Recently, in the midst of my erratic blog meanderings, I bumbled into a briar patch, a half dozen variations on the theme of the two-body problem.  Lest I inadvertently sucker physicists into stopping by, I should clarify:  the two-body problem on this occasion refers to those snags and snarls that typically emerge when two academics wish to find jobs in the same general vicinity.  The usual resolutions (one half of the couple giving up his or her professorial dreams for the other, or the tricksy attempt to cultivate a long-distance relationship) tend to be unpleasant at best, and I sympathize heartily with those folks who must make such excruciating  judgment calls.

I would have those folks know, however, that the single life ain’t no bowl of cherries.

I’m not entirely certain how the mythology of the single life has sprung up, but it seems to be a prominent offshoot of coupling culture, a requisite contradistinction.  To measure the misery associated with romantic partnerships among the academically inclined, troubled couples regularly reference folks walking around in singles’ shoes.  We, of course, enjoy all sorts of perquisites and prerogatives.  We have oodles of time to spare, few pressing personal obligations, and all sorts of disposable income to throw around.  We have no one to please but ourselves, after all.  Judged by such standards–and they are not without some modest merit–the life of the married academic is the Molasses Swamp of existential agony, fraught with unavoidable adjunct work, brutal commutes, and the neverending search for occupational convergence.  Singles, in contrast, live on Gumdrop Mountain, where our most pressing daily commitment is shaking out the sprinkles from our socks.  (Note to self:  buy new bags for the vacuum.)

What prompted me to write was the overarching sense that the single life is somehow devoid of sacrifice.  Faculty wives and husbands (and I’ve known some of each) are victims in a cruel game, giving up career aspirations for the sakes of their families or, worse still, returning to the workaday world to make ends meet while the wife or hubby in the academy gets to enjoy all the pleasures of poetry readings and petits-fours.  I don’t wish to be unkind, but I find this train of thought sort of adorable–if it romanticized helplessness more explicitly it would come with Fabio on the cover. 

Marriage, despite all indications to the contrary,  involves some exercise of free will, and I would hope that couples with one or more doctorates hung on the wall would have the foresight to anticipate the none-too-mysterious consequences.  In the midst of the subsequent martyrdom it may be cruel of me to point out that the sacrifices that married academics are forced to make are the products of their decision to get hitched in the first place.  Singles–and this may come as something of a surprise if you imagine we spend our time getting all footloose and fancy-free–are generally quite busy living with the upshot of our own choices.  It takes more than a little sacrifice to get where we got.

One of the principal reasons I’m single (all repugnant qualities of character notwithstanding) is that I realized pretty early on the catches that came with my particular 22.  I dabbled in dating periodically in grad school, but once I started work on my dissertation in good earnest I became keenly aware of long-term prospects.  Would it be a swell idea to spend a year with Lovely Lady X given the likelihood that the academic job market might find me a) unemployed or b) catapulted to some far-flung corner of the U.S. where she would have a hard time finding gainful employment that would satisfy her own ambitions?  In year four of the diss I dragged my feet when faced with that question, approaching every new relationship with one eye on the mutual horizon; in year five I dispensed with dating entirely, having seen good friends and colleagues wind up in Wyoming and Idaho and rural Pennsylvania, their spouses struggling to reconcile themselves to the vagaries of fate.

The same pattern held true once I began my postdoctoral peregrinations:  I moved several times in pursuit of a permanent position, and that transience prompted me to sever a variety of promising connections.  I’m quite happy in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, but a lifelong Southern belle, a single mother surrounded by family, and an academic with her own action plan might not have been so enthused.  I’d like to think those three women might have entertained the idea of hitching their wagons to my incipient awesome, but it seemed unfair and unkind for me to pose the question in the first place.

Cecil the Semiotician might say that such choices don’t involve sacrifice,  that they are not losses but merely non-gains.  This is why I don’t invite Cecil to any of my sexy parties.  Nevertheless, if we take Cecil seriously I think we still have some grist for the mill of singleness.

As a courtesy, attentive academics might concede that couples culture involves square-dance interaction on a massive scale.  I joined Facebook not long ago, and every third login I’ll notice that a colleague has posted photos from some urbane soirée attended by the department’s sundry dramaturgical dyads; I should also note that regular confabs with one of my local friends have all but ended since her recent marriage.  Am I here to cry on the inside, to resent feeling left out?  Nah.  Let me let you in on a little secret:  I don’t opt out of social obligations because I’m unusually shy or retiring, I do it because attempts to accommodate singles in social situations tend to be more than a little awkward when couples are the norm.  I have some old friends with whom I’m more than happy to be the fifth or seventh wheel, but as a matter of course I’d rather not be that guy if I can help it.  I’ve mentioned before some of the secondary effects that come with a critical mass of couples (I secretly suspect that I, the most morning of morning persons, will forever teach 3:00 classes in order to oblige parents with kids in daycare), but I think it’s worth noting that singles are a relative rarity in campus culture.  They have to be shoehorned into most of the usual social situations if they are to fit at all.

While I’m trotting out personal revelations, let me also note the extra circumspection that must attend my interactions with students and personal disclosures of any kind.  This pains me, I’ll admit, because it requires even more reserve than I’m accustomed to.  I’ll be working with an Honors student in the coming year, for example, and in doing so I would like nothing more than to emulate my own mentors, folks who used to take me out to dinner, invite me over for drinks as we talked shop, and otherwise treat me like a human with a mind that mattered.  Because she is a she, however, I find myself throwing up all the obstacles to such interaction that prudence recommends–obstacles that don’t strike me as necessary with the male McNair scholar I’ll also be working with.  (In one sense that contrast is quasi-comical, since only recently one of my colleagues was surprised to discover I’m heterosexual; apparently I ought to be exercising unilateral discretion.)  Because I’m a single male adrift in a sea of 28,000 students, I feel as thought I ought to keep all evidence of my sexual existence safely out of sight.  More than once this semester I’ve felt as though I was well positioned to address relevant classroom questions about sexuality, and each time I silently declined.  I like to think of my classes as open forums, but there are more than a few topics I tactfully sidestep, even when my reading or experience might make me one of the best resources a student will ever encounter.

I’m running out of blogging time for the day–these exams aren’t going to grade themselves–but I hope I’ve made a few useful inroads for folks who are in the same shoes and folks who wish they were wearing them.  As is the case for almost every perspective, the greennness of the grass depends on where you’re standing.  Stand in one place long enough and it all turns brown.

This is how I rope in the Suzanne Vega fans.  They are, as you know, a key demographic.

Many moons ago I went to a dentist to have a filling replaced.  She saw me on short notice, proved to be quite nice, and explained clearly her rationale for going with a simple fix that could always yield to the complex fix if needed.  Happy to have the matter handled, I debit carded my co-pay on the way out the door and added the dentist’s name to list of Mighty Fine Reasons to Be Happy with Mount Pleasant.  Two months later I received a Final Billing Notice, filthy with angry red ink.  According to said notice, I was days away from being referred to collections; I had received three prior notices, the form insisted, and if I was not going to fork over six dollars and change they would sic the dogs on me.  When I called to inquire about this imminent threat, the billing agent suggested that I wouldn’t be in this pickle had I not been so negligent.  I in turn suggested that I might have liked one of those first three notices.

I quite like that dentist, but I’ll never go back.

Back when I blogged anonymously I chipped away at a 114-part series entitled “Why I am still single.”  It was intended as a diversion for my friends, and it consisted of a cavalcade of my faults, foibles, and idiosyncrasies.  (In retrospect, 114 strikes me as a laughably low estimate.)  It was modeled loosely after Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, because I figure that whimsy ought to be celebrated as a form of self-expression.  At bottom, I don’t think I’m much more unreasonable than anyone else.  When it comes to the vagaries of dating and relationships, however, I observe a few peculiar policies that contribute to my standing solitude.  Some folks might think them unreasonable.

As the example of my former dentist suggests, I don’t believe in second chances. 

When it comes to relationships, I have never been one to deserve or receive second chances.  This has been something of a double-edged sword, and part of this phenomenon is clearly of my own making.  On the one hand, the most perverse dogmatism I might muster in my dealings with the cosmos runs just about parallel to the perverse dogmatism my dating career has met with.  One girlfriend broke up with me for cheating on her, for example, and she persisted in her resolution even though about thirty disinterested parties could attest to my very public whereabouts on the night said cheating allegedly occurred.  Another kicked me to the curb for failing to earn my third-date merit badge, an implicit set of proofs that I, insensitive boor that I am, was far too dense to realize were in effect.  As it turns out, I don’t generally engage in those behaviors that normally warrant the second-chance relational mulligan:  I never cheat, I keep my word, I remember toes I ought not step on.  The dearth of second chances in my dating career, then, either points toward arbitrariness equal to my own on the part of my square dance partners or else masks underlying causes of which I could not be aware (i.e., they needed to let me go for other reasons and used matters of personal policy as an excuse). 

On the other hand, alas, I lack the semiotic sophistication to recognize when these rejections are not matters of personal policy but instead ploys or performances.  From time to time I’ll be involved in relational flare-ups, ones that, poor benighted chump that I am, I will try to manage on the spot.  A woman might tell me I have not been sensitive enough to her needs, or attentive enough, or liberal enough with my time, and I offer all the assurances I can conceive of with a sincere heart.  I am nothing if not an earnest beau.  Nevertheless, the dreaded break-up comes…and then, weeks if not years later, when I’ve settled into a steady friendship with the woman in question, I learn that the episode was something of a test.  I should have chased after her; I should have fought to win her back.  I should have stalked her, picked fights with her new boyfriend, and gotten all Cusack on her ass.  Ergo, I must be both a reject and a failure, since I did not realize that these elaborate kiss-offs should really be considered opportunities for me to prove the depth of my passion.  Frankly, I blame Catholic school.

All in all, I reckon those two variations on a theme account for about 80% of my relational failures.  The former I can live with:  we are all entitled to our deal-breakers, and if I happen to give massages in a way that reminds her of an old boyfriend or if I happen to have an IQ that suggests to her dubious prospects for socialization or if I happen to fail to “give her the wall,” showing a reckless disregard for her personal safety, then so be it.  (And lest you think me nuttier than usual, those are all actual examples of snafus that have undone relationships in my sordid past.)  Some deals were meant to be broken.  The latter makes me feel as though I should watch more episodes of Gossip Girl and perhaps invest in a good boom-box.  Alternately, I could gnaw off my own head.

In much the same spirit, I believe I’m entitled to my own standards.  If a woman dates me, dumps me, dates some other feller, and returns a penitent (her comparison shopping having taught her that I am the bee’s knees and he is the bee’s cankles), a decent man might choose to renew the acquaintance.  I am not a decent man; I stitch up my scars and move on.  Likewise, on those occasions when a galpal opts out of an engagement with me, citing gangrene or stab wounds, rejects my offers of attendance, and then appears out on the town with her peeps, I assume the magic is gone, notes from Asclepius notwithstanding.  Solitude is difficult, but weathering the affections of a woman who holds me in such low esteem erodes the soul.  And let’s face it, I don’t have much soul to work with.

Lest you think me some kind of doctrinaire monster, it’s worth knowing that those who earn places in my affections technically cannot “wrong” me:  they are never subject to my rigorous second chance policy because they cannot exhaust their first chance.  Fun fact:  when folks who are close to me apologize, I often need them to explain how they thought they’d offended me.  Part of the reason my best relationships never escalate into second-chance territory is because all the petty transgressions that might sever a lesser connection can never accumulate sufficient force when forgiveness is a given.

Solitude is where I live, which is not to say I don’t let people in.  Like most folks, however, I’m disinclined to invite bad guests back, and when it comes to relationships I think all I can do is leave the door open and hope that the best guests will stay.