Feelings ... nothing more than feelings ...

Wow. It seems not possible to blog about one's dating travails when a man can terrorize and kill middle-aged women taking a Latin impact dance class in Pittsburgh on a random Tuesday night, angry over never having found someone to love.

As Yahoo! News reports, excerpting the shooter's online diary:

He complained of not having a girlfriend since 1984, not having a date since May 2008 and not having sex for 19 years.

"Women just don't like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one," he wrote. The page ended with the words "Death Lives!"

There's no place for wry commentary in this situation. When you're someone who frequents online dating sites and have either not responded to or turned down a substantial number of unsuitable men, I shudder to think that someone I've rejected could be a man like this.

His purported reputation as an “anti-social” (from the same article) reminded me of an op-ed in Monday’s Boston Globe about “male relational dread.” The author, a (male) doctor, tried to explain, in so many words, why certain men can’t verbally express their craving for emotional connection. How, despite wanting that closeness, they push away partners asking them to talk about it. One eerie line in light of last night’s shooting:

“But scratch our surface and you find that we men desire connection every bit as much as women, and get sick and even do sick things - think of all the destruction wrought by male “loners’’ - if we don’t experience it.”

It is at this point that I feel the need to do 2 things:

1) Link you to the Morris Albert classic, “Feelings” – heartbreak in a song … an example of how to react to loneliness rather than random violence.

2) Add levity into this non-levitous (for so many reasons) day with, after interminable hiatus, some Jermaine and Bret … in this instance doing the "Angry Dance” – yet another appropriate way to deal with inappropriate emotions.