Relationships Are Hard

Not having one can be even harder for some men

☝️Hey, audio-fan! Above is my best impression of a voice actor, reading this essay.

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How not to love

Drunk. You can tell by my closed eye.

As I whipped my car keys at Cristina, yelling at her to just go home, I was deep in a brownout somewhere between two LA beaches: Manhattan and Hermosa.

The next grainy memory was ambling South on Hermosa Avenue. I couldn’t remember why I was angry anymore, so I called someone who’d know.

“I’m angry,” I growled at Cristina.

“I know,” she whispered through tears.

“Why… am I angry?!” I demanded, as if she owed me an explanation.

Me writing this: sigh

To call this a “regrettable drunken moment” doesn’t begin to capture it. Everything about it reeks of sour mash, tobacco, and urine, all leeching out of the drunken man-boy I used to be.

Clearly, at least by this account, I’m nobody’s expert on relationshipping. And yet this is where I most often find myself in dialogue with other men, beyond the search for self-worth, talking about Connection.

Fitting, by the way. This is where we ended the last essay, the third in a series on men defining their self-worth.

Romantic or otherwise, connection is the necessary point of completion in all our self-worth endeavors, even our solo retreats. It’s what brings it all home. For many men, the greatest of these connections is the one they commit to for something like forever.

We could call this a prime connection.

This desire for it maddens and confounds us. We struggle to know what it is we truly want, and yet that doesn’t stop us from pursuing it.

In some lucky cases, its consummation—in whatever form we define that—is what finally tames all our wild horses.

It’s no wonder we wanna talk about it, even when we think we don’t, even when we feel like we’re suffocating in solitude over it. It rises up like a sickness.

That sickness drives us to want the fantasy before we truly know what we’re in for, perhaps before we’ve even felt the full force of the bug. Perhaps this is all necessary to really know connection.

Is unhealthy connection necessary?

My prime connection and me, somewhere in Central America

There are the connections we wish we had, the ones we’re trying to hold onto, and the ones we seem to be losing. In my case, when the car keys went flying, I was unknowingly leaning into the last category.

If you’d asked me earlier that day, before the drinking began, I would have sworn I was in none of them. We were good. Looking back, it’s so obvious to me from my fifties that we were two young adults living in their second round of teen angst, getting by on fortune, mutual lust, and charm.

It’s not that we didn’t invest time in trying to give our relationship depth. We just hadn’t been through the necessary trials to know what we were capable of together.

What we had was a relationship neither of us would tolerate today. At that age, unhealthy was easier, less confrontational. We also hadn’t earned something deeper yet. I think this is true for most young lovers.

Back then, we didn’t know what it meant to struggle together. Cristina was my best drinking buddy. We both loved the ocean. We had matching tattoos for god’s sake.

Obviously, we survived the flying keys event. Years later, we married. Not even two years after that, we moved to Costa Rica and really tested our mettle.

There, we faced the grift of most everything we’d saved, robbed by an early business partner. We lived several years in a state of poverty, but also made good friends. I sobered up, we watched countless sunsets flash green light as they dropped into the Pacific Ocean, and enjoyed many tropical weekend getaways. (Not bad for poverty, I know, but we were also racking up some nasty debt. That’s another essay.)

We even figured out how to run the pizzeria we’d bought. Overall, we built a mutual resilience to many unexpected challenges.

By the time we left Costa Rica, we were no longer in an unhealthy relationship. By hook, crook, and great fortune, we’d discovered what stuff we were made of. The key point is that we did all of this together.

Suffice it to say, it was so much harder to build a healthy connection.

None of this makes me a relationship expert

Fortune is not expertise

What I am… is an expert on this one relationship. I don’t have a meta-view of it. Otherwise, I’d write a step-by-step guide, publish, and get rich from the waterfall of royalties. (Yes, I’m aware this isn’t exactly how books work anymore.)

What I do have expertise in is listening and reflecting, something I’ve been doing since I was a teenager, but also in leadership roles, and more recently as a coach. This is how I end up in these conversations. I’m not mad about it either. These types of conversations energize me.

Ironically, repetitive dialogue on this subject is building a certain kind of competency in me on relationships, at least in terms of what’s not helpful. A friend of mine pointed out that the usual advice from guys like me is something like, “Hey, man. Just let it go. Work on yourself. It’ll come.”

Guilty as charged. I was one of the guys who said that to him.

The problem with this advice is that the single man feels the darkness of undesired solitude, the sting of unrequited love, and the emptiness of loveless sex. For the hopeful father, he feels opportunity slipping with every lap around the sun.

It’s so easy for me to say, “Chill. It’ll happen, man.” It’s also not helpful. One doesn’t feel seen when someone like me says shit like that.

The harsher truth is that connections of this sort aren’t easy. Like finding the right camping spot, it can take a lot of driving down the wrong road to either give up or start over. It takes loss, strife, and mettle-forging, and even then?

Nothing’s guaranteed.

For every couple that stood together against slings and arrows, many surrendered to the next battle, or the next, or the one after that.

What’s the hope in that promise? What does it sound like?

“Hey, man. I know it’s hard, but it’s gonna be harder to make something work, and it may get even harder after that. Nothing’s guaranteed, but have fun trying!”

It’s a wonder any of us even bothers.

Where does this all go?

Not drunk. Closed eye is due to nerve damage from cervical surgery in 2024

Just today—hours ago, as I write this—the news came through that the man of a couple we know just passed away after five years of dementia. His wife is young enough to find love again, if she’s interested.

First, there is the necessary grief.

After over fifty years of marriage and a long, painful decline, it’s easy to imagine that one’s motivation to set up a Tinder profile would be low. Who wants to go back to crying over thrown keys?

And yet, a couple who have spent that much time together understand tested mettle at a level most humans will never know. This isn’t fair, but it’s true.

This was a couple that faced not just the ugliness of their mutual pasts, but also the tough lessons of the world around them, and the new uglinesses they created along the way. And there are definitely new uglinesses that we create as we go.

This is not me being presumptuous. Before he fell into dementia, the man shared some of this with me. It’s the tough part of forever that young couples fantasize about, but never really consider.

At age fifty, after a year of surgeries and doctor visits dedicated to the parts of the body that start failing at this age, I know something of this already. (At least it gets worse, right?)

Cristina and I may only be partway at this point, but I’m confident it’s all worth it. I know because I see what it’s like to live in the wake of love lost, or to live with unrequited love. I saw it when my parents’ marriage collapsed, and I see variations of this with the men I know.

It may be true that it’s better to have loved and lost, but it’s also true that it’s simply better to have love now, that is, if we ever truly “have” anything.

Can’t I just have good friends?

The short answer is, of course. More power to you.

As is clear now, it’s hard to be in love, and it’s hard to be alone, but it’s not just a matter of picking your hard. At least for those seeking that prime connection, good friends will always miss the mark.

Intimate relationships are a special connection where self-worth resonates in harmonies unheard in other connections. That said, a cadre of good friends can do a lot. They can be the mahogany soundboard that reverberates all our discovered meaningfulness, reflecting back what we bring to those relationships, the lessons we’ve collected from our own lives.

For men seeking intimacy, however, there will always be some overtones lost.

For these men, more friends may only serve as more reminders of what is missing in their lives, like certain tones from a chord.

This is just my perspective

It shouldn’t shock anyone that a Substack essay is just my experience. For me, it’s important I don’t preach or advise, even though I know I do anyway from time to time.

Sorry about that.

A few years ago, Cristina also stopped drinking. Whether she’s an alcoholic or one who failed to launch, we may never know. We both come from alcoholic families, but that’s not saying much. Many people do. We are the end of the line for our family trees, both genetically and alcoholically.

The greatest outcome of this is that we’ve only grown closer since. When I first stopped drinking, I read that couples like us wouldn’t last. I was so committed to my sobriety, I had to ignore that shit. My commitment to myself, the line in the sand I drew was, even if the planet-killing asteroid is en route, I won’t drink.

I share this not as a means to claim moral high ground. I have no idea why I could want to stop drinking and stick to it when many others have failed. I have no way of knowing why Cristina was able to do the same.

What we have, which I think is a sloppy way to articulate it, is something we’ll never be able to understand. It showed up yesterday at the beach, playing beach volleyball together. Most couples can’t do this because they end up fighting.

There are no keys thrown between Cristina and me anymore. We may butt heads, but we talk about it later, calmly, and not on the sand or the street.

Here’s what I know, at least for me. The car keys event was necessary in its own little way. So was every bickering match, even the ones I was too drunk to remember. You can also add the loss of our savings in Costa Rica, the end of our party life, and the shared loss of people that we’ve known who’ve died.

It’s all been grist for the prime connection mill. It’s the same one that turns out to be the most valuable resource of reflection in both our lives. I get why someone would want this. It’s the good stuff.

We also know one more thing. It could all end before we watch another green flash sunset. It’s so trite to scream about the importance of now, but ideas are trite for a reason.

Thanks for being here.

~Damon