Ready The Invocation Array!

Once again, we have a title that has nothing at all do with the contents of this post; it's just something I felt like saying, kinda like "FIRE IN THE HOLE!!!" WTF is an "Invocation Array" you ask? Apparently it's something from World of Warcraft, but I know it as the title of a band which I've been listening to a lot lately - or at least it was when I originally started writing this post a few months ago. I highly recommend the track "Bloodsong", which is not on their full-length album.

This song, "Eisbär", which is not by Invocation Array, is also fucking great. A German metal band singing about polar bears? What's not to love?! ICEBEAR!!!111one!!

But anyway, I digress.

Today's topic is brought to you by the letter "Z". Z is for ZING! boys and girls. ZING! goes by many names. Some people call it chemistry. Others call it spark. Polyamorous people apparently call it NRE - "new relationship energy" - which I think is a bit deceptive, because a relationship can be new, exciting, and interesting in various ways but still not have ZING! in any significant amount. I suppose if we want to take the cynical route, it's just a more positive spin on infatuation (which, for those of you who have never studied Latin, is literally translated as "the process of becoming stupid"), but I think that's also somewhat inaccurate. In my mind, infatuation and ZING! are not the same, because infatuation usually begins when you meet someone and fades quickly when you find out that they're just as full of shit as everyone else, but ZING! can appear at any time in a relationship, not just the beginning, even if that's usually where people look for it the most frequently. With apologies to Duke Ellington, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that ZING! ... doo wop doo wop doo wop.

ZING! is that ineffable thing that everybody, even the ones who won't admit it, wants in a relationship. Sure, people want love and trust and dedication and all sorts of other things, too, but I believe that in the absence of ZING! any relationship is ultimately doomed. Love and trust and dedication are great, don't get me wrong, but without ZING! they are boring. It is the ZING! (are you sick of my all-caps-exclamation-point yet?) that makes it worthwhile. It's not that hard (relatively speaking, mind you) to find someone that's not going to treat you like shit, won't cheat on you, will show up when you need them, and won't make your mother look at you cross-eyed when you bring them home for dinner. It's not so easy to find all of those things in someone that also gives you the ZING! in a sustainable way.

I have no idea if most relationships have ZING! in their current states; I suspect that almost all of them had it at one time, but I would be really surprised if more than 25-30 percent of them maintain it for long periods of time (multiple years). When I think about the people who are my mom's age, or people from my grandparents' generation or earlier, many of whom were married for 20, 30, 40, or even 50+ years, I actually think that number is nontrivially lower. People who got married had a higher probability of staying together and literally doing the "'til death do us part" thing because it wasn't socially acceptable to get divorced, or because the cost of doing so (not just monetary, but also emotional) was too high. I think a significant percentage of people stay together because their relationships are good enough to not suck all the time, even though they might never actually be great, but the people persist largely because they don't want to be alone. There have been times when I have wondered if that's what my mom is doing. I definitely think that's what her sister is doing. I could be full of shit on both counts.

On the flip side, I also think that some people that have been together for a long time and who may have gotten married for one reason or another in the absence of ZING! developed it later on. Not every arranged marriage (no, I am not advocating a return to this state of affairs) ends in sadness.^[1]

And that, my friends, is a good segue into the real topic of today's blog post: ZING! and modern society. In a world where we can use the Internet to get more or less anything we want, from pizza to pot, delivered to our doorstep in 30 minutes or less with just a few clicks and a credit card, it should come as no surprise that we demand instant gratification from our romantic interactions. With just the swipe of a finger we can slam the door forever on someone who doesn't photograph well or made the mistake of admitting they voted for Trump and likes a juicy steak made out of real cow (hey, I live in the SF area, these are cardinal sins in the eyes of some people I know) because we didn't get any proto-ZING! from their profile, and yet for all we know, that very person that we swiped left on could have been an endless fountain of ZING! waiting to be tapped.^[2] But we'll never know....

The "swipe left first, ask questions later" crowd are the same ones who swipe right without actually reading someone's profile, and I think I'd throw them all into the fuck-it bucket. If you can't be assed to read a few paragraphs of text, how are you going to manage stringing more than a few words together to carry on a conversation? And what the fuck is the point of swiping right on someone who says that they like cats, don't have or want kids, and aren't interested in dating a smoker, when you're a dog-owning nicotine addict with three screaming poop factories at home? Speaking solely for myself here, because I'm sure there are plenty of dick-first guys^[3] out there that see "Ashtray3KidsDoggoMama likes you!" and immediately think that it's time to call the lumberjack^[4], the attention is not flattering. You might be a lovely person, but some things are non-negotiable deal-breakers.^[5]

However, humans are visual creatures first, so I understand the instant left-swipers' mentality, and it's not really those people that I am looking at cock-eyed here. The raised eyebrow (do blackbirds even have eyebrows?) of Raven J. Blackbird is aimed instead at the people who think that ZING! must be instantaneously manifest within a couple of hours of meeting a person, and if said ZING! is not forthcoming, they execute a delayed left-swipe. Consider the following situation:

You meet someone for the first time, and as far as you can tell, things seem to go rather well. It's not full-on insta-ZING!, but you think the other person is pretty cool, and as far as you can tell, they think the same of you, and it appears that both parties are having a genuinely good time. You haven't uncovered anything about them that would immediately put you off, and again, as far as you know, it doesn't appear that the same has happened to you. Yet there is no second date, because one party claims that they didn't feel any ZING!, even though they have nothing but good things to say about you. I find this situation incredibly bizarre. Are we really so addicted to instant gratification that we must have ZING! right away? How do we know that ZING! would not manifest on a second date if given the opportunity?

I think the reason I find this kind of behavior so puzzling is because the longest relationship that I have had thus far was one which began from delayed ZING!^[6] So I know full well that it's possible for something that doesn't appear to have any ZING! at first encounter to become a full-on ZING! storm later on. And I fully understand people not wanting to waste their time on something that definitely isn't going to go anywhere, but I think our InstaSnapAmaGoogFace culture has fucked our attention spans when it comes to relationships just as it's fucked our ability to read long-form articles without getting antsy or whining TL;DR.

If definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, what do we call it where we try something once and it doesn't suck but maybe isn't exactly what we were looking for, yet we don't give it one more shot just to know for sure? People give so much weight and lip service to first impressions, but I actually think second impressions are more meaningful. I have been told on more than one occasion by people who are now my friends that they thought I was a jackass when they first met me. Hell, I hated sushi the first time I tried it. Now it's one of my favorite foods. In the MMA world, they often say that winning a title isn't sufficient to be a true champion; you have to have a successful title defense. At the highest levels, anyone can beat anyone on any given day, but when you can repeat your success, then you've really got something. If not, then maybe your win was just a fluke.^[7]

And so, I leave y'all with this small bit of corvid wisdom: one engagement with someone is not always going to be sufficient to know what direction, if any, your relationship with that person is going to go.^[8] Don't waste your time when you know it's a clusterfuck, but don't be too quick to dismiss it otherwise. Your crystal ball ain't that clear.