new breed of love that I've encountered that defies every logical convention I have just enumerated, and that is the study abroad romance: the true long distance relationship.
It's a 5 month long one night stand. No commitment. No anniversary gifts. But plenty of closure.
And I suppose that's why these study abroad romances have flourished amongst my American friends in Auckland (with the notable exception of YT). They have the staying power of a henna tattoo and probably nothing profound is going to emanate...but there is an exit strategy in sight.
It's because they know that no matter how serious they get, nothing's going to last longer than four months (or one month in the case of that one chick I know who recently decided that her long distance boyfriend back home didn't work for her and went on the warpath as though the government declared a semen embargo and she has to stockpile for Y2K).
And that's why it works. That's what all of our failed romances lack: closure.

Yet when you get back from abroad, the real world hits you with its continuous stretches of time where "Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends." The real world where the odds are one in 6 billion against you that you'll end up happily ever after with the Nat King Cole soundtrack and dramatic fade out at your first kiss.

So where the hell am I going with this? Am I saying that love is pointless? Am I saying that there's no rhyme or reason why we should keep trying? Am I saying that in the face of inevitable disappointment we should logically just stop driving down the heartbreak expressway?
Exactly.

And that's why we play the game. Because on any given Saturday night, you just might find your other half.


So as always, I remain off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush.
MGD

PostScript: Consider this a rough draft that I wrote down in about thirty minutes. With a little work, this jumbled, nihilistic yet eventually hopeful amalgamation could actually become a decent piece...and hopefully one that doesn't simply retread Annie Hall. Stay tuned, my droogs.