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Sep 29

How I Found True Love (and 3 Things I Learned)

Posted in Background
This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series 3 Things I've Learned

True love. It’s not just for the Princess Bride. It turns out it’s for me as well.

This came as a big surprise to me. Growing up, I’d never had much of a clue about romance, and although I had a lot of female friends (and still do), I reached the age of 30 without ever having had a girlfriend.

Why am I talking about this now? Largely because one of my readers, who’s turning 30 soon and has never had a girlfriend, emailed me for advice (or really, for encouragement – he knew what action to take already).

That reminded me that I’d never told the story here of how it is that I come to be happily married, when for most of my life I thought that was never going to happen. I think it’s a good story – and maybe it’ll be inspirational, not only if you’re long-term single but if you struggle with any elusive dream.

Meant for someone else and not for me

Let’s start at the beginning. I have a mild form of a genetic condition called Marfan’s syndrome, the main visible signs of which in my case are that I’m very thin, with a noticeably distorted back. I was always self-conscious about my appearance, plus I wasn’t comfortable with emotions. (My family are very emotionally reserved, even for New Zealanders.)

All this meant that I was shy around girls-as-girls (girls as people I was mostly fine with), and asking one out was an impossibly scary thing. I was also very nerdy and unconventional, which didn’t help. I had a strange hyaena-like laugh, deliberately dressed unfashionably, and since my intelligence was the one thing about myself that I did feel confident about, I displayed it at every opportunity. Power tip: This isn’t an endearing trait.

I didn’t have a girlfriend at school, but that was normal in a way, because nor did my two great friends. As it turned out, one of them was gay; the other was just as big a nerd as I was. Once he and I got to university, though, he got a more fashionable haircut, started to dress in jeans and satin shirts (it was the 80s), lost the horn-rimmed glasses (his sight recovered when we were in our late teens), and eventually started dating. I didn’t.

I was very religious at the time, and at least some of the time I rationalised my singleness as a “calling”. Trouble was, I didn’t actually want to be single, deep down, and that led to several years of emotional struggle and internal conflict that didn’t really need to happen.

When I needed sunshine I got rain

And then I created a couple more years of unnecessary pain for myself by falling for a fellow student who only wanted to be friends, not saying anything to her for months, and not taking “no” as her final answer (as I recall, she wasn’t as direct and unambiguous as she could have been, but still).

The two of us then joined the staff of a voluntary organisation that we’d both been involved with at university and went off to Australia to train together, living in the same house. This organisation, incidentally, had a policy that if you were on their staff and wanted to get married, your spouse also had to be on staff already or join, and you can imagine how that distorted things.

I wasn’t over her, but didn’t say anything for more months, by which time I was severely stressed by other things that were happening in my life (like training for an occupation I was completely unsuited for), and I took her second and more definite “no” very hard. I then had to continue to see her almost daily for a few more months, until I left the organisation when it clearly wasn’t going to work out.

Back home, we ended up at the same church. She started going out with one of the other guys from the course – the three of us had been good friends and hung out a lot – and they eventually got married. Still very emotionally vulnerable from severe stress breakdown, I didn’t cope with that well. (I actually turned and fled once when I saw her walking towards me.)

Round and round in little unhappy circles

So that experience overshadowed my romantic life, or lack thereof, for a few years afterwards. It didn’t help that my next serious attempt to start a relationship, with another friend, also got a “no” response. I did go out with a woman for about six months, but “go out” was all we did, and at the end she “clarified” that it had always been on the basis of being just friends – definitely not the impression I had, or the impression that the mutual friend who introduced us had had either. Either I moved too slowly and she lost interest, or her clarification was actually the truth.

There were a couple of times that women did show interest in me. One invited me to a film at the film festival – Blade Runner, which I had watched before and not enjoyed – and it took me a second after I’d said “no” to realise that she’d asked me out. After another second’s review, I decided that my answer stood, though. She was – well, to be honest, she was kind of a female me, and I didn’t find her attractive. (This was back before nerd girls were confident and sexy.)

And then there was the friend of a friend who came on so strong and so desperate that I got horribly nervous, and had to visit the bathroom four or five times during our dinner date at my favourite restaurant. We didn’t go out a second time.

And so I reached 30, having had a total of one date that both people present had definitely considered a date, and it had been – kind of a train crash.

I take action at last

Towards the end of the year I turned 30, though, two things happened that created a shift. The first was something I did. I was aware that I wasn’t good at expressing emotions, though I certainly felt them powerfully enough (my years of romantic hope and disappointment had shown me that – several of those many rejections, even some that were indirect and happened before I’d even asked, had plunged me straight into depression, no stopping, no waiting). So I went and took a community acting class. I figured that if I learned to convey emotions that I wasn’t feeling, I’d be able to translate the skill into conveying emotions I was feeling.

The week before the class finished, the second thing happened: my father died suddenly. I was able to grieve him much better and more openly – the class had done its work – and my emotions began to open up. I also – this feels a little disloyal, but it’s the truth – felt released from the pressure of his expectations, including the expectation of not expressing emotion. He was a good man, but like all of us he had his issues, and emotional expression was definitely one of them. He’d been through the Depression and World War II and had learned to cope by not talking about it.

A fortunate friendship

My father’s death was the trigger for me to get back in touch with a friend I’d made online the previous year. This was the late 90s, when the Internet was still relatively new to most people and a lot of today’s ways of connecting didn’t exist or were in their infancy. But a guy I knew slightly on an email discussion list had started a site for people to meet each other, including as “just friends” with no romantic expectations, and I’d decided, “Why not check it out? What could be the harm?”

A woman had posted there with a very interesting-sounding profile, and she was just looking for a friend, so I emailed her. I was apparently the only normal, non-creepy person who contacted her, and we started mailing back and forth, discussing books, and our personal struggles (including with singleness), and psychology, which she was studying, and everything else that came to mind. But then she started having computer issues, and we lost touch for a while.

When I emailed her about my father, I was also emailing another woman, who had contacted me about an article I had written on singleness on my now-long-gone Geocities website (remember Geocities?). I mentioned this second woman to the first woman, Erin, and she became indignant that I’d been emailing someone else (however innocently). This was my first clue.

We started swapping audio tapes in the mail (this was before MP3s or Skype, and you could only do video on CD-ROM). She has a pleasant voice, and I started to notice an attraction – and started to suspect it was mutual. Summoning up all my courage, I asked. It was mutual. YES!

It was the very early days of Internet romance, and it had a bad reputation. To the initial dismay of her fellow psychology students and her father (“How do you know he’s not an axe murderer?”), we decided it was serious. I went and met her – she lived in California – and then a few months later brought her out to New Zealand for Christmas to meet my friends and family. They approved, not that they got a vote, and we were married in February of 1999.

What I learned

I’ve passed 1500 words here, and I haven’t brought out a personal development lesson yet (which is what this blog is for, after all). So here it is.

If you want a change, make a change. Your life isn’t going to magically change by itself and suddenly work out when it never did before. Work on your confidence, your ability to listen, your ability to connect, your emotional management skills. Worst case: you’ll be a better and more interesting person and you’ll like yourself more.

Secondly, learn to take action. The reader who emailed me has an excellent plan: read some of the books he’s bought about confidence and interacting with women, and then join an online dating site and start practicing. I wasted far too much time having conversations in my head that should have happened outside my head, where I would quickly have learned what was what and had the opportunity to move on.

And finally, don’t take it all so seriously. Enjoy your life as it is now, let go of some of your emotional overinvestment in particular outcomes, and roll with the punches. If you’re working actively on improving your life, you’re taking action, and you’re able to become resilient to rejection, disappointment and loss, eventually things do improve.

Keep the questions coming, by the way. If there’s something you’d like me to write about, or write more about, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or send an email. I love to connect with my readers and write about what you want to know about.

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Aug 30

How Not to Change Your Life: Be an Expert

Posted in Techniques

This episode in our continuing series is another one that’s aimed at me as much as it is at anyone else. One of my abiding temptations is to be an “expert”, and I’ll talk more below about a couple of ways that I’ve fallen into that particular trap.

There are three kinds of education (that I can think of), and three kinds of expertise that go with them.

Just the facts, Ma’am

There’s the kind of education that fills you up with facts but doesn’t give you much to connect them together into any kind of coherent whole – all too common in schools, so let’s call it “schooling” for short.

The expert with this kind of education is the know-it-all. He (or she, but usually still he) can bore you for hours with the details of his particular passion. Think of the character of Ross in Friends.

The problem with this kind of expert is that he doesn’t understand his chosen field as a whole, and, more importantly, can’t achieve anything with the knowledge he has. He’s substituted knowing for understanding and acting. And because he never actually knows it all, he can always use “further research needed” as an excuse to avoid committing to action – so he’ll never change his life.

math professor x 4 = pure excitement
Creative Commons License photo credit: peyri

Having been a know-it-all, I can tell you how I broke out of that particular trap. I started doing things based on imperfect knowledge, and discovering more as I acted. What I learned is that you can’t figure out everything in advance – and if you think you have (see the True Believer, below), you’re likely to take that as sufficient achievement and stop without having done anything with your knowledge.

So if you think you might be a know-it-all expert, here’s the cure: Do things. Learn by doing. Discover in the course of action. And leave theory and detailed knowledge to one side for a while.

I’ve spoken before about how learning tai chi helped me to start a virtuous cycle of self-improvement. That was partly because I didn’t approach it as a know-it-all. I struggled for weeks and months to learn something that had no words, that could only be learned by doing it, by practice. It broke me out of more than one rut. I’m sure it freed up my mental energy as much as my physical energy.

True believers

Secondly,there’s the kind of education that fills you up with opinions and only gives you one way to fit them all together. We also call this “indoctrination”.

The first thing I think of in this context, because I experienced it myself as a young man, is religious instruction in an orthodox (with a small o) community. But I’ve seen it in political opinions of every shade, in conspiracy theories, in the New Age movement, in the kinds of causes that young people adopt passionately – vegetarianism, environmentalism, minimalism – and even in health and fitness fads.

Now, I’m completely in favour of passion, and of at least some versions of most of the causes and commitments I’ve just mentioned (except the conspiracy theories). But the danger of being a “True Believer” expert is that you lose all ability to listen to anyone who disagrees with you even a little.

That’s a large amount of potential wisdom consigned to the outer darkness, and almost a guarantee that you won’t change your life. After all, you’re already right about everything, so nothing needs to change.

The Greek legend of Procrustes, who strapped travelers to a bed and either stretched them to fit it or cut off parts that hung over the edge, is the best metaphor I’ve ever found for the true-believer kind of education.

I’ve been a true believer as well, and here’s my recommendation for escaping:

  • Enjoy connecting with people and things as they are, without trying to fit them into your overarching theory of everything.
  • Let go of instant judgement.
  • Suspend yourself in that space where you don’t know the answer yet or have an opinion. Learn to enjoy being there.
  • And draw back from the specifics of your particular commitment – the ways in which it’s traditionally been implemented – and contemplate the principles that lie beneath. Is there another way of living out those principles? Look around for people who are doing that, and learn from them if you can.

It’s a slow process. It took me years. But the starting point is to consider: What if I’m not right about everything? What if other people have a point?

Exploring the principles

Speaking of principles leads me on to the third kind of education.

In the third kind of education, you learn principles – not “theory of everything” principles into which everything must fit, but what’s sometimes called “heuristics”, principles of exploration.

You learn skills, practical skills that you can use when you do things in the field.

You learn to observe – not so much in order to make fine distinctions and categorise (like a know-it-all) or in order to judge and discriminate (like a true believer), but in order to understand and decide on a course of action.

Because exploration and action are the two great methods of this third kind of education. Let’s call it “training”.

Obviously, I’m more in favour of this kind of education than the others. But there are still dangers to becoming an expert this way.

A trained expert (or master practitioner) has put in a lot of practice in the field (the famous 10,000 hours), and his or her brain is now structured differently. The complex patterns that a beginner needs to perform consciously have become built into the expert’s cerebellum, which looks after unconscious use of complicated patterns like movement and speech.

That means that the expert can act without conscious thought. More often than not, this produces the right result – after all, the expert has spent years learning what does and doesn’t work. But in a genuinely new situation, the beginner may have some advantage over the expert, because the beginner approaches every situation without knowing how to handle it, and has to figure it out.

Also, as you become an expert, a layer of sophistication starts to separate you from the simple, human responses that may have been what drew you to the field in the first place. It’s a rare doctor who can simply sympathise with a sick friend, and a rare ornithologist who can take simple pleasure in watching a bird and hearing it sing without naming, categorising and cataloging it.

Zen teachers sometimes talk about having “beginner’s mind”, the kind of fresh approach to any thing or situation that sees it as itself and not an example of a phenomenon.

In order to change our lives, you and I need to approach them with beginner’s mind.

How to be a beginner

In order to be a beginner, I need to let go of being a know-it-all and acknowledge that some things can only be learned when I do them.

I need to let go of being a true believer and acknowledge that I don’t have answers for everything, that some things have to remain mysteries to me.

I need to be prepared to explore, but explore thoughtfully, letting go of being a master practitioner, approaching everything as if for the first time. Even if it looks like something I’ve seen or done before, each time is different.

Because life is untidy and chaotic and provisional, and we can’t live it as experts. If I’m being an expert, I’m not really living. I’m just playing a role.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life – which ends next week with Try for Too Much, Too Soon.

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Jul 5

How Not to Change Your Life: Idealise the Past

Posted in Techniques

Ah, the good old days. Do you remember them?

We were younger then. We were freer then. We used to have so much fun.

If only we could get back to those good old days. Even the nostalgia isn’t as good now as it used to be.

It’s my 44th birthday on Sunday, so this is a good time to talk about the past, and why you might think you want to live there.

Why the past is always greener

We make up our memories as we go along. Memory is fiction, “based on a true story” or “inspired by true events”, as Hollywood puts it.

And we’re selective about what we remember. As we get older, our memory for positive past events becomes better than for negative past events. (We remember strongly negative events in more detail, but all else being equal we’re more likely to remember the positives about the past.)

That inevitably means that the present suffers by comparison. The negatives about the past slowly drop out, as we forget that when we were young we had no money, we had no sense, we had less control over our lives, and a lot of the time life was hard and painful. We remember the good times.

Everything falls apart

One of the things I remember vividly from my time at high school was coming across this quotation in one of my history texts:

This modern age is corrupt and corrupting, bespattering men with its evil imaginations, while its filth, spreading to others, goes on increasing without end.

The reason it struck me so powerfully was that the author, Guibert of Nogent, died in 1124.

Now, in medieval times it was common to think of the past as a golden age and look back on the high civilisations of the Greeks and Romans as having been a peak that we’d since declined from, but there are still plenty of Guiberts around today.

Politicians take advantage of this, as they do of every flaw in our thinking. There’s always at least one politician around whose answer to everything is to turn the clock back 20 or 30 years – back to the “good old days”. You know, when men were men, women were women, and everyone knew the difference and respected it. There was respect in those days. And if we just went back to doing things like we did them then, those good times would return, the people who don’t look like you would keep their heads down and do as they were told, and there’d be jam for everyone. Jam, I tell you!

Jam tomorrow, and jam yesterday, but never jam today
Creative Commons License photo credit: *Zoha.N

This kind of rhetoric is designed to put you in the mindset of a child – dependent, kept safe by someone who knows more than you, relying on them to provide safety and certainty. And that’s an attractive proposition, until you realise that you’d be giving up your freedom in exchange.

The best part about the past was the future

Read some 1950s or 1960s futurism some time. It’s beautifully utopian. Here’s an article from 1968, the year after I was born, predicting what life will be like in 2008.

Automatically controlled cars take us at 250mph between domed, climate-controlled cities. Modular homes that need no maintenance can be built in a day. In these pleasant surroundings, “the housewife” (who appears to have almost nothing to do, since automated machinery takes care of all the household chores) serves meals on disposable plastic plates. (The author was pretty accurate on computers and communication technology, surprisingly, but the coming changes in the status of women and environmental issues seem to have passed under his predictive radar. My guess is that he was an engineer.)

The average workday is about 4 hours, but you need to do 2 hours of study a day (through that wonderful educational medium, television) just to keep up with the pace of change. You go on holiday to undersea resorts or space sattelites.

And, of course, heart disease has virtually been eliminated by drugs and diet. Because people are perfectly rational and would never live lifestyles that would harm them.

The best thing about the good old days is probably that we had opportunities and possibilities opening before us – in fact, we were changing. That’s where the hopeful tone of the retro-future comes from. There was a vast opportunity opening up to create the life we wanted to live – filled with leisure, enabling us to be healthy, wealthy and wise, able to do anything we could imagine.

The experience we actually had, as we went through those changes, was different. The real future turns out not to be nearly so frictionless and convenient. There are unintended consequences to our decisions (individual and collective). We end up in a web of responsibilities and obligations, and our youthful hopefulness gets trapped, buzzes for a while like a doomed fly, and then gets the juices sucked out of it and is left a hollow husk.

The old days become the good old days, when we hadn’t yet made those decisions and commitments that haven’t worked out as well for us as we hoped.

And so we idealise those times, and without realising it, orient ourselves towards trying to be those people again. It’s not only buying a sports car that marks a mid-life crisis. It’s about wanting it all – the uncommittedness and flexibility of youth as well as the connectedness, prosperity and power of middle age.

You know what scares me? I’m getting back in touch with a few people I was at university with, and some of them – by no means all – don’t seem to have changed their opinions since I caught up with them last. They seem to think that the level of insight that we had at the age of 22 was deep enough to carry them through the rest of their lives.

Or have they gone out and explored and then come back round? At twice that age, are they trying to return to that certainty, that feeling of “I may not have much ability to affect the world, but at least I’m right”? I don’t know.

What I do know is that if your best years are behind you when you’re middle-aged, you’re doing something wrong.

Change, progress and growth

Change isn’t always for the better. “Progress” for its own sake, that replaces things that are deeply valuable (like old-growth forests) with things that are superficially valuable (like consumer products), doesn’t get my vote. We have to distinguish between growth and death, between creation of new possibilities and destruction of the branch on which we sit.

Just because you’re changing doesn’t mean you’re progressing. And just because you’re progressing doesn’t mean you’re growing, either.

Action Now

So here’s an exercise for the middle-aged among us.

  1. Think back to a time when you were young, when you looked forward to possibilities and opportunities. Make it as vivid a memory as possible, using all your senses. If you were young in the 80s, like I was, for example, think about flouro clothing and those twirly patterns people wore, and the big hair, and the music with the synthesizers and guitars. Sit in that feeling of potential.
  2. Now imagine you’re packaging or bottling that feeling of potential, of excitement about the future, of opportunities for growth opening up all around you. Give it a shape and a colour.
  3. Now bring the package or bottle with you into your present life. Open it up and let it infuse you, let it integrate into your adult, capable, connected self.
  4. Look around you mentally and see the possibilities and opportunities you have now. Feel the enthusiasm and excitement about them.
  5. Now get up and do something to start making one of those possibilities into a reality – a reality that will challenge you, help you grow and develop and become a more amazing person.

This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.

Sign up below to get early notification and a discount on my forthcoming book, How Not to Change Your Life.


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