I’ve always led a lonely existence. Not directly by choice, of course – though you might have a point if you said it was indirectly by choice.
Around the time my partnership with Genevieve took its final breath, I discovered the Myers-Briggs personality profile – and I know that such profiles aren’t absolutely accurate and can only take you so far. But when I took the test and found out I was an INTJ type personality, and read about what that meant and the writings of other INTJ’s, I was flabbergasted.
That was me.
INTJ’s are one of the rarer types, at only one to two percent of the population. We are described as analytical and decisive, and supremely confident in what we have mastered. The type also partakes of both idealism and cynicism: idealistic about what is possible, but cynical about what people usually do.
Social authority and traditions are pointless to the cerebral INTJ’s, since we see everything as open to investigation and re-appraisal as needed, nothing sacred. Social conventions particularly often get ignored by this type, we value logic and reason above all – not that we don’t have passion and empathy, we simply see reason as the best or only tool to accomplish the goals our emotions prioritize.
Long story short, INTJ’s are introverted iconoclasts, frequently spending most of their time alone, and quite happy to do so.
In that, I was very different from most INTJ’s. I spent much time in isolation, not due to preference, but as punishment I felt for daring to embrace independence, reason, and reality.
Having grown up rejecting both outside influence on shaping me and cultural pressures to conform, I instead built who I came to be largely intentionally, a culture of one.
Which meant that I was part of no other cultural ingroup. Which meant isolation.
That could have worked out fine, except unlike many INTJ’s, I was not happy alone.
I didn’t understand why that might be until my 49th year. My mother, like most of my siblings, lived not far away, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to visit her, sometimes to lunch between IT jobs, sometimes as an IT job – fixing her tech.
She had me when she was quite young – 17 or 18 when I was born I, I think – back in the late 60’s. And what culture had told her was that when you have a male infant, it’s important to not hold him too much or show too much affection in those early formative months and years – so that he can grow up to be strong and independent.
You, dear reader, can imagine how that played out in forming my personality and needs.
My mother of course sees the error in that approach now. It torments her when she thinks of how that affected my life – so I try to not bring it up. Everyone makes mistakes, all we can ask of good people is to own theirs, and she has. There is no reason for her to suffer further.
Nevertheless, my crushing loneliness made perfect sense to me in the context of that upbringing.
In fact, the year before everything changed was the first time in my life I was truly engaged with and grappling my deeper emotional needs. And I discovered I needed to be not alone in two specific ways.
My intellectual side was unfulfilled merely coming up with plans and ideas and understandings – to truly mean something I had to share them with someone who appreciated what I had done.
But even worse, the only thing which really kept loneliness at bay is the experience of touch with someone I’m in love with.
I don’t mean sex, not at all. I mean holding hands. I mean being physically close to each other in public. I mean embracing and kissing. I mean cuddling on the couch while conversing or watching TV.
I mean emotional intimacy expressed through touch.
You are permitted to laugh, given that it’s the Arbiter revealing this. It’s tragic, of course. The juxtaposition is also funny.
Anyways, as part of my Maxx Grey 2.0 campaign three-quarters through my 49th year (nine months before the meteorites), I tried online dating and signed up with fourteen apps and websites – when I do something, I do give it my all!
The first pass was a pretty severe disaster – few prospects even bothered to respond to my inquiries. I met only three people.
One, a woman named Claire, had energy that felt like it complemented mine – but then told me her life was too busy after all to get to know anyone else at that point – perhaps in a few months we could try again.
Another, Denise, I fell hard for. A sweet, quiet, and petite woman, I adored everything about her from her mind, to her soul, to her form. On two separate dates I had her in my arms, and those were the best two days of my whole damn life to that point.
And then it ended when she said I didn’t have enough ambition, she wanted someone who was driven to make more of themselves than I was.
That was painful.
But who was I to tell her she was wrong? Although I was absolutely certain that if she did give us a shot we would both be astronomically happy. But she did not agree, so that was that – although we did stay good friends – and I continued to have strong feelings for her, which she knew and even appreciated.
The third woman, Karen, I had a fabulous first date with, but it was not meant to be. The turbulence she brought (or maybe that we created together) imploded our nascent relationship in short order.
Sometimes it’s hard to know whether having certain knowledge is worth the suffering it brings. Knowing how it felt to have Denise in my arms was like that.
Now I knew exactly what I needed – but now I also knew exactly what I had been without for all my life, and continued to lack, for the foreseeable future.
There were days, and not just a few, when thoughts of despair and worse seemed to fill my world, but I tried to get on with everything, tried to believe that some amount of hope for the future still made sense. Tried to gear up for a second pass at the online dating world.
And that was when a space rock landed on me and changed everything.