E-Indeed: The Blog

I know that from my first few posts, I’ve probably come across as your typical bitter single guy who’s sick of being hurt. Or maybe atypical, since I don’t see that many bitter single guys who actually post blogs about the thoughts that go through their heads. In a way, you’d probably be right. I don’t see myself as bitter, although I can’t contest that I’m a single guy–if I wasn’t single, or a guy, I’d completely invalidate my previous posts as a lie. That’s a joke. Go ahead, laugh. You know you want to. OK, fine, jokes aren’t my strong point. Anyway, it occurs to me that anyone who reads this blog might want to know a bit more about me than the bits and pieces I reveal in my posts, just as I like to know who is behind the posts at the blogs I read.

There’s not much to say about my early life that really relates to the issues I’m talking about, so I’ll leave most of that out. The quick version is that I am an only child, was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, moved a lot while I was growing up, and went to High School in a small town in Minnesota. The other relevant points I can expand on when needed.

When I was 15, I stopped going to the church with my parents for any number of reasons. I don’t know that I had doctrinal differences with it, I think I was just bored and uninterested in religion. I never really thought about it until years later, when I was in college at USC, and realized that I related much better with the non-demoninational Christian groups on campus than I did with the Catholic groups. Of course, this really didn’t mean much until my third year, because I was very much against organized religion for my first two years. Regardless, I re-affiliated myself with Christianity my Junior year, and started the search for a church.

A year and a half later, my search reached its goal. I had left USC in frustration over the fact that I couldn’t change my major to something outside of the school of engineering, which is where I had started. I had moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, to spend time with one of my closest childhood friends, and had started school at the Art Institute of Las Vegas in their animation program. I was attending church weekly at a baptist congregation in the area, and had plans to officially join them. However, I accepted an invitation from a young co-worker of mine who was leaving on his LDS Church mission in a matter of days to sit down, have lunch, and discuss our beliefs.

I don’t honestly remember much of what he had to say, but the crux was that I should talk to another high-school aged co-worker who could give me more information. My curiosity was aroused, so I took him up on it. About two months later, I was baptized and confirmed as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I was 22 at the time, almost 23. In nine days from today, that will have been five years ago. Without a doubt, that decision has been the best one I have ever made. Of course, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been any trials.

I was raised in a very loving home, with parents who cared very deeply for each other. My father is not Catholic, but he has always supported my mother and gone to church with her. The Lord definitely had it in mind for me to be an only child, as my parents always wanted more children. It’s an interesting phenomenon growing up without siblings, especially if you move a lot. I spent many of my early days in California, where only children are not particularly uncommon, but when we moved to Minnesota I became the exception to the rule. Looking back at my life, I think most of my relationship difficulties stem from that. Children in large families have motivations that only children do not. older children, while they tend to be raised in the strictest fashion, tend during their high school years to shun their younger siblings in social situations as they try to establish their individual identities. The younger children try to emulate their elders and almost always want to be included in the social activities of their brothers or sisters, usually to the older child’s chagrin.

As an only child, I had neither older siblings to emulate, nor younger siblings to want to get away from. My main familial role models, because of the distance between us and the rest of my extended relatives (who lived mostly in California and Washington State), were my parents, who were in their fifties by the time I graduated from High School. My friends either had a tendency to not date, or if they did date, they disappeared for months at a time while they were in relationships, so I really never learned how to relate to the opposite sex until I was in college. You can contrast this experience to that of my good friends who introduced me to the Church, who all had sizable families. I remember thinking that it was very strange that they were on a date nearly every weekend, usually with a different girl. While I had always heard from my parents that I should date many different girls, the idea was completely foreign to me.

Left to myself, I had built my thoughts about how relationships should go based on what I saw on TV, and how people I knew reacted to it. This is not to say that I took TV as the authority–I thought most TV relationships were utterly ridiculous. But I did have an extremely idealistic view of how things should be, and it took me a very long time to break that. For example, they say the best relationships and marriages are those based on friendship. I took this precept, and decided that it was silly to date anyone who was not already a good friend. This has come back to haunt me repeatedly, when girls whom I have taken an interest in and built a friendship with proceed to get involved seriously with someone else, usually at almost the same time as I have decided that I want to begin a romantic relationship with them. I’ve actually reached the point where it doesn’t usually even occur to me that I like a girl romantically until I’ve known them for at least a few months, but usually it takes over a year for me to be interested, by which point, of course, I’ve been moved into the ‘just friends’ category.

Now before you take this and apply it to say “he’s just bitter,” I’m going to say that over the past two years I’ve actually turned this around.  After years of having only first dates and no more, the past three girls I’ve dated have been longer term relationships.  I’m not going to say all of them have been great, but again, it was my failings that caused this.  I either withheld intimacy because of the values I’ve adopted (as mentioned in a previous post), or gone for the more well known cuddling and kissing route, and had all manner of awkwardness as a result.  The only complaint I’ve had about the girls involved is that not one of them was interested in discussing boundaries for the relationship early on, but I realize where they are coming from.  In the end, it’s all about incompatibility, no matter how good things seemed at the time.

Before I go further on relationships, a note on my professional life is in order.  My background is in IT and programming, but I finally left USC to pursue art as a career.  I got my degree in Media Arts and Animation at the end of 2005.  I’ve slowly but surely been trying to distance myself from IT and programming work, which is very hard when people know you have the ability.  I also am currently in the process of moving to Sacramento, California, from Las Vegas.  I’m focusing on photography and film-making at the moment, using my 8 years of experience as a Wedding DJ to finance that.  I still have occasional web-design jobs that pop up, but I’m trying to limit those.

People ask me a lot lately why I am not dating.  While I have philosophical reasons in the background, my career is the other issue.  I know myself well enough to know that if I got into a relationship currently, I would drop my dreams to do what makes me money.  I also know myself well enough to know that I would very much regret that later.  While I have a lot of respect for those who find ways to follow their dreams in addition to everything else (and I know quite a few, thanks to the writers group I’m a part of), I also know that I’m not that kind of person, at least at this phase in my life.  I know that my last job, fun as it was, drained me creatively.  I can date in addition to a job, I can devote time needed to family and church, but I completely stopped writing, shooting film, taking pictures, or doing anything creative outside of work.

My ultimate goal in life is to be a filmmaker.  I want to tell stories visually, that can touch the lives of people on a scale bigger than anything I can do on a personal or job level.  I’ve made several shorts, but I need a lot more work before this could become a reality.  I know the industry well enough to know that for someone who is early in their career, it’s not a lucrative field.  I could not in good conscience start a relationship while I’m pursuing this path.  They say the struggle can forge a relationship very well, but I know that because of my skillset, I would go back into IT so I could support my family, and that would be the end of my lifelong dream. Some would say that’s part of growing up.  I’m only now, at 27, reaching the point where I realize that I’m not ready for that.

So there is a practical side to my decision not to date as well. I admit, there’s a certain amount of bitterness at past experiences and pain that’s holding me to it, but that’s not the driving force.  The primary motivator is an unwillingness to sacrifice my career goals, knowing full well that a few years down the line I’d come back to it again, and probably abandon my family in the process.  So it’s protecting myself from pain now, and protecting others from pain later.  I say this because I’ve done it repeatedly in the past, and I have yet to figure out how to balance it.

I wanted to be a filmmaker when I was little.  I then got into computers at 11, and put away the film-making thinking it to be childish.  My Sophomore year in High School, I got back into drama and abandoned computers for a time.  When I went to college, I got back into computer science because I wanted to be successful, and I was being realistic about the odds.  Then, I realized that while I was very good at IT, I couldn’t stand to not be involved in entertainment and Film.  So I left USC to pursue an Art Degree.  All the while I kept working in IT to get myself through school, and it was eating me alive.  Now I’m pursuing my art career, and am happy doing so.  But I know that I take responsibility over happiness when I see the need.  Many would argue that it’s a good thing–and yet I also know that whenever I revert back to my artistic side, it usually involves an implosion of every other aspect of my life, and forces me to start from scratch.  That is something I cannot and will not put a family through.

Down the road, when I have a certain degree of stability in my art, perhaps I’ll consider dating and marriage again.  You never know, I might have something happen that changes my perspective on things once again.  In some ways, I hope I do.  But for the most part, I’m perfectly happy just being single right now, and the idea of a relationship just throws the big old monkey-wrench of terror into the works.

Am I so wrong?