A good man with a decent job

Another thing I need to realize about G__ is that he is conventional. He has quite an extroverted, witty, curious intellect that is hungry for exploration, and what he yearns for deep down is convention. He’s not going to be the kind to surprise me. He will seek me out, and he will do it for the things we normally do together—play video games, watch Deep Space Nine, maybe take a walk. The thing is, if I suggest something new for us that I would enjoy, and he says yes, and then we do that thing a second time together, there’s a good chance he might suggest it the third time.

One of his deepest gifts (I say one of because it’s possible that he isn’t an ENTP) is his conventionality—that he makes a home for himself, keeps a steady job, and a steady circle of friends, his habits. He’s reliable. For all his unreliability—deciding and telling me at the last minute that he was going to Summer Rites, telling me at the last minute that he was too tired to go to the gym, telling me he was probably going to get a drink with M______ around 7:30-8 and he’d call me, and then I don’t hear from him till 10:30—for all his unreliability, he’s very reliable.

Before our first date when I was walking through London Fields to meet him, I thought of what Kelley said about finding myself a good man with a decent job. And I thought, “OK, so I’m going on a date with this guy, and I know the type. Work hard, party harder. He sees himself as alternative and individual because he lives in Dalston and wears tight jeans and hangs out at the George & Dragon, but deep down he’s as conventional as they get. And I do enjoy convention and repetitiveness and patterns and habits. Likewise he enjoys connecting with other people, and with me. And we’re both intelligent explorers. Like Martok said to Worf [sc., DS9: “You Are Cordially Invited”], I might never have imagines myself falling in love with someone like him—someone so cheeky and unreliable on the surface, and so mushy and conventional underneath. But I did. And I don’t want to change that or give that up for anything, I want to cherish that experience and him.