Where Does Crazy Come From?

I was having a perfectly lovely evening earlier, spending time with a man whom I am trying to get to know better. He seems attracted to me. I know I am attracted to him. Our conversation was mostly about him, since he seems to be so much more comfortable talking about himself than he feels when he is asking about me. Then crazy entered, and the rest of the evening (an excruciating 35 minutes) was spent with me trying to make sure I didn't throw up the three quarters of my dinner that I'd eaten.

Crazy and I don't get along very well. Some people don't mind it. Me, it makes me ill.

Once I was talking with a man who seemed normal (enough) when crazy showed up in the form of a question.

"Have you ever been abducted by aliens?" he said as if he were asking if I'd ever had sushi.

"I ask this" he continued as I tried to choke down the vomit in my throat, "because I once dated a girl who had been abducted and it turned out that I lived very near the field where..."

To be honest I don't recall the rest of his story. I was searching for an exit. Crazy makes me want to run. Maybe that's why I get nauseous... it's in preparation for my flight. I'll need to purge my guts so I can run faster.

Online dating is more the norm today than any other form of meeting people over forty. I'm sure it's worked for a lot of folks, but it does seem to come with an inherent risk of meeting a disproportionate number of crazies. Maybe crazy people do online dating because they can hide their insanity neatly, tucked into emails that can be edited. But once you meet face-to-face, crazy isn't nearly as easy to hide. As a Counselor I pride myself in being able to screen out a lot of the crazies that contact me. But now and then one gets through. When that happens, like tonight, I am left feeling incredibly vulnerable.

So where does crazy come from? If I detach here for a moment and analyze it from a distance it isn't nearly as scary. This man probably has met a dozen crazy women before me and he was worried I might turn out to be one too. He's probably had people be mean to him for no reason on his way to our date. He probably is coming up on the anniversary of some significant event with his ex-wife. Maybe he's under a huge amount of stress at work: perhaps someone implied he was incompetent (which clearly he is not). Maybe (and it had certainly looked this way to me earlier in the week) he is totally attracted to me and not sure he can win me over. I imagine that if all these factors were not conspiring against him this evening, he could have continued to appear to be perfectly sane. Then something inside of him slipped and he suddenly may have felt doomed... which triggered this preemptive and self-sabotaging strike. I'll bet that his form of crazy has its roots in all sorts of reality. Unfortunately, his reality wasn't mine.

He was talking about his work and telling me how he spends his weekends. I was sitting there thinking, 'I sure would like to kiss you right now'. The next thing I knew he launched into run-on paranoia.

"You've been looking at me like there is something wrong with me. It's like you are looking down on me. I get the impression you are trying to attack me."

Huh?

What?

We could have ended the evening with the very satisfying smooch I'd been thinking about all day. Instead, crazy showed up and I beat a hasty retreat. I cannot believe I came that close to swapping spit with a nut case.

Then again, on any given day, aren't we all a bit crazy?