CrazySingeLife Preview: Meet Steel - Male, New York, Straight

As part of the ongoing preview on CrazySingleLife, we’re going to introduce some of the dating stars before the site launches. Each dater on CSL will have an alias derived from a color. They also have to write two posts before they start dating, an introduction post and a Mr./Mrs. Right post. The introduction post is meant as a description of themselves, but not like height, age, occupation. It’s more a window into their soul and the journey that their heart has been on. The second post is an open letter to the future Mr./Mrs. Right so that he or she will know to come calling on our daters.

The following except is from the introductory letter of Steel, one of the two male bloggers for CSL. On Monday, you met Tenne, yesterday you met Cerulean and tomorrow you’ll meet them all. Enjoy!

I didn’t go on my first date until late in high school. Until then, I had been your fairly standard loser, more interested in books than girls; yet I harbored the suspicion that somewhere within me lurked a great romantic. The date (or so I thought) was a success; it was she, and not I, who initiated my first kiss. Later that week, she broke up with me on the grounds that having a boyfriend would interfere with her violin lessons—and in spite of the words of cynical friends, I’ve always believed this was the truth. What motive is too silly to ascribe to the half-formed personalities of high schoolers?

I was crushed. But shortly thereafter, I read my first volume of Proust—In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower. Proust, and not the girl, was my first love; I was smitten, intoxicated. His teenaged hero visits a seaside resort and indulges in the most absurd, fickle, short-lived “love affairs” that could not have reminded me more of myself; but somehow he transformed his humiliation into something that brought me joy to read. And when, five years later, I at last finished all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, I found this had been the pattern of his whole life. Proust died alone in a tiny musty room, having slaved away through so many absolutely lonely nights to transmute his life—that is, the years before he plunged himself into artistic hermitude—into perhaps the greatest work of literature of all time. He committed suicide for Art.

It was about then I realized that being a “great romantic” has little to do with being loved, and—more painfully—with being able to love.

This is only half of the letter. Read the rest when CrazySingleLife launches this week!