Please hear me out. I know this post will not appeal to everyone. Some might even say it's filled with red flags. Maybe it is. But I have hope in my heart that somehow, somewhere, the right woman will see this and it will resonate within her. I have thought a LOT about the things I'm about to say. They're not coming off on a whim. There is reflection and substance and weight behind them, as lately I have thought about little else. 

We live in strange times. Dangerous times. Dark times. Society is broken. People are broken. Everywhere I go and look I see hurting people, lonely people, people struggling with all sorts of mental ailments and emotional deficiencies. Men and women are continuing to become more and more alienated from each other, and so many of us live in isolation, due to a myriad of factors. People feel disoriented, disconnected, disillusioned, mourning lost childhoods or broken marriages. Trauma is everywhere. Blame is everywhere. Women don't trust men to treat them decently, and men don't trust women to be sympathetic to how hard it is to live in a world where women increasingly do not need them. Institutions like marriage, monogamy, and family are crumbling, dismantled largely by wounded people who have been hurt by these institutions. But all we see on TV are images of what healthy, happy people are supposed to look like. We are beset on all sides by this fantastical image of what "healthy" looks like, and when we don't meet it, a suspicion grows in our hearts that something is wrong with us. Meanwhile, modern psychology is pumping all sorts of concepts into the Zeitgeist, like codependency, trauma dumping, gaslighting, love bombing, and the like, all of which may be valid in their way, but which are also paralyzing people with fears and concerns and causing them to be more and more mistrustful of intimacy. Nevertheless, people are busy dreamily looking for their soulmates, never knowing that a soulmate will not be found, because you cannot find a soulmate. Soulmates do exist. Want to see some? Go find a couple who has been married for 50 years, who have been through all kinds of shit and have grown, who know each other deeply, who have done life together and didn't shrink from the hard work of making a relationship last. Find those people, and know you're looking at soulmates. Soulmates are not found, they are crafted. Who wants to do that work anymore? Who wants to stick it out through hard times when now it's soooo easy to just walk away? Men and women are both scared. Scared of each other, scared of society, and scared of being hurt. I think there are still many of us, myself included, who deeply long for the trappings of old-school commitment and monogamy, but we're reacting to the world around us, and losing hope. 

I was recently asked a bizarre question. "Two women are before you, two possible candidates for a life of love. In personality they are very much alike, and both personalities are suited to you. But one is the picture of mental health, and the other is not. Which would you choose?" 

I stunned the asker by replying... immediately and without hesitation... that I would pick the latter. I would take the mental ill woman over the mentally well woman any day. Essentially, I sometimes think the mentally well should do love with the mentally well. And the mentally ill should do love with the mentally ill. Mental illness, which trendy psychology and modern therapy cannot always absolutely correct, is the only sort of human ailment that is existing in the abstraction of thoughts, and therefore, being. It cannot be seen by an ultrasound. You cannot cure it by removing tissue or an organ or by administering some sort of vaccine. You cannot quantify, touch it, put it under a microscope, point out its location to a colleague, or dress it with a bandage. The entire interpretation of existence and reality is filtered through mental illness in a way that suffering a bodily ailment can just never match. For these reasons, mental illness may be the worst of ALL illnesses a human can have. Suicide rates testify to that. And yet of all the illnesses, we still judge mental illness, the worst one, more than the others, as though a person suffering from it should maybe be quarantined, questioned, avoided, given a wide berth, and deemed unsuitable. 

If I was going to bed down for a life with a woman, a partner, I would want someone who KNOWS what mental illness is like. Who knows the challenges, the work it takes to function and find happiness as much as one can. I would want to be vulnerable and intimate with someone who knows how mental illness can break a person. Some people are broke forever. And that's just how it is. I think the broken should be with the broken. I think the whole should be with the whole. I don't trust anyone who's whole, really. 

Here is my position, and why I'm making this post. The world is going to shit. There is very little hope. I'm almost 50 and most of my life has been nothing but unbearable pain. I'm tired. I don't have any fight left. I've worked hard to change the things in me that needed to be changed, and I've worked even harder to accept the things about me that will never change. There are ways in which I will never mentally be where I could have been had certain things not happened to me. So comparing myself to what I could have been is pointless. This is me. I'm broken, but I'm still here. And I can still love. I have come to understand that my only real hope for any sort of happy, fulfilling, comfortable life, is to found another wounded traveler like myself, commit to her, hunker down with her in the midst of this crazy ass world, and try to find as much enjoyment in that life with her as I can. I honestly do not think that's a terrible idea, and I honestly do not think it's impossible. I think it's very possible. Look, I am not perfect. I come with so many fucking issues, my god. But you know what? You probably do too. But I can promise you that you will be loved, and I will take care of you as best I can. Ultimately, we all have to take care of ourselves. But in this scenario of hunkering down with love, I can nevertheless promise you that as much as it's in my ability, I will care for you and tend to you. One thing I know about the mentally ill... most of us got that way because people rarely tended to us with love.

Food for thought. Talk to me. There are many dreams I've had to give up on in life, but finding someone to comfortably pass the rest of this scary life with is one I will never let go of. It's really my only hope.