The Art of Dating In the Arts

Okay, so I’ll admit it. I’ve been peeking at the dating books at the bookstore. The first thing that occurs to me is I’m too old for this #%@&. The second thing is that one-third of the books are about how a woman can get a man and another third is split evenly between how a woman can dump a man and why a woman doesn’t need a man. Fair enough.

I’m of course browsing furtively through the final third of the books, careful to regularly shake my head with a wry smile and let out an occasional faint mocking chortle whenever someone else comes down the aisle.

In one book from the eHarmony dating people I come across a startling revelation. The book outlines several key points of potential compatibility and one of these points is about, of all things, art and artistic sensibilities. The chapter is even more specific in that it says if you are an artist of any type you might want to consider dating another artist. This all has to do with the care and feeding of your artist lover. According to the eHarmony folks, the artist has unique sensibilities and lifestyle preferences. I can right away list my own idiosyncrasies: I’m a junk food loving, night owling, work-phobic, lifetime non-drinker who’s never owned a car. Kind of a snappy description maybe, but not the type of thing you send in as a personal ad.

The important thing, according to this book, is that the artist has to have someone who understands the need for bouts of privacy and for a more individualistic approach to life – not to mention a tolerance for bizarre utterances (a more benign but nonetheless disturbing version of Tourette’s whereby, say, the poet might suddenly cry out “The fish dreamed of being a monkey!”). And the obvious candidate for such understanding is another artist. You can certainly see how this works among actors who, spending so much time on the set and having not much privacy or mobility, turn to each other with, if the tabloids are any indication, much success – no matter how often they have to keep succeeding, one divorce after another.

My own dating habits have gone completely counter to this. My girlfriends have been far more practical and level-headed than I am. And they’ve still been fairly open-minded about my poetic predilections, averting their eyes whenever they have caught me in mid-ink-spilling on a page. When we broke up it was usually over things that had nothing to do with artistic sensibilities.

I have had fantasies about dating other artists, though. When I was younger, the fantasy was about dating the female lead singer of a band. But I know with my own button-down lifestyle that would never have worked for someone like that. Painters have always had a certain appeal to me, but I have never found myself in those particular artistic circles. A dancer – now there’s someone I could have understood. Me with my soul of a dancer but body of a bowler. Of course, there was always the possibility of another writer. Why not? I can take the subtle but never completely out of mind competition.

But none of these vague fantasies have ever come to pass. I’m not sure why. I suspect it is because for all my interest in the arts there is something anti-artistic about me – something that doesn’t donate to Greenpeace or ignores recycling bins – not out of malice but simply out of too little concern. I prefer McDonald’s to the (formerly) smoke-filled cafes and I preferred Coke to coffee or espresso. Given my late night junk food-fueled marathon computer gaming sessions, I might have been more compatible with a computer geek with a soft spot for weirdness, even if it was expressed in poetry that didn’t rhyme.

The lesson here is unclear to me. Maybe it’s that art can emerge from the most unlikely of sources. Or that we can’t get the heart to read dating books before it starts beating. Or that some lives are simply misspent on art when they should be getting on with the business of getting laid. Or – more likely – just because one knows their way around the contours of art they may not be able to navigate their own heart – at least not without a trained instructor.