Forced connections probably don't work but I don't have a lot of tools in my toolbox.

I’m a very private person in many ways – a fact which I regret and for which I blame mostly myself. I’ve always wanted and have only infrequently had close associations with other people, and it was only today that I think I have hit upon a possible solution to the question which has bothered me for a long time. ‘Why am I so private? Why am I alone? Why do I go out of my way to keep myself alone?’

Being close to another human being doesn’t come naturally to me. I don’t really understand how to relate to other people on the types of levels that I observe in the relationships that other individuals have with people. I’ve never understood small-talk, and feel highly uncomfortable in situations where I’m expected to be sociable, but can’t really get involved in some deep discussion over topics I find interesting.

This has always made dating hard. On a first date, you are generally expected to sit across from a table with someone in a restaurant, and mouth small pleasantries at each other, avoiding issues of politics, religion, or morality (don’t want to cause any controversy), and then see whether you can still stand each other at the end of the evening. I’m phenomenally bad at that. If I had my way, I’d sit down with a prospective girlfriend and have her tell me her life’s story, including highs and lows, character profiles, descriptive narrative and secrets that she’s never shared with other people.

I tried that once with a previous girlfriend. After a half-dozen dates, I asked her to tell me her story – the tale of who she is and how she came to be whom and where she is. I was less than impressed when she began and wrapped up her biography in a span of about 5 minutes. She told me a bit about her brother, and a bit about her sister. I found out what her father does for a living, and got a listing of the places in which she has lived. None of these things got me any closer to understanding who she was, though, which was the ultimate goal of the story. Even questioning didn’t elicit much better descriptions of the events through which she had lived or the things that she has done.

I’ve started to suspect that my reticence and awkwardness around people comes from the fact that I live in a world populated almost exclusively by myself, and into which other people scarcely intrude. Solitude breeds curious people, and when left to their own devices, they develop strange habits and unconventional ways of looking at the world around them. In a way, I think that I ought to be glad that I live in the manner in which I do, because it has freed me from the socializing influences which lead to the (erroneous, in my view) conformity of opinion on a wide range of issues in other people.

My current state of living alone can’t really be to blame for who I am today, though. Some part of me still clings to the Freudian idea that most of our personality quirks are taught to us during childhood, or are reactions to our childhoods, and I’ve begun to suspect that my solitude was taught in just such a fashion.

My family and I have never been particularly close (with one notable exception). My parents aren’t really demonstrative or close to each other. They’ve slept in separate beds for as long as I’ve been able to remember, usually at opposite ends of the house (my mother says that my father snores like an electric saw and she’s right). I can’t recall my parents ever having hugged each other, or kissed. In fact, they weren’t really lovers and sweethearts, but instead were friends who got married to erect a façade of normalcy to hide their unconventionalities from the world. Where most people have parents, I have people who could be better characterized as former roommates.

My family has never been particularly keen on verbal closeness, either. Both of my parents worked for the State government while I was growing up, and frequently went on long business trips to various parts of the state or to national conferences around the country. I don’t believe that we ever got a phone call from either my mother or my father while they were out on the road. If my father was going out on the road to monitor nursing homes, he told us where he would be and how to reach him in an emergency, and then would be gone for a couple of weeks. When he came home, life resumed as normal. My mother is slightly more demonstrative verbally, but not really much more than my father. A few years back, she went on a vacation (my parents also go on separate vacations) to Europe, where she visited the Netherlands and England. She was gone for a decent amount of time (it must have been about a month and a half), and during that time she sent me a single postcard with a half-dozen words on it.

My parents never really call me on the telephone. When I was living at the University of Kansas, they almost never called. Now, living in my apartment, they don’t call me either. They didn’t even get me a birthday card this year.

When I moved from KU back to my parents’ home north of the river, I did so because it was closer to my parents. I don’t know if I’ve ever said this to many people, but I was accepted to every law school at which I applied. Most all of them offered me scholarship money. One in New York even offered me $40,000 a year under what it called the “Presidential Scholars Program.” I turned them all down in favor of my current law school for the sole reason that it would give me a chance to try to create the kind of relationship with my parents that I had observed with my few friends at KU when their parents came to visit from far away places, and about which I had heard so much.

My parents were quick to disappoint. Instead of a son, I was a boarder. I paid a share of the bills through a monthly rent check. We even drew up a crude contract that my father said would help him if he needed to ensure payment at a later date.

When I relate these things, I keep thinking of the little baby monkeys in a famous psychological experiment. The psychologist took the baby monkeys and gave them a choice between a fake mother in the cage made out of wire and a nearly identical wire mother that was covered in fur to make it soft. The only catch was that the soft mother also emitted electric shocks that hurt the baby monkeys. The baby monkeys invariably preferred and sought comfort from the cloth mother, and when the electric shocks started coming, simply clung even tighter to their pretend guardian.

I’m not suggesting that I’m somehow a damaged baby monkey (they all turned out to be unsociable and crazy when they matured – absolutely true – and most had to be euthanized for the safety of other monkeys in their enclosures), but I think that my upbringing was marked by an absence of the warmth and intimacy that one might typically associate with childhood and family. As such, it doesn’t seem unusual to me to go without talking to my parents for months on end, and to go for days without ever speaking to something that can respond to me (you’d be surprised how many times I catch myself arguing with myself in my car or telling my oven how my day went). But some part of me instinctually knows that this is not how human relationships are supposed to function.

What brought this out is the fact that, today, a friend of mine touched me. She reached out and touched my arm, and then tried to tickle me. One sidelight of being alone so much is that you don’t have the influences of other people to help you determine whether your thoughts and actions are weird. So I don’t know whether other people really do this or not, but I keep track of times when people touch me. Hugs… handshakes… you name it. People don’t touch me, so when they do, I count it as being something special. Before today, the last time that I made actual physical contact with another human being is when I was buying some groceries about 3 weeks ago. I signed my name to the receipt and when I handed it to the cashier, his hand brushed mine.

I don’t know how often people usually touch other human beings. People in my family don’t really touch each other that much, so I don’t have much to compare it all to, but I’d bet that most people make physical contact with other human beings more often than I do. I wonder if it’s healthy to be like them and if so, does that make my way of living unhealthy by comparison?

In a way, I think that blogging is part of my response to the solitary life I lead, as is my habit of trying to have deeply intimate conversations with people, one-on-one. They are both ways of trying to force that gap between myself and other people to become narrower. On the one hand, attempting to force closeness via deeply personal revelations seems shallow and manipulative. At the same time, though, I’m not sure that I can be any different than I am right now. My driving motivation in most of the things that I do, on an interpersonal level, is a nonstop search to find connection with someone. More than anything else, I want to experience some connection with people, to see through their eyes and to know their minds from one end to another, to share a joke, or just to have someone who is willing to put their hand on my arm. My friends all, to some degree or another, provide me with small doses of these connections, if only for a short time in my life.

However quick and fleeting these connections, it brightens the otherwise bleak interpersonal landscape in which I operate and for that I am quite grateful. Thank you, one and all.