Actual Reasons I Need A Girflfriend

Walk into a sleepy melbourne cafe, and Bryce will have asked me about my sex life before we are even seated. Many of my friends take the view I don't even need a girlfriend, I just need to get laid. Maybe they're right, what would I know, but for me getting laid is the least of my concerns. I don't think I'm single by choice, not my choice at least. I feel though I do 'need' a girlfriend again though for the following actual reasons.

#1: Lazy Sundays.

I woke up last Saturday at 7:47 AM and got up, then was hit with the sudden revelation that I haven't slept in for like 4 years. Not even the last time I was dumped, but the time before that when I was working full time and shit, my psychologist put me onto enriching my life and getting to like my own company.

As a result, I am busy, I am busy all the fucking time and I cannot stop. I have tried to relieve this busy-ness in the last week by playing computer games, but alas I still get up at 8:30 at the latest.

I feel my life is rich, enriching, I am a supportive person and well supported. What I need now is that person that makes me want to call up and cancel work on a Sunday, lie in till twelve and then go have breakfast at one of those 'breakfast all day' cafes. I don't think I can actually put the brakes on myself. I need somebody to slow it all down for me, I need to rest, after 4 years of sustaining myself, I feel I am getting low on fuel.

My relationships thus far have felt like being on a seaworthy vessel (the relationship) then it capsizes, sinks, or I am swept overboard (the dumping) then I tread water, swim sidestroke for ages (singledom) then you get hauled onto terra firma (a new relationship) only to discover it is not terra firma but yet another vessel on a vast ocean. Which is alright, and I'm aware, I'm aware that some people are my age and have had, no relationships. But fuck it, I'm tired, I'm tired of supporting myself. I'll keep doing it, but I'm tired.

#2 I need a hit.

Most recreational drugs exploit the neural systems reward centers for forming relationships. Dopamine, oxytocin, the good stuff. You can get some pleasure from anticipating a relationship, but I would like, very much the full cocktail of love drugs. Oxytocin, which builds attachment gets released in the 'cuddling afterwards' and it's highly relaxing, dopamine, I can get when a woman I'm attracted to looks at me, it's pretty good and I forget the rest but basically I'm looking for those hits as evolution intended them, and a steady supply.

#3 Testable hypothesis.

Since I don't know 2005? I have put a lot of effort into becoming a better person than I was. There is much in my nature that is still bad, takes a lot of effort just to mute, and certainly there is a long way for me to go. But I feel I am doing something right, I suspect I am much better boyfriend material now than I was say 2 years ago. I suspect my ex's like me more now as a person than they did when I was dating them.
Also, from the aforementioned #1, there is a wonderful thing about exclusive relationships of two, and pretty much any positive, supportive relationship - they create their own energy, as a carry over of both reasons #1 and #2 - When in a blossoming relationship I was able to stay up till like 4am bowing and performing tea ceremonys and shit, then get up at 5am cycle across town to my home, get changed for work at 9am and still have more energy than everyone else there, despite having more late night plans.
I don't just want to recieve that kind of energy and support, I want to give it too. I think honestly, that I am a much more supportive, tolerant, honest, kind, humourous and optimistic potential boyfriend than I was before.

You know if I don't draw all day, I will usually need to sit down at work, or schedule the next day to draw. I need to express myself in that medium. Writers block is never a problem. I have a need to actually express my love, caring and support, I can in numerous platonic avenues, but it's kind of like only having a greylead and a school desk to draw on. I would like to have that outlet in an actual relationship.

#4 Singular Identity.

I feel sadly, that I have been single so long that it is becoming part of my identity, I feel anxious at the prospect of actually not being single anymore. This is a trap, a hole I will struggle to crawl out of. I don't want to become somebody that pushes others away.

Further more, on like Monday or something I had a rare misanthropic tantrum, where being such a supportive person I felt almost as if I had become the pillar of my social network that everyone could safely ignore. Like the doctor who gets sick, or the leader requiring some leadership, or the you get it you get. That is to say, because I appear to have all this energy to support people in their various pursuits of happiness, doesn't mean I'm doing that having captured lasting happiness myself.

On reflection there was little evidence to support my spurned feeling. I had just garned up the perception that I was all alone, and exerted a bias on my surroundings.

But this is part of being single, I have these periods where I just want rescuing from myself, tired of having to rescue myself all the time - which eventually evolves into the revalation that nobody is going to rescue me but myself, then I end up rescuing myself.

#5 Too many variables.

In the same way that having brakes on a bike can make you faster (providing you have to turn corners etc.) having a relationship provides a secure base from which you can explore the world. Particularly since I have now spurned most other forms of 'security' and as per my swimming-from-shipwreck-to-shipwreck metaphore, true security is an illusion. But some forms of security exist, and to get really romantic, although I agree that the idea of monogamy is overemphasised as the ideal, arguing for polygamy, open-relationships, polyamorous etc as superior smacks of the same 'works on paper' argument that classical economists applied to flexible wages.

Most people want to be employed on a contract, to build a degree of certainty into their future, that enables them to then make decisions. In the same way, I'd like at least to have a stable relationship, that I can then work on the myriad other decisions I have to make in life.

Which isn't to say there is anything inherantly wrong with being single. Having spent a 5 year period jumping from long term relationship to long term relationship, this can be unhealthy as well. I think a well trod path of unhealthy relationships is where you have two people supporting eachothers unhealthy lifestyles. Where one or both partners maintains a comfortable status quo and wastes years of their life not venturing out into the world, until the other becomes dissatisfied enough to shake things up with a break up.

But as Ted Roosevelt said "It may be true that he travels farthest who travels alone; but the goal thus reached is not worth reaching."