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By Dennis Hong, September 19, 2011 6:00 am

Image by Stuart McClymont

I am a stoic. In a new relationship, I tend to stay reserved and guarded. I hold back my feelings, and I definitely don’t let myself fall for someone very easily. At least not until I know for sure that the relationship means something.

Some people, on the other hand, are effusive. In a new relationship, they plunge head-first off the figurative deep end. They bask in the intensity of their feelings, and they are able to fall in love quickly and deeply.

And that’s wonderful. To me, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with embracing new relationships with all your passion.

At the same time, I’ve realized that someone who is capable of falling quickly and deeply in love can be just as capable of falling quickly and deeply out of love. Since we’re invoking clichés, I might as well bring up another:

The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

And this is where passion becomes a problem for the stoic….

We met on a Sunday night. And we were together the next five nights. We just seemed to connect in every way possible, and we couldn’t get enough of each other. On Wednesday, as we stood in the darkness at the beach, watching a group of smelly, slumbering seals, she told me that she was falling for me.

At that moment, I had two epiphanies: 1) Instead of getting freaked out by what she had just said, I realized that these same feelings were welling up within me, too. And 2) even the stench of seal poop can be incredibly romantic in the right setting (and if you’ve ever experienced it, you know that “stench” is an understatement).

Something about the way she looked into my eyes told me that this could be for real. And so, my instincts told me to let my stoicism go.

I did, and I felt myself starting to fall—something that I hadn’t allowed myself to do in years. I even confided in a few close friends the next day that I believed I might have met the woman I was going to marry.

Continue reading 'I Fell In Love Too Hard, Too Soon'»

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By Dennis Hong, July 11, 2011 6:00 am

Photo by Yuri Dojc

Being a guy sucks sometimes.

I mean, aside from having to constantly monitor all these fragile dangly parts that we absolutely positively must keep out of the way of zippers, rogue knees, and hand rails (although that last one really only applies if we’re doing rail slides on a skateboard), we’re also trained from an early age that we’re not supposed to show any emotions whatsoever.

“Be strong!”

“Real men don’t cry!”

What. The. Hell?!? What if I need to let out a good sobbing fit every once in a while? What if I want to bawl when a bleeding, limping Bruce Willis throws the German terrorist who speaks with a thick German accent (even though he can clearly fake an American accent) out a 20th-story window and reunites with his estranged wife?

What am I supposed to do about that?

I have to admit, I was a teenage drama queen. In my angst-ridden senior year of high school, I once punched out our kitchen window. My parents were surprisingly supportive of my emotional outburst, not to mention everything else (I thought) I was going through at the time. Even worse, I actually wore my bandages proudly to school the next day. It was as though I needed to advertise how messed up my personal life was (it wasn’t), and how badass I was (I wasn’t) through my ownage of a set of glass panes.

Seriously, I was Emo 15 years before the term Emo had been coined. I was a miserable wreck, suffering from a miserable life. And I wore my plight proudly, as Atlas must have done when he bore the weight of the world on his shoulders for all those billions of years.

Continue reading 'To Be Strong Is To Show Our Weakness'»