Sans Fig Leaf
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"Mr. Enthusiasm"
20 January, 2005
When I first met him he was into dancing and skating and all sorts of physical activities. Just about every night of the week he and his boyfriend were going out--either to one of the clubs with a dance floor, or to the skating rink, or out to the lake to run or skate along the path around it. They were always on the go.
After a very messy break-up, he found a new hobby, computers--mind you, this was before computers had become ubiquitous. He joined modem user groups, learned how to do some programming, bought a dizzying variety of hardware and tried to make it all work. He started dating someone he met through one of the user groups, and they were constantly talking about computers or games or something related.
When that relationship ended he went into a slump for a while, until he discovered spaniels. Suddenly he had several puppies and zillions of books about the breeds he was interested in. He met a new guy while playing with the dogs at a park, and the two of them were in puppy heaven for the next six months or so.
Various things went awry with that situation, and the next thing I knew, he'd moved to another city. A year later he moved back, with a new boyfriend and now he was into country music and two-stepping and line dancing. This development was particularly amusing to me because back when we first met he had incessantly teased me for going out to a local country bar semi-regularly to two-step and line dance with my own boyfriend and our friends.
Then that relationship fell apart and he became a movie enthusiast. He amassed a collection of both popular and art house films on tape. He went to the local film festivals. He started dating a guy who was into making movies.
He threw himself into each new hobby with total abandon, sacrificing everything to satisfy the new obsession. When he lost the enthusiasm, he just dropped it all, as if it hadn't existed. The puppies, as I recall, he pawned off on some friends, then never talked about or wanted to see again. He ran up a lot of debt in the course of the five years or so that I knew him, and his last few relationships seemed to break up as much over the money problems as any loss of interest.
At least he wasn't as bad as another serial-enthusiast I'd known. She would get all wound up about projects, pursuing them for several years, rearranging her life around them and convincing half her friends to become involved. Then, when she decided the interest/hobby wasn't for her after all, she not only dropped the activity, she mercilessly cut the friends out of her life, as well.
I understand about becoming interested in new things, and how the heat of initial excitement can cool to disinterest. I have a tendency to obsess about new authors or shows or areas of study myself. The part I never quite understood was completely abandoning all interest altogether--including people who were involved in the pursuit with you.
As I have looked back over both situations I noticed a personality trait they both shared. They hated saying 'no' to someone. They would go to great lengths to avoid confronting people. This meant that often they would agree to contradictory things--and then leave the other friends to sort out the mess.
Whenever one of them picked a new obsession, it was always something that someone they knew or had just met was into already. In other words, they knew at least one person would approve of their new pursuit. Neither of them were pursuing their latest obsession out of a genuine zeal for the subject. What they truly desired was the acceptance and approval of the other enthusiasts.
The excitement of novelty no doubt also played a role, but but their underlying insecurity was what doomed each new enthusiasm. Because no matter how fervent the approval of a new friend or group of friends might be, it would never be able to silence their nagging doubt of their own worth. As the new crowd and activities became familiar, they no longer drowned out those insecurities.
Until they could learn to accept and approve of themselves, no amount of enthusiasm would ever last.
--C. S. Lewis