Free Love and Catastrophe

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“If I want to find a husband, I’m going to have to leave New Orleans,” I once overheard a young woman say to her friend at a coffee shop. She said this matter-of-factly and without bitterness, and her friend neither argued nor asked her to elaborate, just nodded her head in sympathy. They griped half heartedly for a minute or two, but I got the impression that they didn’t really see the point in continuing a song they had clearly sung many times before.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that at this moment there are perhaps dozens of women having this exact same conversation. Very possibly, men are too, but I am generally not privy to their rituals of complaint, and so I cannot speak with any certainty. I’ll admit that in my less generous moments, I find it hard to believe that men are genuinely dissatisfied by what I perceive to be something of a buyer’s market on their end, but for our purposes, I’ll suspend my disbelief and concede that, at least as far as millenials are concerned, dating in this city can be a rather grotesque spectacle for just about everyone along the gender continuum.

To begin with, New Orleans’ close community ties lend to a certain insularity, which in turn creates a dating pool about as incestuous as the royal families of Europe. Friends are accustomed to passing around lovers along with God only knows what else. It doesn’t help that hygiene levels are never exactly top-notch here, even during the months when sweat isn’t pouring off you in alarming quantities. In a city this small, there is nowhere to hide when things go south. Having an awkward one-night stand with someone you never want to see again basically guarantees you’ll run into them everywhere you go, especially when you leave the house looking your worst. This dismal state of affairs can come as a bit of a shock to newcomers, and I can see where they’re coming from. You’d think that between our promiscuous tendencies and the city’s innate sensuality—from the fecundity of our plant life and the long sultry nights, to the jazzy tunes forever being crooned at us from the streets—the love lives of young New Orleanians would be slightly more exciting.

According to popular opinion, it is not the quantity of sex that’s the problem so much as the quality. The women I know rarely wax poetic in recounting their sexual encounters; it is more common to treat sexual storytelling like a comedy routine. The dates are the set up (we went out for a couple beers after he hit me up on tinder the other night, and had a lovely time...) and the sex is the punchline (until he took me back to his place and he didn’t even have a bed, let alone a condom). It may be dark comedy, but it helps to take the edge off.

Circumstances being what they are, going into my seventh year in New Orleans and the final year of my twenties, I am no longer surprised when someone tells me that their sex life makes them want to leave the state. Then again I was introduced to the unrelenting meat grinder that is passionate love thousands of miles from the STD-ridden swamp I now call home and have since suffered male impropriety in a variety of international locales, so I am a little hesitant to stick New Orleans with the blame. As a female Uber driver once told me, “I used to think the guys in New Orleans were the problem. But I lived all over after Katrina, and now I think they just don’t know how to behave anywhere.”

I’ve spent my twenties in an unusual position as the only millenial in my peer group to never have employed the help of the Internet in finding a sexual partner. The odds of identifying  someone you’ll have chemistry with from nothing more than a photo and a banal personal resume have always struck me as too long to bet on, and in my book, the existential discomfort of a bad date makes the risk way higher than any possible reward. The day a computer comes up with an algorithm that can make sense of my absurdly specific romantic expectations is the day I’ll start swiping with the rest of them, but so long as dating apps remain about as discerning as temp agencies, I will be forced to forage for amorous encounters in the wild.  

Unfortunately, free-range love is not a solution so much as a different set of problems, and while it’s true that a good man is hard to find, I can only place so much of the blame outside myself. As a socially quarantined adolescent book nerd, instead of being initiated into the world of heterosexual relations through trial and error like everybody else, I got all my information second hand from the long dead and primarily male group of professional neurotics responsible for the Western literary canon. Too young to know any better, I allowed deviants such as James Joyce, a notorious panty sniffer, and Leo Tolstoy, a sexually confused Russian who spent a lifetime vacillating between sex addiction and evangelical abstinence, to lay the foundations for my understanding of human sexuality. As you can probably imagine, by the time I actually got in the game, my instincts were pretty wacky.

But even now, years after I took it upon myself to learn the rules of contemporary social engagement, I find my agency in romantic matters is still limited, and I am left with a sense that the game has been rigged by a bizarre and impassible set of societal obstacles. What chance does one person have against a tide of bad pickup lines and a rash of interpersonal awkwardness that has reached epidemic proportions? I am always astonished to observe the sheer number of men and women who, in spite of having at least some mutual attraction, haven’t got a clue of how to talk to each other. Even when there is a spark, no one seems to know what to do about it, and signals can be extremely hard to read. A man might buy you a drink without any romantic intention because he is considerate and you are poor, and a man desperately hoping to lure you back to his home might not buy you any drinks at all simply because he is cheap. I have no illusions about life for women in the ‘50s, but at least back then, when a man staring at you from across the bar sent you a martini, you knew where you stood, no matter how repulsive or married he might have been. What few social conventions were left after the cultural upset of the ‘60s and ‘70s appear to have eroded in the decades that followed. Now, absent any established courtship protocol, we millenials are pretty much fighting blind, and sex mostly seems to happen by accident. The ensuing mass anxiety explains why our young and attractive generation has had to turn to robots to find lovers, and while the situation has still not gotten bad enough to make me join them, I am sympathetic to the impulse. After witnessing a wide array of confounding male antics ranging from sudden, unsolicited nudity to violent bouts of psychosis, I’ve learned that when it comes to dating there is no such thing as a pleasant surprise.

A few years ago, aghast at the paucity of eligible suitors and looking for guidance, my roommate and I decided to throw ourselves at the feet of the Great Divas of Yesteryear. We were too young  and passionate to keep on losing the game just because we didn’t know the rules, and so we decided to call in the experts. Retreating to our house, a foxhole in the trench warfare of New Orleans dating, we sought in old movies and autobiographies penned by their most dazzling leading ladies the answers that had eluded us everywhere from Mimi’s to Miss Mae’s, Pal’s to the Candlelight Lounge. The intelligent men of our generation may tend to favor neurosis over self-possession, but perhaps a touch of Bacall would bring out their Bogart. Mae West’s signature marriage of humor and seduction might be just the right antidote to millennial awkwardness, and if Grace Kelly figured out how to glide through a room like elegance personified why shouldn’t we seek to cure ourselves of clumsiness? And so, as devotees of the silver screen goddesses, we swore to speak with the wit of Lauren Bacall, peer through our eyelashes like Elizabeth Taylor, and work a room as if possessed with the breasts of Sophia Loren. Surely then, we reasoned, we would be rewarded with sex lives less tinged with pathos.

My roommate immediately put our theory to the test with more fervor than I could really muster. Determined to seduce the male population of New Orleans into realizing their full romantic potential, she wore her most coquettish ensembles, flirted with dexterity and vigor, and radiated a joie de vivre capable of illuminating even the darkest dive bar. But for all her optimism the men of New Orleans did not seem to share her vision, and her best efforts were only repaid with sexual frustration. After one promising evening after another led to defeat come morning, the experiment finally ended with her screaming, “AT LEAST LEARN HOW TO FUCK A WOMAN PROPERLY!” to a crowd of unsuspecting millenial men standing on Saint Claude Avenue. The outburst was uncharacteristic of her otherwise easygoing nature, but she wasn’t going to be young forever, God dammit, and at this rate, when it came time for her to write a diva autobiography of her own she wouldn’t have any stories worth telling. Always more inclined towards meta analysis myself, when the experiment inevitably failed me too, I became resigned to the grim reality that the 21st-century just wasn’t made for lovers.

The problem with this verdict, of course, is that one would be hard pressed to produce a century in which the course of true love did run smooth. Since the beginning of recorded memory, there has been a definite consensus among the world’s great storytellers from Homer to the Persian poets: romantic love is an unmitigated disaster. If the long leger of doomed mythological lovers is any indicator, youthful passions have not fared well through the ages. Rife with suicide and societal ruin, pre-modern love stories issue a clear warning to the young and hot-blooded; as Friar Lawrence tells Romeo and Juliet on their wedding day, “love moderately,” for “violent delights have violent ends.”

Perhaps the trouble with modern romance is that the perils of love have gone too long forgotten by the collective memory. We’ve grown complacent after decades of birth control, laissez faire parenting, and a governing political body that, unlike the ancient Greeks, does not consider warfare to be a viable alternative to divorce. We no longer see love as a force of nature whose primary purpose, to judge by its effects, is to wreak havoc on human sanity. An endless stream of manic love songs and criminally optimistic romantic comedies (the bread and butter of a cultural economy designed to extract profits from our unchecked desires) constantly reinforces the notion that passionate love is not a suicide mission but a basic human right. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, we believe love is some exalted state of deliverance, a necessity available to all who seek it, and it appears our shared need is only intensifying as the century progresses.

But then, in the shadow of the imminent apocalypse, who wouldn’t want to seek refuge in the arms of a lover? If ever there was a time to go against the good sense of our ancestors and recklessly pursue love en masse, it would be now. Glaciers are melting, civilization is crumbling, and the future is bleak. These circumstances may not be romantic, exactly, but at the very least they should put our social anxieties into perspective. As the cold winds of fascism and environmental ruin make us cling ever more fiercely to our romantic illusions, why not actually commit to realizing them, knowing we don’t have much to lose? Since desperate times call for desperate measures, we may as well concede our lack of romantic finesse and embrace the kind of confessional vulnerability known to overcome passengers of a plummeting aircraft. For if the urgency of our time could inspire us to give ourselves over to love with honesty and abandon, waiting for the end of the world would certainly be a lot more pleasurable.  

After all is said and done, I suspect it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to convince New Orleanians with this line of reasoning. For all the years of amorous confusion here, I have also had my share of beautiful moments with some truly remarkable men. We may have more freaks in this city than a circus sideshow, but we’re a passionate bunch. Think of Mardi Gras, when we joyfully waltz around town together enveloped in glitter and tenderness. Of the season’s many splendors, its ability to dissolve all inhibitions is my favorite; during Carnival, it is not unusual to fall for a different person every night. In no time at all I find myself lost in the dance of love along with everyone else. As my truest, most vulnerable self, the steps come as easily to me as if I’ve known them all along. Throughout the long parade, I am stripped of fear and scar tissue, and I never wonder whether I’m beautiful enough or if I’ve somehow said the wrong thing. Shedding protective layers of irony and suspicion like snakeskin, I forget all of my hardest lessons and note with pleasure that my dance partners have become as guileless as I.

Is it hubris to imagine this exalted atmosphere can be maintained amidst the slings and arrows of daily living? Maybe. On Ash Wednesday, when we awake to unpaid bills and unbearable headlines, it seems impossible to imagine anything else having the same liberating power. Foreboding isn’t much of an aphrodisiac, and the end of the world may seem a poor substitute for a magic masquerade. But rebellious debauchery happens to be this city’s specialty, and if New Orleanians did resolve to resist annihilation in a triumph of passion like Botticelli's Venus rising from the sea, wouldn’t it be worth it for the spectacle alone?  All I know is, as the rough beast of our impending doom slouches towards Bethlehem to be born, I for one am willing to try.