500th post (or: math continues to be my nemesis)

I scooped the butter in the pan and turned on the heat.  The Roommate was at the ward’s Family Home Evening and I was making pasta with white sauce and a side of sautéed green beans.  After the butter melted, I tossed in the flour and started stirring.  When the mixture’s consistency smoothed, I poured in the milk and continued stirring.

I often cooked when I had a free night.  I wasn’t very good, the food often ended up rather bland, but I enjoyed it.  As I stirred, I thought about one day cooking for other people, but the thought didn’t settle anywhere and floated out of my mind as easily as it had entered it.  It’d been over a month since my most recent breakup and I was starting to settle back into my single life.  It was getting easier and easier to switch back into seeing my future as a single person and I wondered if one day I wouldn’t be able to switch into thinking about the future and having someone else be there as well.

As I stirred, I stretched my other arm to the sink, pan in hand.  I flipped on the faucet with the pan and filled it up, mostly to see if I could.  I turned off the water and placed the pan on one of the stove’s other eyes.

Even though the thought that I might get to the point later in life where I had lived singly for long enough that I was incapable of a relationship sounded like an emo thought, I was actually unbothered.  I had learned a lot about myself in the past few years and I realized that the things I was looking for in a man were severely limiting my dating options.  In the past, I had ascribed to Spencer W. Kimball’s teaching that “it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price”.  If both of us worked hard enough at it, I could make a relationship work with any good person.  Well, after dating several good women and several good men without permanent success, something had to be wrong with the formula.  Either:

  1. The person I was dating wasn’t a good person.
    While I’ve dated people who weren’t perfect, most of them have actually been decent, caring individuals.  So this one was out.
  2. I wasn’t a good person.
    Well, I definitely had some flaws, but I didn’t classify myself as a bad person.
  3. We weren’t willing to pay the price.
    Hmm… This one is interesting.  With women, I certainly wasn’t willing to pay the price as, for me, it tended to involve me to sinking into some pretty dark places, but with the men I’ve dated, I think it certainly could be said that we worked quite hard at making the relationship work.  In the end, though, it wasn’t enough.

So what else could it have been?  True, President Kimball probably wasn’t really expecting his words to be applied to relationships between two men, but that doesn’t mean that his thoughts didn’t have value.  So if two good people who worked really hard at a relationship failed there had to be more to it, right?

And as it turns out, there was.

Later in his talk President Kimball outlined more thoughts on building a successful relationship:

First, there must be the proper approach toward marriage, which contemplates the selection of a spouse who reaches as nearly as possible the pinnacle of perfection in all the matters which are of importance to the individuals. (emphasis added)

Aha!  So, it wasn’t really any good man and good woman (or man, whatever), but the two had be perfect for each other in all the areas that were the most important.

The water was coming to a boil, so I dropped in the angel hair pasta.  I also poured some olive oil into a skillet and started to heat it up and tossed some diced Roma tomatoes, chopped parsley, spices, and shredded parmesan into the sauce.

True, I hadn’t dated tons, but I had dated enough to know the things that I was looking for, things that the guy would have to be fairly perfect in.  But running the numbers didn’t seem too promising.

The person had to be a person: ~6,000,000,000 candidates
Call me old fashioned, but I wanted to be with another human.

Yeah, he’s going to have to be a “he”: ~3,000,000,000 candidates
This was one area where perfection was a must.

He’s going to want me to be a “he”, too: ~150,000,000 candidates
I had heard estimates the the percentage of people who were gay was around 10%.  I considered that to be way too high and settled for a still-generous-sounding 5%.

Into the olive oil, I dropped the green beans and the chopped almonds that I had almost forgotten I bought when I was at the farmer’s market.  The beans were damp and started to spatter.

Mormon background: ~250,000 candidates
Okay, this number was probably high by at least 50%, but it was about 5% of the 10 million Mormons on the books (divided by two).  This didn’t account for the fact that there was more women in the church than men and didn’t account for inactive or former members, but I had to start somewhere.  Also, this was the requirement that I had the least surety about.  I liked to think I would be fine dating someone who never had any real connection with the church, but it was hard to deny that I really wanted to be with a Mormon (or former Mormon).

A guy who wanted a family: ~10,000 candidates
Big hit here.  I had met more gays who wanted to legalize gay marriage more than they wanted to get gay married (other than a nebulous “yeah, you know, someday”).  Another reason for the big number drop was the likelihood of a Mormon gay to make his family the old fashioned way.

A guy who wasn’t threatened by my participation in the Church: ~500 candidates
Things were starting to look pretty sparse here.  As much as they wanted to respect other peoples opinion, many of the gays I’d met ended up being unnerved by my continued participation in the Church, especially post-Prop 8.  It was true that my relationship with the Church had evolved over the last few years – I discovered that too much exposure to the Church caused very undesirable side-effects in me while no contact at all had unfortunate consequences of its own.  There were plenty of things I thought the Church could do better, for sure, but the Church was always going to play some role in my life and anyone I dated was going to have to be okay with that.

I pulled the beans off the heat and sprinkled it with grated parmesan cheese.  I stirred the sauce some more as it sat warming on the low burner.  A large drop sloshed out and splattered on the floor.  I was wondering if I was going to make it through the meal without making a mess.  Nope.

Reasonably attractive: ~150 candidates
I wasn’t overly picky when it came to a guy’s appearance.  I was pretty thin, so I was self-conscious around guys who were much bigger than me, plus someone around my age, plus or minus five years or so, but what made a guy really attractive was common interests and personality, which brought me to:

A guy with whom I shared similar interests and who had a good personality: ~0.75 candidates
So out there was a cute, funny guy who was a little nerdy, raised Mormon, wanting to eventually start a family and was, apparently, about 4 foot tall.  Given the distribution of the world’s population, though, I’d probably have to learn Korean or something.

Dealbreaker.

I put some of the pasta on my place and poured the sauce over it.  The parmesan was melted over the green beans and the toasted almonds smelled a little like popcorn, which I decided was a success.  I scooped them up and put them next to pasta and sat at the table.  The food was blandish per usual and while I ate I opened my laptop.  The email chain that some friends started in order to arrange a viewing of Dial M for Murder devolved into a discussion of the position of a certain overly-tan Swedish male model on the hotness scale.  I contributed my opinion.  I emailed former coworkers asking what time we should meet up to eat at the new pizza place in West Midtown that was all the rage amongst the foodie-wannabes.  I read the message from Carrie that settled on Friday as the tentative day to go watch Rango.  I perused The Pioneer Woman for recipes to make with Jessica A. for the rest of our friends.  I sent a Twitter DM to the Terry’s asking what would be a good evening to spend time with them and their adorable three month-old daughter.  It was true, I likely was never going find a man with whom I’d fall madly in love, get married in one of those five states, and adopt a couple of crack-addicted Chinese girl babies, but, you know, whatever.

I could always just buy a motorcycle.

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4 Comments

  1. That’s ridiculous. How did you go from ~150 to ~0.75? I just don’t understand your math there . . .
    At any rate, I liked this post. I remember when I calculated my odds of finding someone once. I’ll admit that they are definitely better than yours, but they’re still pretty bleak — mostly because I want someone churchy, yet subversive and sort of snarky.

    I also have those moments when I think, “Well. This is my life. It’s just me.” And it may be that way for a while, and I guess I’m finally okay with that. I just wish I had good friends in close proximity to make me feel better. :/ (I know, I know. Nobody forced me to move . . .)

    Posted March 23, 2011 at 7:09 pm | Permalink
  2. ReadingWildly

    Great post, as almost always :) It’s OK if you delete my comment, since it’s none of my business, but I thought I’d take a shot. Long time reader, and trying to stay Mormon, and wondering if/how you’re personally working out (hopefully!) having family/relationship with someone of the same gender. I know I don’t think that prohibition is “true” (i.e., what God wants), but since the dudes in charge maintain that stance, and it’s required for temple worthiness, being in good standing, etc., well, do you give those parts up?

    And thanks for the additional Kimball reference. I’d never heard *that* part.

    Posted March 23, 2011 at 7:20 pm | Permalink
  3. I’ve had a similar thought process, though my numbers might be a little better than yours because I’m a little more generic.

    I only made it to the 10,000 candidates. Lost me in the “threatened by your participation in the church.” Although we did discuss that: it’s a potential point of tension but not necessarily a deal-breaker. So I might squeak into the final 150 (if I can be counted as “reasonably”). As for making it into the final .75 (your joke about being 4′ didn’t register until just now, when I was going to make a similar joke but realized you’d beat me to it long ago), I’m a nerd, but you’re right: who knows about the interests/personality compatibility. Besides, I don’t know if I could be with someone who clearly has a more engaging narrative voice than me. But I haven’t ruled out the idea of being next-door neighbors who cook together ‘n stuff. One of these days, when we live in the same half of the country…

    Posted March 24, 2011 at 2:03 am | Permalink
  4. Clint

    @Sara – You are my soulmate and I loved you at first sight. :-) Also, the math doesn’t lie.

    @RW – Obviously, there are several aspects of my goals that are going have me run up against church policy eventually, but that’s just the nature of things.

    @O-Mo – Ha, you went through the list. Adorable (in a good way). You do bring up an interesting point in that I think I’m interpreted as more hard line on the “not threatened by my church participation” point than I actually am.

    Let me try to articulate better: I don’t mind if someone has issues with the Church, even major issues (I might even agree), and I don’t even mind it being voiced and discussed. What I don’t want to deal with is personal criticism of my Church participation. So, for example:
    Okay: It drives me nuts that the church does X.
    Not okay: It drives me nuts that you go to in a church that does x.

    The second will cause me to turn my head to the side a little, furrow my brow and say “um…excuse me?” Danger Will Robinson.

    Of course, I’d much rather discuss this over dinner rather than blog comments. (I’d rather discuss other things over dinner even more.) One of these days…

    Posted March 24, 2011 at 8:01 am | Permalink