The Ontarion - Relationships and revolutions

Starting relationships at protests a better alternative to the bar

For my whole life, an image of the bar has been building in my mind. As a kid the bar was a place where grownups go, where people drank the alcohol that I wasn?t allowed to taste, and where the heroes in the movies I watched always got the girl. As a teenager, the bar represented a departure from the conservative sexual politics of my Catholic high school; it offered distant promises of fulfillment and escape.

For my first year of university, as an 18-year-old without a good fake ID, the bar became the place where the seemingly impossible came true. As the res-parties turned into pre-drinks for Trappers, older guys started to bombard me with stories of their sexual conquests at the club. They would tell me about the blowjobs in the bathroom, the supermodel-type girls they had seduced and the unlimited supply of women?s numbers they had in their phones. The people bragging often lacked social skills, or any perceivable depth. Their insecurities were palpable and with a couple of the right insults they would have shattered ??but I still believed them. I believed their stories because I trusted in the illusion of the bar: I thought it was a place where the weak became strong.

After my 19th birthday, I watched as the self-proclaimed sex gods would fail with women, and then drink excessively as if to repress their own inadequacy, before repeating the cycle. And I began to see that the bar is a lie, and that lying to everyone around you is what the bar is all about.

You see, the thing about the bar is that who you are doesn?t matter; all that matters is who people think you are. Appearance is everything and if you pay enough attention to the codes of intimacy, you can appear to be anyone. The process is gradual and your actions depend on the situation, but over time you learn the best ways to angle your body, the right postures to assume and the most effective ways to smile and look at the people around you.

You become adept at eye contact, using your peripheral vision to get people to look at you before meeting their gaze, so as to position them as the pursuer and yourself as the pursued.? You learn different mentalities to hold in your mind and when to switch them. You get a feel for when to be funny, when to be dangerous and when to be sexy.

Like it or not, what you learn is game. And while you can tell yourself you?re not playing and that pickup artists are losers, the reality is that ignoring the signals around you decreases your performance and prevents people from seeing the great person you supposedly are ? so everybody plays and everyone tries to get better.

While getting better at playing the game increases your chances of a successful interaction, what you still never really figure out at the bar is compatibility. This is because everyone to some degree plays the game, which also kind of means that everyone is lying about who they are. Seducing somebody at the bar has more in common with code breaking than actual intimacy, as your navigations through social barriers rarely produce genuine insights into individuals? inner selves.

This is why people tell you not to enter into relationships with people you meet at the club. It?s not that people who go to bars are worse than anyone else, it?s that your ability to discern who they are as people is generally obscured. This is not to say that lots of great relationships don?t start at the club, but that the success of these relationships is largely chance.

If I?ve convinced you of some of the shortcomings of the downtown Guelph breeding ground and you?re feeling lost, don?t worry. There is an alternative space with a rich history of helping people to discover fulfilling relationships. It?s called the ?protest rally.? And in the sexual revolutions of the 1960s, protests were central to challenging the societal norms of monogamy and celibacy. Despite what you?ve heard about the origins of Western sexual freedom ? it wasn?t discovered on the dance floor ? free love was won on the street.

Yet even with protests and their historic ties to sexuality and relationships, they?re almost never suggested as realistic places to find somebody.? The cultural stereotypes disseminated by the media paint protesters as pedantic asexual hipsters whining and tweeting ironically. Any reference to sex and protests (which is rare) is always transformed into a caricature of the real thing. Sexual liberation is replaced with images of smelly hippies smoking joints and awkwardly groping each other after singing ?Kumbaya.? It?s as if the words used to describe social activism have replaced the offensiveness traditionally associated with swearing. Feminism has become the new ?fuck.?

But when you actually join a protest, you surround yourself with the positive energy of those who refuse to passively accept injustice. Gone is the misanthropic doom preacher. The doubter who thinks but never does. For he is silenced, made quiet by the human potential of the crowd. Everywhere you look, people show you that they?re not afraid ? that the fear-machines of the status quo will not stop them and that there is an answer to the hopelessness of despair. And when you see all that courage, it makes you brave, it makes you question the barriers holding you back, and it makes you less susceptible to the universal turnoff of cowardice.

The stale small talk that plagues most social gatherings with its disgusting repetition of boring surface observations also ceases to be an issue. Peaceful civil disobedience creates an environment that facilitates passionate in-depth conversations. The adrenaline and hope that comes with actively trying to make a difference causes you to feel close to the people around you. Suddenly telling someone about your university major seems irrelevant and all that matters is your deepest fears and concerns about the world. A protest shows you what real communication feels like and it reminds you of how valuable it can be to listen.

The act of resistance brings out the strength within yourself and everyone around you. Instead of having to guess through drunken eyes and the many masks of game, you see people?s capacity for love and morality laid raw. Finding a partner no longer requires a suppression of the self in a minefield of chance. At protests, starting new relationships actually makes sense.

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Source: http://www.theontarion.com/2012/11/relationships-and-revolutions/

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