I'd really like to forget about this guy. I'm only a degree of separation away from at least one of his victims who seems like really decent people and I really hate the amount of attention that he's gotten.

I thought that tracked -- more authoritatively -- with some of the comments on "field experience" from jessamyn and jokeefe especially.

There was also a comment I thought was in that thread but must have been somewhere else, maybe AskMe, around the same time. A poster (Doohickie?) recalled the odd and incomplete men that his mother dated around that age, and found that as he approached the same age he was doing everything he could to model his life so as not to be like them.

I mean, I don't want to indulge in too much self-analysis, but as jokeefe pointed out these are common fears even among women.




TMI ALERT




I had (independently) reached the conclusion that what I was seeking in my last relationship was validation. As they say, validation is for parking stubs. In a way my life had -- still has -- bottomed out from some not very auspicious highs. I had this connection with this person for a long time and we couldn't get it together and in the trying broke the connection. The blog post here says that even if he'd gotten sex, he wouldn't have been cured of his maladies, and I also independently realized that.

And, holy shit, the annotations use the terminology generativity vs. despair. I just heard a talk on generativity -- I tweeted about it. There's a MeFi post there if I can get the research together.

Anyway, I can see how the pieces fell into place for this guy. I'm his age, roughly, and have little to show for it. I do have perspective he doesn't have and I do want to live my life in ways that have meaning, so for me it isn't the objectification of the car and house. I've lived through a year of hell and not only did I survive, I feel like my presence has contributed something positive and worthwhile. If I ever do date again it will be on something more of my own terms. Career terms, I'd like to create something worthwhile. There's a precipice, an abyss, looking at this document that I don't enjoy seeing.