A guy I just met a week ago told me yesterday that he’s active in AA and has been sober for many years. He’s been divorced a long time and began telling me about his dating struggles. He said he recently asked his sponsor if he’d ever find someone and if he did, would she be beautiful. He said his sponsor told him that he would find someone but that the woman would only be as beautiful as he deserved.
This struck me as wrong-headed advice and for a moment I hesitated on whether or not to say so. But since he was going out on a limb a bit with me, I thought I’d go out on a limb a bit, too.
I told him that I thought if he did find someone, he’d attract a woman who was about as beautiful as he was handsome, and that hoping for anything more than that was just an ego orgasm — a false belief that having arm candy will somehow make him happy, heading down the path that Donald Trump or any other number of aging celebrity geezers have trod. “Stinkin’ thinkin'” I said, using one of AA’s helpful mantras.
I asked him if he’d used on-line dating services and he said he hadn’t, that he’d considered it but that it seemed desperate — that his sponsor told him that serendipitous meetings are the way to go. Hence, he’s joined various clubs and groups hoping to meet someone.
I said I knew many people in town who’d found their partners through on-line dating services, that I thought it was a more straightforward, honest way to meet someone rather than joining a group pretending to be interested in the activity but really on the prowl.
I paused, thinking, “What the hell do I know about all this, having been married for 30 years?” But then I figured, I know a minor version of this ego orgasm all too well. It doesn’t necessarily go away even though I’m happily married. I still succumb occasionally to trying to make smiling eye contact with attractive women strangers and if they smile back, I have a little ego orgasm — mental arm candy. I’m making a little progress, though. Half the time now, I’m able to catch myself afterwards with an “Ahh, there I go again,” a gentle whack, smiling at myself just as Eckhart Tolle predicted:
One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it. – Eckhart Tolle