Charlie Brown

Hanging out with younger people when you are old is an interesting experience.

At a recent party, a young woman, probably 22-24 years old and bicycling across the country with her boyfriend, told her friends that relationships are easy and effortless. She told everyone that her relationship with her boyfriend was “meant to be” and didn’t take any effort at all to start or maintain.

My first reaction, which I’m not proud of, contained dark cynicism. I imagined a future in which this couple would break up in bitterness from a combination of boredom, inertia, different life paths, or just intentional cruelty. When I got home, I imagined them bouncing from relationship to relationship in their 30s in some sort of Midtown Hipster Hell of Diminished Expectations.

I was jealous. This had everything to do with me and nothing to do with the young couple. At 40, I couldn’t imagine a relationship effortless in either its initiation or its maintenance. I couldn’t conceive of a relationship that didn’t contain insecurity, awkwardness and effort. I knew at one time what it is like to love someone without any sort of defense mechanisms and neuroses.

Relationships and love are not effortless for me. Instead, it is inherently awkward, difficult and scary – like watching Charlie Brown kick a football even when he knows Lucy will take it away, it’s a leap of faith. It takes bravery for Charlie Brown to try to kick the ball even though he knows after years of experience that the possibility exists that he will fall if Lucy pulls the ball out from under him.

But Charles Schulz’s metaphor goes beyond the mere act of Charlie Brown attempting to kick a ball. After a number of failures, even professional placekickers sabotage themselves. They call it “the yips” – after a number of successive misses, a kicker thinks too much and their mechanics suffer. As a result, placekicking is a self-fulfilling process – if you are confident, your mechanics are flawless. If not, you will miss badly and embarrassingly.

After each time I try and fail at even initiating a relationship, my approach and preparation suffers as I overanalyze each past or potential relationship. I become neurotic after a lifetime’s collection of misses – becoming a self-conscious, worried, neurotic basket case. I make bad decisions – or, worse, think that every woman is Lucy as Charlie Brown’s holder on a field goal attempt. I become, in short, an over analytical mess – the inter-gender equivalent of Lin Elliott after he missed a number of successive field goals. So I stop trying, equating “relationship” with “failure.”

It shouldn’t matter, though. Others do not, of course, define me. Further, if I try again, I should do so without cynicism and without thinking about decades of failures. The process, thoughts and preparations of attempting to kick the ball or start a relationship is all that matters – the result doesn’t. It is brave to try knowing you might fail. It is a leap of faith for me that I may or may not ever try again – if I do, I hope to try with the same wonderful charming naiveté displayed by the young woman last night. Of course, the woman I ultimately attempt to initiate relationship with might have to supply a bountiful amount of patience and possibly a syringe filled with Thorazine in order to deal with my initial nervousness. It would be worth it for both of us.

Cynicism, age and guile are overrated – you end up being the bitter former player sitting in the stands criticizing others when you just lack the skill or guts to attempt what those on the field try every day.

In short, I should at least try. Also, unlike Charlie Brown, I should take great care in selecting the placeholder.