Stay classy.

Not too long ago, a woman sent me a note telling me I was a classy guy. I didn’t believe her and honestly she wasn’t right.

There are a lot of things I think of when I think of my mental image of me. Adjectives which I would apply to myself and how the world around me perceives me. Like many, I carry...

I started this and then stopped.

The upshot is a woman I know called me a classy guy and also at the same time said ‘I wanted it all.’

She was wrong and she was right.

I’m not really a classy guy, maybe that’s the veneer I project today but I know in my heart I am a savage, as much as I may try to pretend otherwise, I am deep down a creature formed of my circumstances and upbringing and I can honestly say that my upbringing was anything but civil.

Even into very late in life i found I had to be a beast. I found that I dealt with a tyrant and when you deal with a tyrant you have to be willing to be as much of an animal as the tyrant is otherwise you will be crushed under the tyrant’s heel. The trick of course is to walk that line between grace and becoming a tyrant yourself. Not an easy dance to be sure but one that can be done if you have something of a moral compass.

Anyway, the woman in question called me classy and I never held that in my mind’s eye as part of my self image. You have a picture of yourself, and truthfully if I looked at myself in my mind’s eye, classy was never one of those adjectives that would be on the menu.

Then there was the ‘wanting it all’ and later on in retrospect I thought to myself that she was entirely right on that count. Thing is though, I can’t say I ever really made up my mind in that regard, there was this old Star Trek episode called Amok Time and there’s this quote that stuck with me, “After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but is often true.”

In regard to the woman in question I hadn’t yet made up my mind if the having her was really something I wanted and I was put off more than a little by her assumption that I would so easily be swayed.

Surprisingly, I have standards and expectations of partners and I have been blessed very much with the company of some truly smart, beautiful and dynamic women. It may make me different from other men, but I’ve never been in the situation where I awoke wanting to chew my arm off to escape.

I give myself over to someone... I mean heart and soul. If I am in your corner, I am in your corner and you will never have someone who will champion you the way I will. I want you to be everything that you are capable of and at the same time I want you to lift me up as well. Not blindly, but in concert together being a team supporting each other.

That’s something that’s very, very important to me. Given the fact that it’s something that is so very hard to find, I have at the moment pushed back from the table as it were and since in life time is growing short, I can’t honestly say if that is the right decision but then again I’ve seen people who have compromised and in the process wound up making their lives a living hell.

This woman is someone I in one sense wanted for so very long but I never really felt that she warranted the effort because she did not reciprocate in the slightest way. If anything there were times when I felt that in being supportive I was being viewed as a fool and that was something I could not simple abide so when the ‘wanting it all’ was thrown up, I found it all at once both off-putting and more than a little presumptive.

Presumptive in the sense of, ‘You know, I don’t know if you even merit that.’

Anyway, to get back to the original thrust here, I’m one shade of nice, just barely. You would have to have known me for a very long time but while I believe in the niceties of civilized life I still think that those niceties are a very thin veneer. I can be the most polite and courteous person you can come across but at the same time I can be an animal too just let me know what the rules are and once I do I am more than willing to throw down even though I am an old lion, there is still a lion inside.

I heard from this woman today actually.... I had had to put some distance between us. It didn’t mean I didn’t think about her any less because I still did quite often and I do know she is going through some tough times but, I’ve been going through some tough times myself and the truth is that she never had any kind of bandwidth to be a supportive friend for me. I was disappointed in her because a part of me really wished it would be different but I finally had to acknowledge the reality of the situation and also come to grips with the fact that whatever I did offer up, really had no value to her. She just took it for granted.

This is the curse of the beautiful woman, women who draw men into their orbit like moths to a flame, they don’t feel any sense of obligation because they figure they are dispensing light but my days of being a bug are long gone and I simply cannot abide putting an effort into someone who feels there is no need to reciprocate, it’s nothing more than a tremendous waste of time and energy,

And after all, I’m really not all that classy a guy.