Of MHC and men

If this blog were a movie, it would start with a tight shot of me looking upset and jangled, sitting in front of the computer in a state of visible agitation. Early-90's-era Pet Shop Boys plays. The camera would pull back to reveal stacks of dirty dishes and general slovenliness. Then the voiceover would commence: How did we reach this point?

Indeed.

Readers, yet another reason for the blog-out was this: A. (Note: this is not Mr. Margarita A. In fact, I suppose, technically we could call this one A, which is a bit of rebus profoundly amusing to me and maybe one other person. Also hard to type. So we'll just call him A2.) A2's inadvertently blog-distorting effects can best be likened to Alvy Singer's remark "As Balzac said, there goes another novel." (hat tip: Ryan) If you don't immediately get the reference, please don't look it up; this is a family blog.

Who is A2? On our ol'triangular attraction model, A2 squeaks by on the intellectual scale. I mean, sure: a few awkward moments, like when he confused Julian P. Barnes with Julian E. Barnes, but mostly in the ballpark. Ish.

On the emotional scale, we have a split ticket. Is there the kind of easy, talk-about-anything rapport? There is not. Is there, however, a visceral sense of something inchoate, ineffable, and molten, just below the surface and striving to be born? Well: yeah. Mostly loading as a factor, I think, on the physical scale. Let's say the physical scale runs from one to ten. On that metric, A2 scores a 2,083. Give or take.

A2 and I became entangled in October, [mumble]-something weeks after the last K breakup, and after he (that is, A2) repeatedly and somewhat haughtily assured me that of course doing so wouldn't affect our pre-existing friendship. Right. So how long 'til our friendship was destroyed? Readers, approximately ten weeks.

There was a big, bad blowup on New Year's Eve (over something incredibly stupid), an aggressive silence, and then the little sh*t went all Old Testamenty, delineating my crimes and my sentence of excommunication in a pompous and painfully-spelled email, followed by a note informing me that he'd deleted my (frankly, quite reasonable and placating) reply unread. All of which is proximate. The real issue here? A2 and I never had a formal relationship -- just out of one, I really wasn't interested in jumping into another -- but, rather, something ambiguous and undefined, which I was reasonably comfortable with but which never sat well with A2's quaintly charming Midwestern mores. When I returned from vacation and A2 confessed he'd missed me more than anticipated and hoped he wouldn't end up getting hurt, I knew we were in trouble. Cue the awfully convenient blow-up, less than 24 hours later.

Putting aside the fact that A2 quite clearly has trust and anger issues that far predate me, this tiff has had the unfortunate side-effect of vaporizing my social life, which, in my laziness and social ambivalence, I'd left solely in A2's care. This leaves me with much time to consider questions like: what the hell just happened? And where did the previous three months go? And, most importantly, how is it even possible to have a non-relationship, something so explicitly without a future (I kept trying to bring up Nikah Mut'ah as a possible sop for his need for labels; he always erroneously thought I was kidding) go so emotionally out of control, so fast?

It's a very weird thing, chemistry. If you asked for a list of qualities I found physically engaging, I could supply it within seconds and A2 would have exactly none of them. Leading me to wonder: is it because he isn't short, dark, and Semitic and couldn't possibly be a distant relation that things got so all-consuming? The old canard about the major histocompatibility complex (MHC, no great links; just google it) and attraction is that there's a pheromone-mediated bias towards dissimilar MHCs, in the service of allelic diversity. Sure, I'd always thought, for other people. For me, I'd generally opted for the more explicitly cognitive similarity-promotes-liking mechanism, especially since some of the psychological research in that area is mine {cough}.

Here's the thing, and it's something you don't see discussed in the MHC literature too much: these two attractors are largely at odds. To put it in current and concrete terms: what are the chances that a blue-collar (-roots) Catholic guy from Wisconsin is going to get my Alvy Singer reference? And, more dispiritingly: do I really have to choose between shared cultural allusions and a touch that inexplicably makes me melt?

In any event, 2009 is off to an incredibly inauspicious start; a non-relationship ending in a very real and raw breakup. Well: emotionally raw, anyway. Intellectually, I can't muster anything other than profound irritation at the juvenile, friendship-shredding, and bullying way A2 handled the aftermath; after all, we both always knew, from the outset, this wasn't something in which to get seriously emotionally invested.

And yet. And yet, and yet.