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When I was a freshman in college, I was just getting started on a drinking problem. I wouldn’t drink every night, but I wanted to. And I also wanted a girlfriend.
I met a fellow freshman who I really liked. She seemed lukewarm on me, but I kept inviting her to parties and she kept coming. At one point, I thought maybe I had worn her down enough to officially be considered boyfriend-girlfriend. And a big part of that was because we shared a mutual love of camping and the outdoors.
Just kidding. I hated the outdoors. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania but I never quite enjoyed nature like so many friends of mine. I didn’t love hunting or fishing, even though I had done quite a bit of both. And I would have rather slept in the laundry room at a Holiday Inn Express than outside in the nicest tent on earth. It just wasn’t for me.
But my potential girlfriend—we’ll call her Debbie—loved hiking. Loved looking at birds and trees and mountains. She practiced building fires and I practiced lighting cigarettes. It wasn’t a good match. And yet I completely pretended that I was Mr. Bass Pro Shops.
I bring this up on an addiction newsletter because I found phoniness to be a telltale sign that I was searching for something that was impossible to attain—I wanted something to fill the void in me, even a potential girlfriend who I had nothing in common with. I had all sorts of dating partners like that in my early days, where I just tried to immediately turn myself into something I wasn’t so that maybe they’d like me. That is dangerous territory for an aspiring alcoholic, because it’s the starter kit for living a life of lies.
In this case, I was trying to date Debbie when a new Lemonheads album came out. The Lemonheads were a great alternative rock band in the 1990s that I always enjoyed, and their new album had a song called “The Outdoor Type.” It was like they were singing the song to me. It was a cover of a song released a few years earlier, about an indoorsman who was pretending to be the outdoor type to date someone.
Let’s just say that freaked me out. I couldn’t believe someone had me pegged like that—the song was the perfect encapsulation of searching so hard for fulfillment from another person that you become a total fake.
I think about it now, at age 48, and how there is a certain amount of phoniness involved in the dating scene, no matter who you are. Everybody wears nicer clothes and makes sure their hair looks ok and they don’t have shit stuck in their teeth if they are early on in the dating process. That’s pretty normal. But I think I would never dream of pretending to be a camping super-fan just to get somebody to like me any more.
I consider that a gift of sobriety—it took me a long time to figure out who I was, then how to live as that person, not the person that I think somebody else wants me to be. So I don’t think I ever want to go back to pretending that keg stands in the woods is my absolute favorite thing in the world!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
The speaker was going on and on. A man in the fifth row stood up and walked out. As the speaker was winding up, the man returned. After the meeting, the speaker asked the man where he went.
“I went for a haircut,” he said.
“A haircut? Why didn’t you get a haircut before the meeting started?”
The man replied, “I didn’t need a haircut before the meeting started.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2002, Jay C.)
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