Rhythm, Romance, and Jerks

I believe I have figured out the secret to one of life's most impenetrable questions: Why do chicks dig Jerks?

After reading and discussing a whole slew of theories for this phenomenon, none of them left me wholly satisfied, particularly since the digging of jerks tends to be universal, at least through certain periods of every modern woman's life.

I boldly step into this arena, being an ignorant man, and welcome the dissent and abuse that is likely to follow.

Here's a related question: Why is music so entwined with love? This is a bountiful zone of speculation. Music resonates with biorhythms, with our psychological memory of sexual rhythms. Music links our rational minds to our intuitive selves in incomprehensible ways, and often concerns other subjects that do the same, primarily our passions. Specifically love.

And what is it about love that we love? Is it not this very sense of harmony between these rival aspects of our souls? Is not love a microcosm for the rhythms and season of all life? For it encapsulates so many of these rhythms within itself: sexuality, which is still tethered to an ancient seasonal swell; family, whose stages trace most great patterns and roles of social life; reciprocation, in its ultimate form, the giving and receiving of ourselves with others.

Music illuminates and focuses these elements within us; elements often too broad to encompass five minutes of thought, are stripped to their essence in music--that bittersweet pill of temporally experiencing the eternal (or close enough to eternal, in the recurring significance of these elements through human history).

Uh-huh, you say, so what exactly does all this flowery shit have to do with jerks? Obviously it is not that jerks are in tune with these romantic ideas. Well, probably not, but women generally are, and it is in the jerk that a woman is best able to experience these things--at least on the surface.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Josh. Are you just talking about drama? The drama of being with a jerk? Kind of, but I think the real answer is far more subtle.

It all comes down to a theory I have about emotions in general. Anyone who has ever been a teenager probably remembers a time that they were depressed for no damned good reason. And love itself, sometimes, seems to strike for no damn good reason either. Usually the two (depression and love) are entwined, but my question is: are they entwined with each other like a pair of dancers, or are they entwined with some third element--like two planets orbiting the same sun?

To be depressed about nothing is a horrible experience. It may be the most horrible experience there is. The mind has nothing upon which to hang the depression, nothing to blame as its source, and therefore no direction to go about fixing it. But what if all depression were truly this way? What if every time you got depressed you were really depressed about nothing at all? What if depression were just something that happens to you because you are human. If it were merely an experience of the world that comes and goes with the tide of your brain chemistry?

But wait, we're often depressed about things and we know exactly what those things are. Do we really? Or has our rational brain merely trained itself to cope with these rhythms through reason? Maybe the rational brain is just a control freak who even wants to lord it over our emotive and intuitive side (yes, rational brain, don't deny it). Okay. Imagine yourself as a child, developing patterns of needs, and the denial or fulfillment of those needs. As you get older this behavior develops into a more sophisticated form of meeting needs--desires are born. Don't get these two terms confused. Desires are the ordering principle that regulates (and often disguises) our needs. Desire stacks on top of need in such a complex way that I'd have to hire a psychologist to describe it, but I think you all know what I mean. Through desire, needs eventually becomes psychological entities rather than biological ones. Needs spread out and becomes multifaceted, and eventually Desire comes in to represent, for example, maybe a sort of storing-up for future needs. It may do so wildly and neurotically, or it might do so in a fairly healthy fashion. "I need sex. I know I'm going to need sex in the future--wouldn't it be more efficient to have a long-term girlfriend?" But you'd kind of look like a chump if you said you NEEDED a girlfriend. This is an example of a desire generalizing a complex of needs over time.

And you guys thought I wasn't a romantic!

Anyway, the point is, most of our emotions express to us this complexity of needs through the conduit of desire. Desire is the pipeline from emotion to biological need, and further to the biological rhythm that those needs bear out. The rhythm that was once based on a physical craving has become a psychological craving, and a psychological rhythm. The rhythm may or may not connect with any particular circumstance. We could just have an emotion slap us in the face one day, out of the blue, like a stray memory. And because the emotion is a complexity of desires which are a complexity of needs, we might not be able to draw any rational connection between what we're feeling and what our self really has to have.

Buddhist's speak of the wheel of suffering. I'm going to steal this image for my own ends. Imagine a cycle of suffering that comes and goes in your life. Imagine it driving your emotions in a complex pattern. For simplicity's sake, let's pretend the wheel turns in a very simple way: every winter you will be depressed. Thus spake the Wheel of Suffering! So winter comes along and you start to get depressed, fine, and being no longer a teenager, you start to wonder why you're depressed and you start to look for the cause. (I imagine this first phase happening at a very subconscious level, but again, for simplicity, we'll pretend this is all going on in your inner monologue). So you say, what could be the matter, and most likely something in your life is not going as planned. Well maybe that's it! And you assign that problem to your depression. You do this because you are no longer as in touch with your unconscious as you were when you were younger, and your brain, that has developed its tidy system of wants and needs, requires--no, demands!--some source for the depression, in order that it can run that source through its desire-satiating system, and do (or believe that it is doing) something about it.

This theory may or may not have any validity. I've often thought about it mostly for fun, but the tendrils certainly grab onto obvious truths. Rhythms are important and are a part of our emotions. They are psychological requirements, and even if they are not the all-powerful source of our emotions, they are at the very least strong influences, and deeply entwined.

Just like this apparently wild digression is deeply entwined with our topic: the jerk.

Imagine a woman in love. This is a tremendous place for her to be in. This is the crystallized expression of all of her emotional needs and how she intends to deal with them.

BUT! Ahhh... something is amiss. Relationship expresses our conjoined rhythms just as feelings express those rhythms (and by "express" I mean a form of inner communication, say, from subconscious to conscious--"feel that? yeah, that's hunger. eat something.") Similarly, the relationship rhythm, extending from the individual biorhythms, might indicate that something is wrong with the relationship.

Or it might just indicate that life is a series of epicycles, of swells and release, of motions and emotions. But what is the rational brain to do with all that?

What if you're dating an absolute prince? What if he is fulfilling all your needs with the utmost loyalty? Sounds good on paper, right? But most women will admit a certain anxiety arising from this situation. Suppose that anxiety is nothing more than the conflict between experiencing an ebb in relationship, and having no rational explanation. Nothing to DO about it! "I feel lonely, but he's right here attending to my needs. The fucker!"

The loneliness comes with the tide, as does feelings of inadequacy, fear, anger, and countless others that we still don't really have names for.

But with the nice guy there is no tangible way to confront it. With the jerk? Ahhh... now there's another story.

The jerk undoubtedly will have any number of recent neglectful behaviors that the rational mind can assign to the emotion. And whether or not they are connected is not the point. What matters is that they are there to be confronted. "I feel like hell. Why? I don't know, but he stood me up the other night, so maybe that's part of it."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not slamming women. This is just as much a guy-thing, and anyway, I'm exaggerating a point. In fact, I'm convinced that women are generally the only ones who eventually figure this shit out and come up with more creative ways to deal with it. Which is why the older women get (hopefully) the more they start to stray from the jerk-attraction.

In the meantime, you have your emotion, and you have your jerk, and now you have the recipe for living out the great... yes, here comes the word... the great drama of life's rhythms. You can express your frustration, and you can do it in a way he understands. You did this to me, you fucker. And if he's a crafty jerk, he will finally relent and apologize, and the cycle of reconciliation will be complete.

This cycle is expressive of who we are. I'm not dogging on it. It is a powerful and pervasive force. The "nice guy" leaves no room for reconciliation. He allows no rift and so there is none to repair. There is no great movement of emotions (which, recall, are an expression of our deepest rhythms), in which the woman and her man can participate. And without that, what's the point?

(Is life not really, as Shakespeare said, a great play? And whether we drive or are driven by these little psychic cogs and wheels through the movements of time--of course what we really want is our counterpart to play their part.)

Am I saying guys should be jerks? Not really. I guess if I were to give advice I'd just saying be your damn self. There's a little jerk in there somewhere, I guarantee it. But dating a super-jerk for a long time is probably a little psychotic, and way on the other extreme. For all of this to work, the subject must be a normal jerk-faced jerk. He must be able eventually to come around and do this dance with the girl. If he doesn't, he'll be just as unfulfilling as the purely nice-guy. Women don't want "jerks" per-say, but they want the expression of the natural rhythms, the ups and downs that are life. And they want someone to share those rhythms with, to participate in the conflict-resolution experience.

Or maybe it's just that women have to be right all the time, and the jerk offers them the best opportunity to do so. *ducks*