Hipster T-shirts & First Dates
Why you should always/never wear a statement t-shirt on your first date
I took my leather motorcycle jacket off and headed over to the couch. I perched on the edge of the cushion, not quite ready to make myself at home. I imagine I looked like a robin redbreast on the handle of a well-loved garden spade inspecting a new garden for the first time.
I also looked like a man trying to hide the nerves of someone utterly new to the world of dating.
Before I’d had a chance to check in with myself, Claire was coming back from the kettle with two steaming hot mugs of coffee.
I say mugs, they were the most delicate and dare-I-say, ridiculously feminine fine-china cups I’d ever tried to fit my oversized masculine hands around. ‘Highly impractical’, I thought to myself (like a knob) as I took what I thought to be a well-cultured sip.
Whilst I had no idea who Cath Kidston was at the time, her pastel white, pink & blue floral (not to mention polka-dot) print designs have become a permanent feature in my life.
Claire seemed to be a lot more relaxed than I was. She clocked my t-shirt and must’ve decided to liven the conversation right from the get-go…
“You don’t believe in that do you?”
I looked down to make sure I was indeed wearing the hipster-cool t-shirt that I thought I’d put on that morning.
Yup there it was…Charles Darwin is My Homeboy. It was a T-shirt that said I was inteligent but also a little edgy (actually it was a t-shirt that said I was trying too hard but we’ll let that slide for storytelling purposes 🤣 )
I awkwardly…I think the word is, ‘guffawed’…with a mouth full of coffee. Unbelievably, I managed to stop myself from spraying coffee everywhere. I thought she had to be cracking the funnies but her sub-conscious body language cues were telling me different.
There was something in the unshakeable firmness of her position. It was such a paradox. On the one hand, Claire was as delicate as the quintessential English fine china cup I was holding and on the other, she presented as sure of herself as any mountain range.
Incredulously, I asked myself, ‘Do I believe in evolution?!’
And it dawned on me, wether I believed in evolution, or more broadly, a Western scientific understanding of the world, or not, was besides the point.
The issue was, I’d never had the temerity to ask the question. And not asking questions is the antithesis of science.
Maybe because I was doing a lot of yoga and meditation at the time or maybe the planets were all in retrograde (Sike) but Claire’s honest and unshielded enquiry opened the door for me to question everything at a fundamentel level.
It brought me to the stuff philosophers have been grappling with for millennia but not in an academic way. I wasn’t interested in stimulating my intellectual muscles (even if I had any!).
I just found myself navigating a new and unfamiliar world. It was like I had fallen out of the world I had previously called home and landed in a new space. A new world that looked a lot like the old one but didn’t follow the same rules.
Today I watch as my, almost 2yr old confidently navigates her way around, what for her, must be an entirely alien landscape.
So maybe it’s been a second birth of sorts for me. Why can’t you have more than one birth? Not just a physical birth but a birthing of the soul.
What can I know for sure?
Letting go of your assurances about the world and your place in it has been an unnerving, unmooring path to go down (to mix my metaphors) and I’m not sure everyone needs to go down it.
Maybe it’s a path the male psyche needs to go down. The masculine is in need of a real humbling which I don’t think is very far off if it isn’t with us already.
I’m hoping you can relate to this story of losing everything and finding yourself in the process.
What’s been your experience moving through the threshold of the second half of your life? Leaving behind old notions and perhaps other peoples ideas of who we are. Grappling with or reinterpreting the arc of our lives.
Whats your experience with where the masculine needs to grow up or times when the patriarchy hasn’t held you safely?
However you identify and whatever your thoughts I’d love to hear them!
Especially if you feel like your views are too uncomfortable for society right now.
Much Love
Manos
I’m not sure the patriarchy knows how to hold me safely 😆. I do love a good mug though. And whilst I go believe in evolution I also believe that Charles Darwin was a sexist pig 🐽 😅