The Emotionalist

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‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine, you?’

‘I’m single again.’

‘I’m sorry, hon.’

‘Want to go on a drive tonight?’

‘Will it last longer than a night?’

… ‘Probably not.’

… ‘When will you pick me up?’

‘I’m already on my way.’

And so the cycle continues.  He has been playing it this way for years, not going more than five minutes alone, perhaps making up for lost time in his simultaneous dating of several women.  He’s committed to all of them, only not exclusively to any single one. He shows affection only to Elisabeth.  She’s not one for conversation.  The rest are an occasional trip to the cinema, a casual lay and an awkward goodbye, usually only lasting the thirty seconds it takes him to put on his trousers and walk out the door to his car to go to work.

He drives incessantly.  He has eight different places in this county alone to take a woman and treat her as if she is all that matters in his world.  And for those brief moments, he makes the particular woman just that.

He considers his biggest relational problem the fact that he cannot find a woman who fits with him.  He could never see himself spending a lifetime with any one of the women he is seeing.  He is an unusual magnet for insecure women and is very aware of this.  Yet these women represent the broadest extremes, from the most passive deadbeat to the most aggressive feminist.  He thinks he wants someone in the middle, but in his mind he’s already passed through seven of them, while at the time not knowing that they were the right ones for him.  He discovered this while passionately kissing Agnes.

He sees himself as some sort of Phil Connors.  He can work his routine ten times without a repeat.  He can sharpen it up and try new things the next time around.  He knows that he is failing at life, but has such low expectations for himself that his conscience is expiring.

He is the product of seventeen years of incessant emotional manipulation, and all forms of abuse.  He has no trust for the government as a result of the numerous cries for help, an extremely brief investigation, followed by an eventual grand maternal manipulation, the likes of which Katherine Hepburn had never reached.  As soon as they had come, Social Services had left, four times over.

A mixture of his own narcissism and insecurity have fueled him his full time pursuit of  women since the age of fourteen.  He is a man of no special talents or abilities.  He has many books, most of which have never been opened except upon arriving home after a purchase when they were to be stamped, ‘From the Library of…’

But for a moment, once, he was in love.  21 November 1999.  She's married now.  Now he searches evermore for that same feeling, fleetingly.