The High End of Low

There are approximately 4.1 million people living within the city limits of Los Angeles and everyone, almost everyone, is getting high.

At the turn of the twentieth century, filmmakers relocated from the east coast to LA and by 1915, the film industry was the fourth largest industry on the planet. By now, you can imagine that every ancillary industry has found their way out west in pursuit of opportunity, making it, by nature, one of the most competitive and ever growing cities in the world. With endless options and probabilities, LA is, if nothing else, the city of Reinvention. It's where Norma Jean became Marilyn, Morrison became the Lizard King, and where everyone is seeking something that is greater than themselves...whatever that may be.

In 2004, psychologist Barry Schwartz published a study called The Paradox of Choice which argued that having unlimited options has contributed to the steady decline of happiness in western culture. Sometimes I look around and I think about this: we can have any kind of food delivered to our doorstep within the hour...endless movie streaming...shopping, music, porn, learning, socializing, and, of course, dating. All within reach, even from the comfort of our couch. And yet, so many people are wandering the city, unfulfilled, ignoring their needs, unsure of what they want, and even less sure of why they're here. 4.1 million people, many lost, many alone.

I live in LA. Hollywood to be exact, otherwise known as the Land of Perpetual Situationships. This morning I met a girl at the gym in West Hollywood who was visiting from New York, we'll call her, Emily*. She was about my age. Beautiful, educated, covered in flash tattoos, and wearing a huge rock on her ring finger. She told me about her friends she was visiting and lit up when talking about she and her husbands love story. "What's it like dating out here?" she asked "my girlfriends say its 'rough.'" I shrugged and nodded, half chuckling in agreement.

She carried on: "It seems like men out here suffer some kind of delusion that they all think they can get something better. Like, for what? So they can be with the newest, hottest girl at the party?"

"Lot's of betas pretending to be alphas." I replied.

I can't say that I didn't yield to many similar superficial whims, having spent a bulk of my twenties with my head on a swivel looking for the next thing, the next gig, the next spot; eyeing any broad shoulders or chiseled jaws that walked through my radar. I also can't lie and say that I didn't enjoy it...at least for a little while. During those years, I was working and in school both full-time, and partying a lot, which left very little bandwidth for me to tune into myself, let alone another person. While I was crushing it in some aspects of life, I was avoiding myself on a conscious level. Too busy to even notice how empty I felt and how steeped in my masculine energy I was, constantly conquering or accomplishing. The competitive tendency to excel at something hasn't really left me since high school where I learned it to be a useful tool for when I feel out of control, lacking in some area, or vulnerable. Feelings that I linked to my fragile femininity.

I finished my undergrad at the University of Washington in Seattle, which you may already know, is not the brightest or happiest place on earth. Being that it's culturally a very anti-social city and most of the days are dark, I found it difficult to connect with or even meet people, so I decided to return to LA after school where an internship would be waiting for me. It was an easy choice being that I hadn't made any quality memories in Seattle and I was eager to get back home...that was, until I met G.

We met at an XX concert when I was under the influence of one or two things. Back then I was often operating with some kind of substance, and I hate to say it, but had I met him in LA, I might have not given him the time of day. He was honest, pure, and unfazed, something I just wasn't used to in the men that I typically chose. He was so happy-go-lucky that he even slept on his back, his hands folded behind his head like a boy gazing up at cloud formations on a breezy afternoon, a gentle smile across his face. Well connected in the restaurant scene, he generously showed me a good time for the last couple months I was there. One night we were at some bar in Capitol Hill and I told him about the frivolity in the LA dating scene: “That’s so dumb,” he said “How do you know the love of your life isn’t standing in front of you if you don’t give it a shot?” That one sentence changed me forever.

I recently came across a few articles talking about how situationships are preferable amongst the new generation and that hookup culture is the way of the future. One of them cited a Tinder based study without any empirical evidence and the other was published in Time. Both articles kept using words like 'freedom,' 'openness,' and even 'enriching connections.' Now, I'm part of this generation, I have relations with the opposite sex in this generation, and I have participated in more than one situationship, often unconsciously so, and this is not how I would describe those experiences. I would call it stifling, closed off, restrictive, confusing, disconnected, and addicting. This pervasive idea that we are maintaining personal autonomy by removing our emotions and detaching from any option of a connection is one of the biggest ways that we are playing ourselves in modern society.

Studies have shown that our brains fire up with dopamine each time we get a notification on our phone, sending us into unnatural levels of highs and lows throughout the day, disrupting our regulatory systems and making us more distant from understanding our emotions as they rise and fall. The uncertainty that is the landscape of a situationship, then, is like a drug we keep returning to. We don't give our emotions, but we give our time, our energy, and our bodies to these counterfeit relationships without anything in return apart from a temporary dopamine hit. And then there is the concept of the open relationship or polyamory. Another popular subculture in Los Angeles.

Modern psychology is exploring the idea of monogamy, namely in the book Sex at Dawn, which I learned through a friend serves as "the Bible" of the polyamorous community. It aims to answer the hard questions of infidelity by offering research that posits that monogamy is simply a construct invented by religious organizations in the dark ages and is unnatural to our sexual identities. While I can't argue this, there is one thing this book, this community, these situationships, and these ludicrous articles fail to recognize: we are social animals who live in communities and require attachment systems in order to survive.

Emily and I somehow found ourselves in a deep conversation this morning where she told me that her relationship, as any, was not without its challenges and growth. How choices had to be made in exchange for what would be something so much greater than being alone, and that would be devotion. I loved hearing her story because it was demonstrative of what I feel to be true as well, which is that there aren't necessarily sacrifices in matters of love, but rather trade-offs. She traded her single girl life in the city for this connection she shared with this man because it was worth it, and I'm a sucker for happy endings. The fact that it wasn't just her, but he chose her as well; together they made the decision. She brought up the failing concept of nuclear families and how our hyper-independence will ultimately be our downfall, because, we survive in communities. Not alone. When we talked about "alphas and betas" I wasn't referring to the cartoonish versions of men such as the Andrew Tate's and Dan Bilzerians of the world. That is merely a limited view of masculinity. The truth is, that type of a man is a beta, and a beta is a man who lacks the substance of what true heroism is in the arena of masculinity and femininity: presence. These exterior factors, the cars, the girls, the lifestyle, are all just part of the costume and are meaningless if a man is incapable of providing the feminine with his focus. And to be truly focused is to face yourself, your whole self, which betas are much too fearful to do. Ultimately, G and I would have never worked out in the long run. Our time was only meant for a season, but I will always be grateful that God put him in my life at that time. He showed me a different, healthy, version of what it means to be an Alpha, which not only taught me a lesson, but put a mirror to what I had failed to recognize in myself. That while I believed I was operating from a place of feministic liberation, I had actually been co-opting male-centric ideas that live within the core of hookup culture: that by denying our feelings we believe we've conquered them. I really feel that this wave of feminism which pushes for such intense equality must be re-examined, because no matter what anyone attempts to press, our experiences with our male counterparts are anything but the same. On a primal and biological level, the feminine requires to feel safe and protected by the masculine, emotionally and otherwise, which casual encounter do not provide. Total equality of the sexes eliminates the balance of the two.

I've had to work through the comedowns from the novelty of false control, where I continue to actively soften the edges that were made by me unconsciously giving into these social norms where I had actually just been chipping away at myself. However, it worries me how normalized hookup culture is that even in my thirties I have a couple female friends who don't know the difference between dating someone and a situationship. I keep hearing or seeing the word 'attachment' on social media and it's being used almost as a dirty or shameful word. That if you are somehow attached to someone, then it's automatically directly linked to some traumatic event in your childhood. That if you're attached or have chemistry, you are operating from wounds, and you should run in the other direction or move towards something that is less stimulating. Something that might, in fact, be less loving. But how would you ever know if you never actually gave it a try? If you never shot your shot.

When a situationship fades out, it's almost worse than the ending of a committed relationship because you have to grieve the loss of what never was. You have to release the hope and the dream of what might've been while your friends may trivialize the connection because, simply, they weren't in it, and there was never a title. They didn't ride the emotional waves that came with the uncertainty, when you were so close to this person but you didn't have them. That you were alone even when they were holding you, holding them. The depressive moods that wrecked you and sent you to bed for days, how you searched for answers as to why you weren't "good enough", assembling the pieces and collecting the forensics, trying to make sense of what just happened, why you endured it, and just maybe, that you'll live forever regretting it. At least with the ending of a relationship where there was devotion, we can see clearly as to what happened and henceforth, we are awarded closure. While a relationship with hidden feelings and no context sends us home, in the middle of the night, where we are alone to cope with the mess that was made. If situationships are really the future, then why do they leave so many scars?

Between social pressures, religion, commercialism, and media which are all used as tools to shape our perception of reality and drive us toward consumption by leading us to believe that we want or need certain things, it's important to question the agenda like the aforementioned articles. Is this truth, or are these dating app companies stocks falling and they are strategizing to increase user-ship? I hate the idiom of "plenty of fish in the sea." I think it's just another way that we gaslight ourselves into limited emotions as the result of our overstimulated lives, making us apathetic and denying the courage it takes for emotional conviction. Yes, there are plenty of options out there, but are they worthy?

Throughout our lives we'll be attracted to a ton of people, of those tons we'll have chemistry with a handful, of that handful we'll have a genuine soul connection with a few, and of that few we may be compatible with one. To never try or to forfeit something so rare for the sake of social pressures should be a crime. These ideas proliferating through pop psychology and pop spirituality that we see about being "ready" or "whole" is less of the rule and more of the exception to the rule. We will never be fully ready for what life brings us, but we will also never know what we are capable of experiencing or giving if we stay stuck in our egos. It all comes back to choices and trade-offs, not sacrifices. We've been led to believe that love is far more complicated than it actually is. It's not. Because it doesn't come from our brains where our egos keep us shackled in fear, it comes from our souls frequency. Love is pure, it's energetic, it's precious, and it's extraordinary.

Have we forgotten this? Or are we just high?