a valentine story

or, I know a guy named Roland

I have an unusual job. I never talk about it because I find it so supremely uninteresting that I can barely bring myself to say it aloud when people ask me directly to my face. Many people don’t seem to even know what my job is!

Sometimes my job requires that I spend most of a week in a car with someone who works for some kind of industrial manufacturer of machines. This is both a crucially important part of my job and the absolute worst part of it.

The men (so far, only ever men) I’m forced to spend these weeks with are generally unpleasant libertarian types. And so most of my job during these hours in the car involve making small talk about things I don’t really care about.

I don’t watch sports. I don’t watch The Blacklist or whatever dramatic TV show men over 50 watch. I don’t listen to hair metal or country music.

I do, however, have an ability to talk about almost any subject uttered within my hearing regardless of ignorance. And so I can fake along with sports talk and can do what men do about any topic we know nothing about: speak with authority.

Other men appreciate this.

One of the men who comes to visit most often has a name but we’ll call him Roland because that’s the kind of thing people do on the internet when they talk about a real person.

Roland has told me he’s in his early forties but has also spoken out loud what his birth year is, which makes him ten years older. I have no idea why he lied to me about this the first time I met him.

Roland is bald, single, and addicted to working out. He has told me he works out, on average, three hours a day every day of the week. I do not care if this is true or not. Since I’ve met him, he has become increasingly muscular, though, so I assume it’s true enough. He’s never been married and has dated many women throughout the seven years I’ve known him.

It has never gone well.

When I first met him, he almost exclusively dated women in their 20s. Or at least this is what he told me. Again: who cares. He sometimes bragged about having sex with them. This is a topic so far from my interest that I guess I couldn’t even hold back my absolute disinterest in his possibly imagined sexual encounters and so he stopped talking about this with me some years ago.

Life is full of such minor blessings.

Usually, the blame for his poor romantic luck has fallen on the women he meets. Women be crazy and so on. He’s told me at different times that the problem is with dating sites/apps. Every woman, he says, has dozens of men trying to get their attention and so they’re always playing the numbers game, the grass-is-always-greener-game.

Fortunately for me, I met my wife before I ever downloaded an app (literally - I didn’t have a smart phone) or visited a dating site.

To be kind, I take Roland’s word for it. Because also: I don’t care.

Over the last few years, he’s begun dating older women. Which is to say: he’s dating women within ten years of his age. This seems to have led to more success, or at least longer relationships. So far, though, it still has never turned out well.

When he’s not blaming women, he blames his job. He travels, by choice, about forty weeks out of the year. I mean this is by choice because no one requires him to travel this much. His employer would be fine if he only traveled, like, twelve weeks a year. But he chooses to be on the road with people like me nearly every week of the year. I suppose there's something to be said about having a captive audience.

A bit more about my job: I never argue with these men who spend hours of every day in my car with me. Any theoretical argument would begin with a power imbalance. The primary one being economic. While business isn’t personal, it’s also almost completely relationship driven. If Roland and the other men who sit in my car with me spent most of their time arguing with me, there’s the very real possibility that I would lose my current means to money.

So if you’re wondering why I don’t push back on the things Roland and men like him say while I’m with them, it’s because being correct may be a noble pursuit, but nobility and righteousness, unfortunately, don’t feed my son.

While I may not enjoy my job or these hours spent with strange men in my car, they seem to enjoy them well enough. We get along well enough, even if I mostly wish I was anywhere else doing anything else. But Roland tells me about his life and his hopes while he scrolls through his boomer-meme-filled facebook newsfeed. Sometimes he tries to show me some meme about how AOC is dumb or whatever. My nonreaction has never been a deterrent, and he laughs along with whatever passes for conservative humor to aging men.

Anyway, because of his busy schedule, Roland’s romantic partners don’t have much time to spend with him and so they look for someone else.

This seems fairly normal. Roland, to his credit, acknowledges this.

But he also says he likes traveling this much.

Roland fills his days with exercise. He is, by his own description, rarely alone. He’s always doing something with his friends, who are also in their early fifties and single men who go to bars all weekend to pick up women, buying expensive boats to ride around, and driving ATVs and snowmobiles at all hours and at all levels of intoxication. If he’s not with his host of aging bachelors, he’s spending his days in cars with people like me.

On those few occasions when he is alone, he tirelessly works on his house. The kinds of projects he does on his house astound me. Not simply because they’re a lot of work, but because they seem pointless. A few years ago, for example, he dug an enormous trench around his house to keep it from flooding. Not that flooding was previously a problem he dealt with, but you simply never know.

Roland likes his life the way it is. I know because he tells me so.

This is a natural kind of posture I’ve encountered with many different people over the years. I even took up this pose in my young life. This pose is defensive in nature.

When I was younger, I told myself I didn’t want anything serious, that I would never get married or have children. I said this and meant it. But part of why I meant it was to convince myself that my loneliness was partly my choice. My inability to be a good romantic partner was not so much my fault but simply a bonedeep need to move, to be free, to be careless. Loneliness was the side effect, not the cause.

I know people still, in their thirties, knocking on their forties, who tell me that they enjoy the single life. They don’t want to get married or be in a relationship.

For some amount of these people, I’m sure this is true. But I know these people. I see the need in them, the insatiable longing.

Now, I don’t think people need to be married or even in a relationship to find fulfilment. I don’t think people need to have children or even family ties to be satisfied and thrive.

But I also know loneliness. It’s a disease that scars you. I can spot the scars on others because I know exactly what they look like, what they sound like, what they feel like. Loneliness carves through you, even when you’re with friends and family. It is a hollowing, wasting disease.

You can run to new continents, fill your days in foreign cities you’ve read about in books, seen in movies, spending your nights drunk and high and in love with the temporary people who populate your expansive yet claustrophobic life.

In all those days in Europe and Asia, I never told anyone I was lonely. To name it is to make it stick. And I was running as fast and as hard as I could to keep from having it stick to me. Never mind it had already coated my skin, seeped through to sinew and marrow.

And so I know the smell and look of this particular disease.

Roland is lonely. He is, perhaps, the loneliest person I’ve ever met.

It’s not helped that he’s a dick.

I bring up Roland because, without fail, he plans his visit to Minneapolis for the week of Valentine’s Day. Why he chooses always to come to Minneapolis this week - I couldn’t begin to tell you. Maybe I make him feel less lonely than the other men he spends car-filled days with.

This means that in our entire marriage, Chelsea and I have never really spent the day together doing anything.

One memorable Valentine’s Day involved Roland and me eating at a very crowded restaurant in St Paul filled with romance and desire. The menu was designed specifically for couples. Dinners for two, wine specials, signature cocktails that only come once a year.

This was not very funny to live through, though it is funny to see from the outside. Two men so clearly not on a date having a date on the date-iest day of the year.

I should have bought him a rose.

And now, strangely, when I think of Valentine’s Day, I don’t think of romance and love. I think of an aging man so desperately lonely that he does whatever it takes to fill his days.

All of this is a long way of saying that I hope you’re not lonely.

I hope you’re with people you love. I hope your Valentine’s Day was beautiful and fun.

Chelsea and I had our first Valentine’s Day together in years last night. She’s pregnant and feeling sick so we didn’t really do much. But sometimes just sitting beside each other in bed is all you really need.

It’s definitely the best cure for loneliness I’ve ever found.