At the time, I thought that the grand and cathartic process of coming to terms with my father would have the desired effect of curing me of my ineptitude with men, but it didn’t, at least not right away. Even as I was gaining momentum in the search for peace with memories of my father, I was spectacularly stuck in my dealings with men. Case in point: I had started communicating with a man online. Let’s call him Dylan. He was a musician, and he sounded smart and witty in his early email communications. I told him that I thought he seemed like just my cup of tea, renegade that he was. His response: “Why do you think I’m a renegade? I’m just a late middle-aged fat guy who has long hair and plays drums and drives a drop-top. I haven’t used my passport in three years and I’m nowhere near as out there as some of the ‘lifestyle’ pervs on CollarMe or FetLife.”
Attractive, huh? Anyone would run to send a response to that, right? Being Suzy, I did, of course. I responded immediately and then checked my email all day long waiting to hear back from this dude, because after all he was a musician and he wrote cleverly (not that you could tell from the example I gave, but I guess when you are thinking about CollarMe and FetLife, that overtakes the place where your wit would normally be exercised). The small part of my brain where a modicum of restraint, intelligence and self-care resides was asking, “What the hell is wrong with you? After all this time and all this therapy, how can you think for even a nanosecond that this is the man for you? Are you kidding? Why don’t you go out and bring home the first psychotic crack addict you see, or better yet, see if Jim of bathtub fame is back in town and give that another whirl? And maybe step it up with your therapist while you’re at it.” I came to my senses by the end of the day and gave up my daydreams about the drummer freak. (Well, I did check my email one last time before I went to bed, but that didn’t count because I was 95% committed to never speaking to or meeting Mr. FetLife, which was pretty good odds for me given that I was and probably always would be drawn to the wild side.)
I remember thinking that that was a pretty good outcome—my experiences were consistently supporting the notion that my out of control, off the wall episodes were only going to last a day and not a year, and barely make a dent in my life instead of carving away pieces of my soul. That was something I could live with. In fact, as long as they were that well contained, I actually found such episodes entertaining, like the Sunday comics. As far as I was concerned, I was out of the woods.