The Narrowed Limits

I've had a new insight for the first time in weeks - months maybe, given how much I came to repeat myself on these blogs.

I woke up early again at around 5am - better than 2am as of late, there are plenty of people who get up for work at 5am - and a thought so very obvious occurred to me that I can't believe I've not realised it before.

It's very simple - I've realised how narrow my social boundaries were and how little I stepped beyond them. I deliberately used the passive voice there because I don't think I knowingly drew those boundaries.

The specific realisation was this: it occurred to me that when I was at college I remained within that tight little group of Heather, the two Johns, Melanie, Lorraine and Lynn. I think everybody else mostly did the same. I considered for much of the time that the only women available for asking out were Heather, Lorraine, and Lynn. I didn't feel Melanie worthy of consideration, which was mean and shallow of me.

John had put dibs on Lorraine, John S had put dibs on Heather and for some of the time she was going out with Geoff, and I was so reticent with Lynn that I said nothing and she took up with Duncan W, despite her once having told me directly to "show some initiative" towards her.

It was ridiculous for me to have drawn my boundaries so narrowly. I think part of the problem was that art schools are so incestuous, one spends so much time in the company of a small group of people of one's own age in a way that is very unusual after infant school.

Most students aren't big mates with most of the people on their course, they see them only for a couple of lectures a week, instead they make friends with the people they share houses with, people they meet in social societies, political societies, and what have you. For instance, Heather would probably never have met Geoff if he hadn't been John S's housemate for a while. As I remember she lived at home for two terms until her parents moved out of the area, John lived at home for all but two terms, I lived at home, and Lynn lived at home for a good part of the course until her parents divorced and she and her sister moved into a council flat.

Such staying with one's parents is very unusual for students and - in my case at least - limited the motivation to find a social outlet, and also reduced the pressure. But I was particularly inert. John G lived in a bedsit in Whalley Range for a while, found on his own initiative, and everybody else sooner or later moved out too. The only move out I made was one term in Halls, and I only applied for that because I was drunk at the time and had found that everyone had moved in to Halls and I felt I was missing out.

My life being as limited as it was between the ages of 11 and 37, those four years at college were a time of particular opportunity I failed to recognise. I can see that I'd been primed to think very poorly of myself and my chances, but I should have perceived the situation as one of opportunity, I should have considered people on other parts of the course as potential friends and girlfriends, if no one else. It isn't as though I didn't have connections with other people on it, I used to be friends with Janet W, I knew Jean Y and Carmel McC quite well, and had slept overnight on their floor, and there were others too.

But I never picked up on these connections, I never struck out on my own.

After college, apart from getting very fat I was unemployed for most of 15 years, which pretty much put me out of the running for everything at a very important time in my life. Never the less, I'm startling to realize how little I ventured out of that little group at college, how narrowly I drew those boundaries.

When I did get a job, my confidence and situation were so deeply troubled that I made no use of my opportunities, I stayed fat, I stayed at home, I merely longed for women from a distance (and they were mostly Doctors, which didn't help). My social boundaries were drawn in so tightly to just me and my parents, despite working in an institution with nearly 2000 employees, the greater part of whom were women.

At college and at work I was potentially in clover, all unawares.

The funny thing is that out of the two Johns and me, I was the only one who actually approached women I didn't know at parties. The Johns usually did nothing, they would drift around chatting to other men or end up in the kitchen, but I would at least sometimes approach women - I at least pulled a couple of times.

On one of thesse blogs I used a line from a John Cooper Clarke poem *Midnight Shift" - "was there ever a thing so fair that smashed itself to bits". That was about a prostitute, but you could say something very similar about me. I was OK back then, and more fool the women I knew if they couldn't see it.

I sense a strange inertness and deep sexual passivity within a lot of women, so many women seem to need some kind of permission to find a man attractive, even if it's only the permission implicit in other women finding him attractive. I think it's the reason that women tend to be more interested in married men and divorced men than men are in married and divorced women - there's an aspect of "oh, he must be quite attractive, because another woman has found him attractive".

Women criticise men for being attracted to younger women, but women are so very often attracted merely to male status, rather than men as people, and put up with men they don't especially like, as in the old Mrs Merton joke "Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to the Millionaire Paul Daniels?"

Indeed, most women seem not particularly to like their male partners . For men, and their attractiveness to women, it's a case of "more gets more", As as sex women seem to want to be loved and desired by men more than they actively love and desire men. The only women I've known who exhibited anything I would call passionate love and desire are Melanie and Beverly M, a girl I knew at 6th Form. I could cite many examples but I'll pick the one closest to home: my dad always addressed cards and notes to my mam as to "my sweetheart" i.e. he actively saw her as someone he loved, whereas she always wrote "your Eva" i.e. she saw herself as someone who was loved by him. I've pushed female friends to voice their love for the men they are with, and find they wont, although they will say variations on "he loves me". or "I need his love"

I look back and see now how fine I really was and didn't realise it, and I think I must have read this female inertness as something that was directed at me, not something quite general in most women, to be overcome, or melted by men.

I don't and didn't have problems talking to women. I've never found it difficult being with women, never ever. I have a limited social life but I've always had female friends. I prefer the company of women, the conversation isn't limited to sport and boasting and getting pissed or high as it is with many men, and women are more comfortable talking about emotions.

If I'd had confidence, most of the rotten things that have happened to me, and that I've done to myself, would probably never have happened.

But I drew those limited and limiting social boundaries, or failed to see there were no boundaries there, and thus reduced my opportunities to none..

What I am trying to draw from this is that I'm not unloveable, not unwantable, not unable, not a social cripple, but someone who could have had a normal happy life, and perhaps still can have if I can get past this leaden crushing sense of worthlessness, and see and make and grasp what opportunities are still there, to get beyond the sense of shame at my perceived worthlessness that I've felt since late childhood.