The John Avery Effect, Pt. 2

I went to a party at a friend's house a few weeks ago - you know, one of those Girls Nights. It was awesome. The hostess is a natural socialite, and had the whole evening set up to hang out, drink, gossip, and enjoy each other's company. I was especially excited because one of my friends from work was there. I hadn't seen her in a while, and I was eager to catch up.
Except she was there, but she also really wasn't there.
She was at the party, but she wasn't present.
She had her nose glued to her phone the. entire. time.

Curious as to what was so important, I asked, and she showed me: she was on Match.com, and had found a connection with a cute guy. They were chatting through the app, exchanging messages back and forth. She showed me a few photos he'd used for his profile page, and he was indeed worthy of her interest - but not like this.

Rather than spend an evening with her actual friends, at a party she was physically attending, she kind of ditched us all and gave her undivided attention to this guy she hardly knows. Based on a few photos and texts back and forth, she automatically gave this stranger the benefit of the doubt, assumed he's awesome, and blew us off to maintain his interest.

"Yep, he's hot. And now your beer is, too."

I hate this for her, and I'm ashamed to admit I've been guilty of this in the past, too: It's the John Avery Effect.
When we don't know someone very well, we assign to them the qualities we hope to see. "Ah, he has a picture in a rural area! He must like to hike! Therefore he's healthy and in great shape and loves nature and we'll give our kids earthy, naturalistic names like 'Cedar."
NO. IT JUST MEANS SOMEONE TOOK A PHOTO OF HIM OUTSIDE ONCE.

Human beings are meaning-making machines, and when we're kind, good people, we tend to project those qualities on others. The less we know about someone, the better we think they are. That's how I operated. For me, I'd meet someone and if they behaved marginally decently towards me, I automatically thought they must be a fantastic person. I would place their value higher than the people I actually knew, because those people had at some point shown humanity, shown weakness, or let me down. But THIS person - this shining beacon of hope - THIS person is amazing.
Often these estimations are unfair to their subject. When I placed the men I was interested in so high up on a pedestal, it was only natural that they'd let me down. I set them up to fail by assuming they were perfect.

I felt bad for my party friend - not only was she wasting her time with us, but I suspect she was wasting her time with him, too. What guy is going to be intrigued by a woman he already has at his beck and call, on a Saturday night? She's out, at a party, and giving him her 100% focus. There's not really much alluring or ooh-I-have-to-get-to-know-this-mysterious-creature about that. Men's brains are still pretty simple. They get off on Novelty, which is why if you sleep with someone too soon in the relationship, sadly, more often than not that relationship is doomed. It's been my experience that the guys who are sexually attracted to a woman, but are not instantly gratified in that department, often stick around and (gasp) actually get to know the woman they're pursuing sexually and discover that hey, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, they may have a lot more in common than interlocking genitalia.

Plus, the fact is, my smitten friend (in addition to making herself look desperate) is making her assumptions based on a PROFILE SITE. A carefully manicured presentation of the best parts of someone. It's not like she met him at Whole Foods so she can make a logical guess that he likes organic carrots and is gainfully employed. She's looking at a dating site, so of course only the final edited director's cut is shown. Even if they go one step further, and link up via facebook, that's still not the whole story. Who among us is accurately defined by their facebook page?
Except for me, of course. I have a profile pic featuring me, on stilts, wearing a lemur. A goddamn lemur, people. I'm awesome.

My friend over-valued this stranger, devalued her friends, and worst of all, devalued herself when she spent her night like that. But I've done it too. (In my defense, I really wanted to get laid.)
But let's look at this behavior, because it's not uncommon and sadly it affects all ages of women, at any time. Where did this nasty habit begin?

JOHN GODDAMN AVERY, THAT'S WHERE.

In Part 1 of this series, I describe a very influential first-love with a guy I really didn't know all that well, but thought I did. It was a big part of my emotional development and came at a critical time in my teen years, so my "relationship" with this guy actually had a massive effect on the way I handled relationships in the future. I suspect that the timing (hormones and whatnot) and outcome (teen heartbreak) are not unique to me, so it's my conclusion that the John Avery Effect affects lots of women other than just myself. This common experience sets a pattern in a still-developing brain. Sorry, ladies, but yeah - our brains didn't get full-grown til we were out of our teens. For boys, it happens even later.
We all have a first love. We all have a John Avery. That guy gets around.

John would send me letters, and, hungry for connection, I'd instantly gloss over what he wrote and read what I wanted to read. I was oblivious to my own self-editing, or I lied and told myself it didn't matter. (Trust me ladies, it matters. But that's a subject for another time.)
When John would simplistically describe his new home and town (per my eager request) I'd photoshop my own mental picture until a blah Nothingtown became a lush winter farmland paradise. Snert and concrete rebar became fluffy sparkling snowdrifts and cherry-red brick walls. I enhanced it, mental pixel by mental pixel, subconciously because that is where I wanted it to be when I met up with John again.
We were getting married. I know because he gave me a necklace.

I caught myself doing the same thing, too, when a guy I'd meet tells me he's a director. I automatically assume his films are the stuff of genius. If he tells me he paints, I assume his work is fantastic. And the worst part? If these works didn't live up to my expectations, my brain was so tired of being disappointed, sometimes I'd lie to myself and say "oh, wow, yeah... it TOTALLY is a great painting of a landscape... er, self-portrait. Is that a face? I see it now, wow that's good." My projections went rampant to the point where if someone laughed at my joke, I'd assume THEY were hilarious.
I think a lot of it comes from good intentions, but I'm ashamed to say a whopping portion of it came from low self-esteem. I didn't really like me much, so if they showed interest, they should probably be knighted on the spot.

Once I got a little (coughcough) (OK, a LOT) older, and had the luxury of my old thought patterns destroyed, I began to see things a little more clearly. After the dust settled from my explosive divorce, I got to reinvent myself, and this time, I choose a woman I love. She's smart, she's kind, she's confident. And she has a great sense of humor. But she's still a total softie, and still very, very in love with love.

Cue Round 2 with John Avery.

After almost 2 decades of wondering, I finally tracked down John. Even though I'm in a very happy relationship, I've always been curious as to whatever happened to my first love. And so, through the modern miracle of Facebook, I found out...

As soon as I saw the profile photo, I knew it was him. Same green eyes, same sandy blonde hair, just framing the face of an older version of the boy I knew. His facebook page is not set up to allow friendship requests, but I could scroll down and see a sampling of what his life is like based on the 4 profile photos he selected.

1) There's the angry beard shaved head black and white shot.
(He's deep, he's broody, he's angry! Aha! The stormy musician I'd fallen in love with!)

2) There's the kinda musing, reclined in a chair, black and white shot.
(Sooooo broody!)

3) There's a measuring tape with a "Local Union #4" logo on it.
(He's a ...metal sheetworker? My sensitive musician is a sheetworker??)

Aaaaand my personal favorite:
4) a two-shot of a cheery looking woman in glasses, and a cherub-cheeked toddler who looks like both of them.

Wow.
Could this have ever been me?

And of course I have to wonder... is this his wife? Is that their child? Is he living out the dreams he'd shared with me, all those years ago? None of this is what 16-year-old John said he'd wanted.
I picture myself, if things had worked out, living his life in South Carolina. I have glasses and a toddler and a sheetworker husband...
It's not me.
It's not what I want. It's not what I ever wanted. And I'm so happy for the glasses-woman, and the toddler, and him, but happiest for me, I think. I'm doing exactly what 16-year-old Jaime said she wanted to to: I'm writing in LA.
It's hard to say whether or not he's happy. I hope he is, because he springboarded a very powerful lesson for me, but honestly, I don't know him. Sadly, I never really did, because we see what we want to see. Noone could've ever been as cool as the John Avery I'd made up in my mind. The shy musician with the green eyes, casually strumming a guitar in his van while we toured America and I wrote from my laptop.
And I don't have John Avery, but I have something much, much better - a genuine, real, authentic man whom I fucking ADORE because he is not exactly what I'd imagined, but everything I'd hoped for. He's smart, and kind, and confident. And he has a great sense of humor, and he loves me better than I've ever been loved for who I am, in spite of who I am, because of who I am.

The John Averys and the subsequent men I've projected on are their own men. They are wonderful and flawed and awful and perfect in their own ways, and I'm slowly wiping the glitter (I somehow secrete) from my eyes and learning to see people for who they really are, and not who I want them to be. There are so many special, awesome, good guys out there - but they're the ones who will straightforwardly tell you how they feel over pad thai, and not monopolize your Girls Night because they want to get laid.

"I know you said you were busy, but I have a penis, so..."

The very best way to get to know someone is to know yourself. And when you get to the point where you can love yourself enough, you won't have to throw that love on everyone else instead. You don't have to make a stranger like you. If they DESERVE you, they'll like you just because.
And hey - maybe I don't know you that well, but I think you're pretty terrific. So put the phone down, girl. Come party with us.

The John Avery Effect, Pt. 1

After literally nineteen years of searching, through the modern miracle of cyberstalking, I finally tracked down the first man I ever loved. And let me preface this by stating that this was a HARD teenage crush, back in the flanel-wrapped glory days of 1996. I was 16. He had a guitar. Clearly we were made for each other. His name was (and still is) John Avery, and I met him, oddly enough, at church.

Neither one of us is particularly religious, but his parents are, and my best friend Holly is. So it was pretty miraculous in the first place that I found myself at the Oviedo Baptist Church that evening, but even more divine: this angelic boy bent over an acoustic guitar...
John was playing something derivative of the time - Pearl Jam, I think. Holly introduced us, and when his smokey green eyes shyly lifted to meet my skeptical blue, I experienced a feeling I'd never felt before... and I was instantly smitten. We shook hands and mumbled "hellos," but he held my hand a little longer in his guitar-string-calloused grip. His hands were rough, but gentle as they held mine like someone would hold a bird. He held my hand like he was holding something valuable, and a delicious shudder ran the length of my spine, landing in my brain and lodging there.

Smitten, Smitten Kitten. Oh yes I was indeed. As it turns out, so was he! I'd been curious about other boys at my school in my past, but never beyond rampant gossipy speculation with my female friends about "who likes who," etc. With John, though, there seemed to be a palpable realness to an intangible connection.
We spent most of the service delighting in catching the other one sneaking glances, and each time I'd bust him, he'd turn crimson and hang his head until his mop of sandy blonde covered his eyes and all I could see was a sheepish grin. Oh, he was cute.

And after church, after his band performed, (spladoosh,) Holly and I were leaving when I heard the soft shuffle of corderouy pants hustling up behind us. I spun around to find myself a breath away from John, who pressed a sweaty-palmed piece of paper into my hands.
Two words from him: "Call me?"
A verbal waterfall from me: "Oh yeah, sure, OK. I'll do that. I will call you. On the phone. With this."

I don't remember the ride home. Or really, much of anything after that, except how patient Holly must've been as I surely obsessed about when to call and what to say when I did. Working up the nerve. Whatever I said on the phone must've gone well because John invited me over to his parent's house. They lived so close to me, but just on the border of the next county over, which is why we never shared a school.

When I arrived, I parked on the street in front of his house because his driveway was full of boxes. He came out and introduced me to his parents, who politely shook my hand and called me "dear."
John's parents didn't allow him to "date," so we just went for a walk around his neighborhood. We had SO MUCH IN COMMON: we were both white middle-class American teenagers. We BOTH LIKED MUSIC. We BOTH ATE FOOD. Clearly, this was my soul mate - and then my soul mate dropped a bomb on me.
"So I'm moving to Michigan," he says. "Like, tomorrow."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Hm. Well, that explains the driveway full of boxes. Dammit.

Not to be deterred, I suggested we pen-pal it. After all, I told him. I was going to be a hot-shot writer someday, so I'd enjoy keeping in touch with letters. Kind of chronicle our love affair until we found a way to be together.
Shockingly, he agreed - after all, he was going to be a hot-shot guitarist someday. Surely, they'd have a van or travel trailer of some kind. I could get a laptop and write from there while the band toured the country.
A laptop? I already had a laptop. So basically we were halfway there.

He moved, just like he said, to Farmington, MI. When that first letter arrived in my mailbox I was over-the-moon excited. He DID write. He DID love me. And even though it was riddled with all the misspellings and grammar errors one could imagine from the product of Florida public education, I delighted in every syllable of his oddly block-printed handwriting. I was thrilled to hear about his new surroundings, and visualized everything in lurid detail. The woods near his home. The snow piled up on the red brick walls of his new school.
John hated Michigan. He was just starting his Senior year of High School, and had a hard time making new friends or finding other musicians to play with. I tried to keep my letters cheerful and full of sunshine, but no amount of positivity of affection from me seemed to make a difference.

I obsess in Lisa Frank proportions.

As his letters got shorter and more impersonal, I could sense him slipping away.
I asked my father, who was an airline pilot, if he would help me visit John to cheer him up. After some parental discussions between his folks and mine, in an unprecedented act of adventurousness, my dad agreed! We'd go to Michigan for the weekend! True love conquers all!
John had mailed me a plastic purple bead necklace, and told me he had a matching one. This was the first gift I'd ever recieved from a boy, and certainly the first jewelry I'd ever been given. I wore them every day until the string smelled like my marching-band-practice sweat.
Then I hung them from the rear-view mirror in my car, and every turn I took, every speedbump, they'd rattle and I'd feel that shiver resonate in kind, right up my spine. I was in love.

I'm pretty sure if I'd kept a journal at the time, it would've been riddled with heart-shaped doodles of "Mrs. Jack Avery" and her husband-to-be. I mean, surely the stars had aligned to introduce us before it was too late. Surely the Universe had conspired to nurture our young love with the letters and calls. MY DAD WAS ENCOURAGING THIS RELATIONSHIP SO IT HAD TO BE THE ONLY CORRECT PATH.
Never mind the fact that really, I was the only one writing at this point; that wasn't the point. The point was:

I would go to Michigan and get my first kiss.

After a short flight and a short drive, (but still plenty of time to allow my stomach to completely tie itself into knots,) my father and I arrived in Farmington. We followed my hand-written directions carefully through the snowy countryside to John's neighborhood, which looked nothing like I'd imagined. There were none of the flourishes I'd pictured, no "Michigan Farm House" charm. Just standard track houses on a normal street.
The "forest" near John's house, where he'd go for melodramatic angst-ridden teenage walks of solitude, was kind of just a square or two of semi-undeveloped land. But it was fine - it didn't matter - we were together!

I rushed up to his door, not sure what to expect, but when he and his mom opened it together, there was no swell of music. No cartoon birds appeared, and a very awkward hug ensued between us as our parents met in person for the first (spoiler alert: and last) time.
Didn't matter. I was here. He was here. We were in love. And I was gonna get that kiss god dammit. I was 16. It was OWED me.
After some polite small talk, Dad left for an hour or so to go scout out a hotel for the evening.

That gave me and John some time to warm up. Sort of. I'd been standing around in his mother's living room, not sure what to do with my hands. I hadn't even removed my coat. I was so nervous. Had I done something wrong? Was something wrong? Hadn't he asked me to come?
John suggested a walk, much like the one we'd taken the only other time we'd been alone together. A walk in the woods. A walk in the snowy woods. Trying to still my racing heart, I rebuttoned the coat I'd yet to take off. It was 40 degrees outside. I think I was sweating anyway.
We went for that walk, and I kept expecting that at any moment he'd give me... something. A kiss, an honest moment. Where was all that chemistry we'd both felt at the church? He really didn't even make eye contact.

After we reached some arbitrary half-way point known only to him, we turned around and headed back towards his house.
I think he tried to hold my hand, but we both had mittens on so who the fuck knows.

I could've unbuttoned that jacket for him. I was so hot from my own nervous energy, my blood, my brain, that spot in my brain which had been ignited when he first touched my hand, was on fire. I wanted so desperately to show him that I'd kept his beads, and removed them from their shrine on my car to travel North with me, as proof of my love. I could've shown him, I guess. But something told me he didn't care.

Back at his house, he took me for a quick tour of the town. There really was no town, so he basically just drove me to his school and back. All that nervous chatter faded on the drive back to his house. The bricks weren't even red, they were brown. Why had I imagined them as red? An iconic setting from his letters, in which I envisioned my love ardently penning letters was just a brownish wall about 4 feet high. With a handfull of tired grey snow clustered around the bottom. The naked, thin woods, the non-town, the grey, grey, grey everywhere and the deafening silence from John kind of piled up. We all went out to dinner that night. Our parents took pictures of us. We are standing 3 feet apart in the pictures.
The next morning, my dad and I went back to Florida.

Bleh. Just, bleh.

I sent a thank-you card. I sent a letter. I included copies of the picture my dad took of us. John's hands are folded so far behind his back he looks armless. Just a guy with empty short sleeves, staring stoically into the lens like some soldier in a daguerreo-type.
A little while passes, I've heard nothing. I write him again and ask if he has a girlfriend and hold my breath for a week until my response arrives.
"I am, in fact, seeing someone," he writes. "Lady Depression is her name. I am courting Despair."

I had, at the time, zero comprehension of what that meant. My own Dark Lady would set up camp with me in the years to come, but at 16, I couldn't possibly fathom what that meant. I just liked that he wrote like a cheesy balladeer. I liked that he wrote. I mean, what even WAS depression? Pff. Things would work out.

...Things didn't work out.
After two months went by with no more letters, I retired those beads off my mirror permanently and stuffed them away into some dark corner of a jewelry chest. It wasn't until nineteen years later that I'd see his face again, via the great public crystal scrying bowl known as Face Book.

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which we learn what ever happened to John Avery...