I don’t know how I keep getting myself into these situations. I told myself, that’s it. I’m going to date one girl at a time.
But then an e-mail came from Peace Corps office, a notification about a Valentine’s Day weekend hosteling package this weekend in Lviv. It’s accommodations, food, a tour of the city, a tour of a castle, and a candlelight dinner with live music in said castle, all for 200 hrivna (a little under $40). I like to boycott Valentine’s Day whenever possible, but somehow I was talking to Susannah and she had gotten the e-mail, too and somehow we thought this would be a good idea.
Susannah should be introduced: a 23 year-old petite, redhead polyglot with a political science degree, she’s lived in Russia, France, Ghana and now Ukraine. She was in my link during training, and we had no sooner started dating than the revolution broke out. In lockdown and in different towns and couldn’t see each other.
The revolution was fucking with my love life.
We hung out in Kyiv for Christmas, and then, because we were headed to opposite ends of the country, we decided that friends was all we could be. And friends is what we are, except she’s about to hop an overnight train and we’re going to spend the weekend in Lviv, as well as Valentine’s Day itself exploring the Caves Monastery in Kyiv. Sounds great, yes? Yes. And somehow in all this I forgot my self-promise to stop dating multiple people.
True, four dates and a few kisses with Diana does not a commitment make, but it was the principle of it all. Besides, they know about each other.
And just as I was ruing my lack of self-control this morning in Berdichiv, I end up meeting yet another girl. I was down in Berdichiv giving demo lessons. It’s the same town where they treated me like a rock star during the Spanish Olympiads, and I got the same treatment again. Only two teachers were supposed to watch the lesson, but I ended up with closer to ten, lined along the back wall at the classroom, watching me intently. Afterwards, the kids asked me for autographs. It was an ego-maniac’s paradise.
Yulia, a twenty-one year old English teacher, was thrust upon me in the teacher’s lounge, and I was embarrassed for her as the older teachers kept saying: “isn’t she beautiful, you don’t have beautiful women like this in America, do you?” And actually, she was really cute.
In any case, after I was done with my classes I had a couple hours to kill before I was scheduled to meet up with a Peace Corp manager and we would both go back to Zhytomyr. Yulia had already handed me e-mail and phone number on a piece of paper without my asking, so I text messaged her to see if she wanted to grab some coffee. Coffee turned into a tour of the town, including a beautiful monastery.
The monastery was built on a 14th century fort, the foundations still visible as we walked down steps into the vestibule. We were the only ones there save for two Carmelite nuns, which we talked to in Ukrainian while they sewed a banner. They told us about the monastery’s holy relic, and we never would have seen it because it was tucked into this dungeon-like alcove that they showed us. They told us that the relic, an old painting of Mary with a baby Jesus, worked miracles and pilgrims from all over came to see it.
Myself and Yulia in front of the monastery
While walking back to meet the manager, Yulia asked me if I would return and go to a dance club with her. As I know both the Berdichiv volunteers and it is only 45 minutes away…
The problem, you see, is choice. My life, and people may hate me for this, is not that nothing happens, it’s that everything happens. I don’t do well at choosing. You mean pick between teaching, writing for a newspaper, going to grad school, directing a training video and being in a dance company? No, I did them all at once. And you know what? Quality suffered.
And my love life tends to be the same way. Other than random spates when I’m in love with monogamy, I’m usually trying to deal with the fact that there’s too many amazing women around and I don’t want miss out by being with just one. Maybe that makes me sound really arrogant (and I can be really arrogant), but it’s a statement of fact. I’m not beating them off with a stick, but usually two or three are reciprocating interest. And usually I end up train wrecking them all instead of having one really good one.
So am I going to change? Um, probably not.
So here’s my advice: don’t date me. Seriously. Ask people. It’s a bad idea. I’m a great friend and a horrible boyfriend.
But I think there are further implications to this that I won’t go into because I feel my word limit coming on, but I hope you’ll think about them. Thusly:
Does variety breed dissatisfaction?
Knowledge is a forbidden fruit. I know the variety that is in the world, and because I can’t have all of it, I feel dissatisfied.
Americans, we seem to have the most variety in the world and the least satisfaction with our own lives.
We have 5000 channels and flip through them. We have the entire world at our internet fingers and keep clicking and clicking. I don’t know about you, but I’ve read at least a thousand books in my lifetime and have only read maybe 10 twice.
If you owned only one book, how much more would you appreciate its words?
Does 12 brands of toothpaste make your life better?
And even if you agree that variety does breed dissatisfaction, would you give it up?
I know I wouldn’t.
The problem, as they say, is choice.