When driving in my car, and I’m having a technical (#!#&$@) with my phone, I will pop in a CD. I have a collection of eclectic stuff… some from my old collection and some from thrift stores… some so bizarre that I swear someone has broken into my car and left them.  

So I started listening to this one disc… was one of those writable discs that has no label on it. I listened to it… and it stayed in the player… longer than the regular rotation… because it had a lot of really nice songs that took me to a sensation of a time-gone-by feeling. There’s one song in particular that made me think about (name). We did have a deep bond and I did love her dearly. Like me, she has her quirks and we didn’t fit together because our quirks were too offsetting to be solved by passion.

One evening I stopped the car… and unexpectedly the CD pops out of the player. I go to wipe it off because it looks a bit dusty and I noticed some very faint green magic marker writing on the disk. It said ‘love mix from (name) hmmm… I just started laughing… and then later threw it out the window.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

https://nyti.ms/1RAnp1X

I think the term romantic is too often viewed as a superficial expression. To me being romantic means thinking warmly about your lover and providing thoughtful gestures and expressions of your Love. The best romantic gestures are words and actions not things. It’s knowing what your lover needs emotionally and providing that before they ever articulate it. It’s a simple as thinking about the other person and how you can make them feel loved, for some people it’s a warm cup of tea or a warm touch when you’re passing by, it’s singing a song that strikes their heart, it’s warm words of encouragement, it’s a soft kiss and a little light touching of her neck, heartfelt notes that are penned by you and not by Hallmark. It’s flowers that you liberate from the neighbor’s yard under cover of darkness and small tokens that have an outsized meaning. 

It’s a warm smile that you have when you’re thinking about them when they aren’t even there.

So this phenomenon hits me every now and again and it’s happening right now. 

I came to the conclusion recently that the last thing I need right now is a romantic relationship. I need to focus on me.
Course, right after saying that, for some reason, I’m attracting women right and left. Women of substance and feminine beauty reaching out to me. I’m getting texts from past ‘potentials’… and warm stares in public places… and my dentist’s new assistant made an overt move on me that I still haven’t gotten over (yes, I’m infatuated with her and she’s warm and beautiful but too young). 
I’m fully aware that I don’t just want some warm body… I want to find a spectacular love… and I’m gonna. I just get the feeling like the universe is taunting me to see if I’m going to follow my dick or my brain. 
It’s not easy being a sensitive guy who is trying to be a good man.
No response required.

It is possible to think too much about things and sometimes you just need to take a f****** leap off a cliff. Nothing is for certain and people change… that’s the excitement and challenge of this crazy game! The mind block that I often have to overcome is the ‘paralysis by analysis’ swirl.  (aim…aim…aim…)

… just jump and the net will appear…

It should come as no surprise to me that I often appear to be invisible. For years I tried to hide myself from view by presenting a bland and quietly reserved emanation. My superpower was the ability to present myself as a translucent blob to the world. All I really wanted to do was crawl into a hole and be left alone with my books. I suppose there are a lot of reasons but not feeling worthy of love is probably the foundation of my ability to be lost to view.

As much as I shunned the spotlight, I was still always deeply hurt when not acknowledged. At times I felt like people, while scanning a crowd, would somehow magically skip over me as if there was a hiccup in their eyeballs, at precisely the right moment, that made them overlook me. 

At the same time, whenever I got some desperately needed accolade my heart would race and my eardrums would pulsate so all I could hear was a whooshing sound that overrode any positive comment that was made to me. 

My ‘life-before’ was not that I wanted to be alone… it’s that I wanted to be left alone.