Nonrequired Reading: Thoughts On Love In Kansas City

So I’ve been thinking a bit about the brief post we wrote about the study cementing Kansas City’s status as a poor dating city. What follows are some thoughts on the topic, with a (probably unnecessary) personal edge, none of which is required — or even advised — reading for anyone.

I’ll admit I’ve always been perplexed by the discussion of “good dating cities” or “bad dating cities.” What does that mean? The study referenced in the post takes it to mean a city that fosters connections between young people, usually in the form of places for them (us) to mingle and meet: coffee shops, semi-trendy restaurants, etc. I suppose this makes a certain amount of sense in the if-you-build-it-they-will-come sense, but what does it do for people who are not quite interested in such scenes?

A semi-trendy restaurant is the last place I’d want to go on a weekend night; playing Scrabble at someone’s house sounds infinitely superior to visiting any place where the object is to see and be seen. Those of us who write for this blog also have minimal interest in places like Westport or the Plaza, at least for socializing — we can only handle so much incestuous dating amidst ex-frat-boy haunts like Granfalloon or hipster epicenters like McCoy’s. You’re more likely to find us at a historical retrospective at the library or a performance by the Kansas City Symphony than at any kind of “cool” place — and it’s silly to pretend this doesn’t hurt our prospects in what’s termed the Kansas City dating scene.

The label has even less meaning for those of us who are not serial daters. At least a couple of us are not Dating Guys — we’re Girlfriend Guys. We tend to think of interactions with girls in terms of relationships, not hook-ups or one night stands. Our first thought when it comes to girls is not “Will she go home with me tonight?” In fact, it’s more like “Is this someone with whom I can have a serious conversation about philosophy, economics, literature, etc., while still having some great laughs and enjoying each other’s company over a long period?” Does this put us solidly in the minority among male twentysomethings? Yeah, probably. We don’t care. We’re not looking for hookups — we’re looking for love.

And that’s what I’m getting at, really. Our views of love and romance have been corrupted by pop culture to the point of frustration. We occupy places in that emerging social category: the postmodern literary self-aware male. We conceive of things in terms of narrative and self-referentiality, in the mode of Dave Eggers and Chuck Klosterman and Nick Hornby and — yes — John Cusack. We look for cinematic love, the stuff of pained essays and heartfelt dramatic performances. We’re not looking, in other words, for the girl for whom we’d buy a drink. We’re looking for the girl to whom we’d run in the pouring rain just to tell her we can’t stop thinking about her.

We have some success, though I hesitate to even use that word because it implies we have some kind of metric for measuring Girls Gained vs. Girls Lost. We don’t, because that’s incredibly unromantic and we have this (perhaps decidedly unmasculine, though we don’t care) obsession with romance. At least one writer on this blog has recently begun seeing a great girl who makes him quite happy, and the rest of us are happy for him. But here’s the key: she’s not a traditional twentysomething girl. She’s cut pretty clearly from the intellectual cloth, and they’re great together because of that fact. They think of love differently than most people in their twenties, and they — we — are happy to occupy that minority. So we don’t really want to be a part of that “good dating scene” that Kansas City apparently lacks, because our interest in it is nil. When you think of things in terms of long-term potential first, you really couldn’t care less about who’s meeting who at the newest sushi place.

There’s a downside to this, of course. People like us — the postmodern self-aware literary males — tend to become completely enveloped in girls we find wholly enchanting, even if our prospects for success are slim. Right now your humble editor is totally, completely in love with one of his best friends. (Note the immediate use of narrative construction.) She doesn’t know this, though it seems likely that she suspects it. I’m confident, however, that she does not feel the same way. (She doesn’t read this blog, though she’s aware of its existence. She doesn’t like to read things online because it hurts her eyes — this is just one of her millions of adorable personality traits that make me love her even more.) The point, though, is that my all-too-cinematic feelings for her actually prevent significant things from developing with other girls. This is the curse of the postmodern self-aware literary male: we tend to experience fixations with the idea of love with a certain girl, which colors our views on potential love with other girls. It’s neither healthy nor fun. In fact, it’s often excruciating. But there’s no use in denying that we operate that way.

Which, I suppose, is what makes us shrug off news of Kansas City’s rank at the bottom of “best dating cities” lists. We’re not really a part of that world, you see, because we don’t think of love in those terms. We take it seriously because our formative books and films shape our views, and tell us to take it seriously. Sure, all of this might seem unnecessarily dramatic — but that’s our framework for thinking about things. And yeah, it’s probably not fair for me to write about someone without her knowledge, but such is the curse of making everything fit a narrative structure.

How many are there like us? How many who are willing to let girls walk by while we carry the torch for those we likely cannot have? There can’t be that many, it would seem — or Kansas City bars would not do nearly as much business. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t bother us to let the other girls walk by, no matter how acceptable they might be in the present tense. If it comes down to superficially dating one girl or staying depressingly in love with the right girl, we’ll choose the latter every time. Sure, we could meet a perfectly lovely girl at a local bar tomorrow night and experience some Fun In The Moment — but how does that compare with spending even five minutes with the girl we love, no matter how unrequited our feelings? We’d readily trade a thousand normal girls for just five minutes with the girls we love, even if it’s just to see them smile from across the room, adjusting their glasses and smiling at a lame joke we made, as we sit content with the knowledge that even if we don’t marry this girl then at least we got to spend a brief, glorious portion of our lives in her company.

And the next night we’ll return to our games of Cranium or Monopoly, accepting the fact that we’re not a part of the allegedly bad dating scene, and we’ll make more jokes about politics and indie rock and find a mountain of interpretation in just one glance across the table from her. Then we’ll content ourselves with terribly obvious Gatsby allusions, and the next day we’ll stretch our arms out farther toward the girls we love, running faster toward a cinematic depiction of love we’ll likely never have, satisfied with the simple act of earning a smile from her because it will always be the most glorious smile you’ll ever see, and one fine morning –

And so we beat on, hearts against the current, borne back ceaselessly into a society that does not reward our conception of love.