FISHER OF MEN

everyone, i hope, has experienced the rush of falling in love and being fallen for in return. i happen to be in love. i can personally attest to its potency as the most well-rounded high one can achieve. i haven’t tried heroin yet but it must be similar.

my entire life i’ve daydreamed about being in love, wondering in my youth what it might be like. i would listen to songs and feel a rush of something in my chest, wishing earnestly i would one day be in the position i find myself currently- drinking mightily from the fountain of my lover’s outpouring affection.

i am no stranger to falling in love. my past is marked by fantastic romances involving gods, brands, futures, cities, friends, women i knew, women i never knew. there was even a woman i married for a while.

richard dawkins views my (and your) knack for falling in love as an adaptive function of our evolution. it’s been a handy tool to keep humans tethered to each other long enough to raise our premature offspring who need more tending to than any other creature on this planet. he goes on to draw the conclusion that religious belief could stem directly from this function. the line drawn between the two experiences seems fairly straight to me.

if you were to take vitals, brain scans, and blood samples of teenage girls screaming along to taylor swift hits while imagining it was written about their crush and compare them to the same data of a woman crying with hands raised at a tent revival, we may find the results indistinguishable. if we could insert a neuralink and measure precisely their emotional sensations, i don’t know what difference you would find.

i don’t doubt people fall in love with jesus because i did too.

don’t worry, i made it out- we got divorced almost a decade ago. oddly my mom prays every day we will get back together. (give it a rest, for christ’s sake. and mine.) i think he’s better off without me anyway.

i remember having heart-bursting experiences, raptured in full-body orgasmic ecstasy playing drums in a christian band praising my true love: god. i still cry if i hear “how he loves” by john mark mcmillan. that may have more to do with my daddy issues than the song but god damnit, it gets me every time like the ending of the notebook. i would tell anyone i could about the love i felt with god. it turns out to my great disappointment those feelings were a cocktail of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and the pheromones of the girls in the room and not a connection to the divine.

you can actually trigger the release of these feel good brain drugs reliably with a guitar when the “god” chord is strummed following the appropriate musical foreplay.

you may recall the formula written by leonard cohen:

the fourth, the fifth the minor fall, the major lift … it’s a cold it’s a broken hallelujah

that one also makes me weep.

jesus was my lover for years. i would write him letters in my journal in the form of prayers. he would respond in the pages of the letters he wrote me 2000 years ago that someone was kind enough to pass along. we had a great relationship. it was rich, juicy, dynamic. sometimes we would fight but he was always right.

i admit he could be a bit controlling. he asked me to be celibate until i met someone else who loved him so we could enter a three-way marriage with him at the top and us humans bound by our devotion to him. (we all know how polyamorous relationships tend to go).

he asked me to give him 10% of my income which felt like a bargain in exchange for eternal bliss with him. hell, my human wife was entitled to 50% so jesus’s price was a steal. thankfully he never instructed me to kill any muslims or witches like he did with some of his exes. still, lot’s of things were off the table: booze (even though he literally made wine), masturbation, heavy music, a list of words, and lots of other small things.

the restriction only increased my devotion. is that a kink?

after all those years of correspondence, we never actually met in person. sure, i hung out with tons of people who were in love with him too and we talked about him every week together, but i never had a fleshly encounter with him. we tried pretending to eat his body once a month or so but it just didn’t do it for me.

later, long after we broke up, i learned that he wasn’t even a real person. those letters he wrote me were written by a group of old jewish men and compiled into a book by a different group of old roman men. you can imagine my embarrassment, my anger, the betrayal!

what do you call someone you fall in love with whom you’ve never met yet requires you to send money and unending devotion?

i’ll give you a hint: it’s reminiscent of that symbol everyone draws to represent jesus.

a catfish.