Love and Other Bad Ideas

Army life brings with it many temptations. You’re out there, on your own, with very few people to answer to outside your professional circle. Without pesky financial irritations such as “rent” or “food money” to worry about, it’s all too easy to spend your entire paycheck on home electronics and pizza. Hell, I once purchased two hundred dollars worth of DVDs featuring (a) Arnold Schwarzenegger, (b) Jackie Chan, or (c) Sharon Stone’s breasts, in one outing.

Perhaps the greatest temptations to the single soldier, however, are the temptations of the flesh. Sex is a huge commodity in the towns surrounding any army base, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is probably a frustrated lawn-tractor salesman whose revenues have fallen off since the local dirt merchant opened a club called Tits Ahoy! next door.

I try to live a relatively moral life. Thus far, I have resisted the siren song of the strip clubs, probably aided by the fact that I don’t find anorexic women dancing listlessly around a pole that sexy. Not that I have any firsthand knowledge that they’re anorexic. Or that they dance listlessly. I just know this guy who – look, never mind.

Anyway, even though the lure of prepackaged sex has not yet caused me to fall, I do not want to yield to temptation in a moment of dire extremity, such as when none of my DVDs seem worth watching and Everybody Loves Raymond is a rerun. To avoid this eventuality, therefore, I recently made a solemn pact with myself. I decided that the best way to conquer the baser instincts was to hold myself to a rigid standard and never deviate from it, to instill in myself, through hard work and careful attention, an iron discipline that no wind could topple. I decided that the best life is the pure life.

To wit, I have decided to take a vow of celibacy, a vow that I absolutely will not break until the day comes, as come it must if I have faith, when I meet a woman who wants to have sex. And not just any kind of sex, but sex with me.

At first I thought that this vow would be difficult to adhere to. Actually, it has turned out to be far simpler than I imagined. This is because, surprisingly, there don’t seem to be that many women out there who want to have sex with me. Oh, I know plenty of women, and I’m sure all of them want to have sex at some time or another, but when they do they simply go home and have sex with their boyfriends or husbands, all of whom seem to have names like “Brick Slabchest” and biceps that are each the size of an entire Backstreet Boy.

Now, I’m not a shrimpy – or even an unattractive – guy. I’m actually pretty large, but I’m an army journalist, which means that in the biceps department I fall way behind the infantry guys all my female acquaintances seem to date or marry. These guys have Lance Bass riding under the skin of one arm and Nick Carter under the skin of the other, while my biceps are, at the very best, the admittedly unimpressive Joey McIntyre from the New Kids on the Block. Actually, even this is exaggerating. In fact, if we continued with this rather tortured entire-human-being-as-muscle metaphor, and compared my biceps with Hervé "Tattoo" Villachaize from Fantasy Island, we would be edging much closer to the truth.

Yes, the sad fact is that here at Fort Bragg, men outnumber women approximately seventeen to one. This wouldn’t be so bad, since at least there are women out there somewhere. However, I outnumber women who want to have sex with me one to zero, which as any mathematician will tell you – and he’ll tell you even if you don‘t want him to; if mathematicians didn’t just spout off statistics uninvited, they’d never get to say anything, because let’s face it, they’re stuck in a job for total wankers – represents an infinite decrease between me and women who want to have sex with me, which, in case you forgot during the whole mathematician digression, was the point of this sentence.

You see, guys, women like sex – hell, they love sex, just like we do. I know this based on my exhaustive research on the subject, which consisted of asking a woman I know. It’s just that women are a whole hell of a lot more selective, as a general rule, about who they’re going to be having sex with. See, whereas men want to nail pretty much any woman who respirates and doesn’t strongly resemble Jar-Jar Binks, women take into consideration minute details which we men would find insignificant, such as a prospective mate’s personality, compassion, and intelligence.

The fact that women require men to possess these attributes, of course, leaves the vast majority of us out in the cold. So they end up dating Brick, who, in addition to being the approximate size of a luxury yacht, saw Chocolát twenty-three times and cried every damned one of them, and will be happy to explain the new sensitivity to you via the method of pummeling you mercilessly about the head and shoulders if you so much as look at his girlfriend.

So the outlook’s pretty grim for us regular, nonsensitive males. I don’t mean it’s a total wasteland out there; I have known women who wanted to have sex with me before, specifically women with whom I have shared a relationship. Or relationships. I mean, I had separate relationships with separate women, I’m not the kind of degenerate who would – look, never mind. Yes, I have dated, and quite happily, at least at the outset. It’s just that the vast majority of the women whom I have dated were, to put it plainly, crazy.

Yes. Almost every one of them. Stark raving mad. I don’t know why this is. I dated a girl in high school whose path I crossed again, years later. She is now a very intelligent, funny, intriguing young lady, and we are good friends. But while we were in school she was, to use the exact psychiatric definition, completely batshit. That seems to be the standard for all of my relationships. My parents are giving up hope, and one day they’re going to drop even the pretense of warmth toward my significant others. They’ll introduce us at parties without even bothering to conceal their dislike.

“This is our son Ryan,” they will say (they say everything in unison like that; it’s rather off-putting), “and this is the batshit girlfriend we’re praying hard will get run down by a bus within the week.”

Now, a lesser person might begin to wonder if maybe he were the reason that all of his lovers were somewhat screwy. But I possess an almost superhuman capacity for self-delusion, so I refuse to even entertain that thought. I choose, instead, to believe that only the batshit women have the courage to go out with me, and all the sane, stable women who are wildly attracted to me are just too intimidated by my smoldering sexual magnetism.

At any rate, the point was, before I digressed (I digress a lot, in case you haven’t noticed; it’s a flaw, I know, but one that I have been powerless to remedy – but I digress) that even I have been with women who wanted to have sex with me. And for the most part, I was always happy to oblige. To a man, there is literally never a bad time for sex. Take for example the following, entirely plausible, scenario:

MALE NEUROSURGEON: All right, we’ve reached the medulla, and now I’m going to very carefully excise this lesion...

ATTRACTIVE FEMALE NURSE: Excuse me, Doctor – would you like to have sex?

MALE NEUROSURGEON (already shucking his scrubs): Does the Pope wear a tall hat? Just let me keep my scalpel hand free.

So yes, that part was always okay. It’s just the other parts of the relationship, such as talking and having emotions, that were difficult to get a handle on.

Ladies, let me, a board-certified man-person, give you a tip: males, in their natural habitat (the couch), experience only two emotional states: (a) tired, and (b) hungry. Anything more complex is beyond most raw, unfinished men.

Here’s another tip: it may be true that for every man there is a certain special woman out there, one who can teach him to feel more complicated emotions such as love, compassion, and tenderness, but if you haven’t made any headway within the first month, then you are not that woman. That’s right, he’s beyond your help. But you may be that certain special woman for some other idiot male, so dump this one and start fresh with a more promising candidate.

I am willing to admit that I, for one, seem beyond help. Oh, I can talk the talk with the best of them. Many is the time when, in an intimate moment, our hearts beating in concert as we held each other close and our breath met and mingled and I drank deep of the honeyed perfume of her alabaster skin, my lover would ask me, “What are you thinking about?”

Now, when this question is asked, the truthful answer will almost always be one of two things: (a) “That new Schwarzenegger/Bruce Willis/Jackie Chan movie looks like it’s gonna kick ass,” or (b) “I could really go for a bacon cheeseburger.” Or, if you want to end the relationship swiftly, (c) “Those pants make your ass look big.” These are the truthful responses. But did I ever answer with one of them? Holy shit, man, of course not. I may be grossly insensitive, but I’m not stupid. I answered with some rot like, “You’ve got the sweetest eyes I’ve ever seen,” or “It’s a little bit funny, this feeling inside,” or some other bit of fluff cribbed from an Elton John song, and she would smile and kiss me, and I could safely go back to contemplating cheeseburgers or action heroes.

It’s not that men don’t care, ladies. In many instances, we do. It’s just that we don’t really think a lot about it. We sort of accept the fact of our caring subconsciously, like we accept the fact of the federal budget deficit; everybody knows that there is such a thing, but nobody really understands it, so we merely make a note of it and try not to think too hard about it, and we consider those who do spend a lot of time thinking about it to be sort of weinerish.

But it would be suicide to admit that to a woman (although most women have figured it out on their own; anyone who hasn't is hardly a MENSA candidate). So yes, there was a time when I would tell a bald-faced lie like “I was thinking about the way your hair seems aflame in the twilight,” merely to keep the peace. But no more. If I ever have the opportunity to break my vow of celibacy again, I’m going to be brutally honest. No more of this hearts-and-flowers stuff if I don’t really feel it. If I’m thinking about a Big Bacon Classic Combo Meal Deal, I’m damn well going to tell her that I’m thinking about a Big Bacon Classic Combo Meal Deal. This is not because I’m insensitive, although I am. No, it’s because I am looking for True Love, a love so strong and honest that it can break me of my insensitivity and turn me into the kind of drool-gushing nancy-boy whom, at this point in my life, I would sincerely love to kick the shit out of. And for that kind of love to occur, my prospective mate must be able to look past the fact that I am male, and therefore a complete oaf. She must be able to see the tenderness of which I may, in some odd parallel universe, almost be capable. She must love me for who I am, warts and all.

Not that I have warts, I mean. Especially not that kind of wart, ha-ha, it’s just, you know, it’s just an expression...

Look, never mind.