Snake In The Grass

Snake In the Grass

September 7, 2009

James McCormack
men's health

I read recently that Swedish scientists have apparently discovered a commitment-phobia gene.''' I can see this being a potentially scary development if, on first dates, women begin asking us men how many allele-334 vasopressin 1a receptors we have.

There are some who might say I could have been a case study for the research. At 41, I've never settled down to a single career, a mortgage scares the absolute bejeezus out of me, kids are out of the question (not that I don't like kids, but you've got look after them for 18 years at a minimum) and I remember being terrified when I gave my girlfriend a kitten for Christmas because it seemed like the greatest commitment of my life.




Over the years, though, I've worn this apparent commitment-phobia as a badge of honour. I've seen it as flowing from the death of my father when I was eight. At an early age, I learnt life was short, often brutally so. Make the most of it now. Suck its very marrow while you still can, before you get too old or have it tragically cut short.

For me, in large part, this meant combining dodging responsibility with a life of travel and adventure. Ski-bumming around the world for six years, then spending another six in Japan. Settling down seems like a slow death when there's still so much of the world to discover, so much to experience.

If growing up, at least in the traditional sense of the word, means settling down, narrowing my experiences in a bid for stability, then the only sensible response has been for me not to grow up. The more I watched mates succumb to "growing up", the more pride I felt in being a holdout.

That's why, until recently, the knot remained untied after seven years in one relationship and then 10 years in another.

I'd never really, deeply, truly stopped to think about why this should be, though. The explanation of commitment-phobia seemed valid enough to please others, so I was happy enough to believe it myself. And it wasn't like it was wholly untrue. But I'd never considered there was a deeper, less palatable reason. Until I ate Mexican on a summer's evening.

Chaos theory can be defined simply as minor changes in variables that produce wildly disproportionate effects. Putting chaos theory in human terms, we might rephrase it as "small decisions, huge consequences." Edward Lorenz, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist, was an early pioneer of the theory and his work spawned the never-intended-to-be-taken-literally hyperbole to illustrate it. You've probably heard it: "The flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas", or simply: "The Butterfly Effect".

I like to think of the tiny choices that dramatically change our lives as Butterfly Effect moments. And for me, in Byron Bay a couple of years back, it was a decision as small as where to dine that led to my greatest ever Butterfly Effect moment.

It was a balmy February night, and my girlfriend Alexis and I were wandering the streets in search of food. We saw a Mexican restaurant; with the night heat, Coronas seemed apt.

Now when it comes to Mexican, I'm a willpower-devoid glutton. That night, notwithstanding the several enchiladas and half-dozen beverages I'd already downed, I kept scoffing away on corn chips and salsa till I could barely move. When Alexis couldn't finish her meal, I stuffed that down, too.

Feeling dangerously like Monty Python's Mr Creosote, I vetoed our romantic post-dinner stroll on the beach. I needed to walk, or rather waddle, on the road, where the going was firm and far easier.

It was 10.30pm and the streets were dead as we ambled down the middle of the road. Alexis chastised me for canning our moonlit beach stroll.

"You're so unromantic," she told me.
"I'm not unromantic," I protested. "It's just that, well, you know I always eat too much when I eat Mexican. And this was good Mexican." Even to me, it sounded unconvincing.

"If you were romantic, you would've married me by now."
Silence.
"It's been 10 years."

When I first met Alexis, I'd foolishly told her how never again would I, as I had previously, let a relationship run past five years without getting married.

"Ten years," she helpfully reminded me.I fumbled to steer the conversation elsewhere.

"Hey, I'm not trying to change the topic, but there's a sign over there saying to beware of snakes."
"Where?"
"Over there, in the park."

We were wandering down the middle of the road, where the double white lines would have been if there had been any. I took my eyes off the dimly lit tar, off the road I never would have been walking down had I not eaten Mexican and been so outrageously full, to point to a sign warning park-goers of snakes.

I kid you not, it was at that moment, with my arm outstretched, that I trod on a snake. Karma, eh?

It happened so quickly, I wasn't even sure I'd been bitten. I discovered later snakes can bite up to five times a second, but all I knew then was that the snake was tangled around my foot. Unfortunately, I was wearing thongs. Seconds later, I began seeing blood.

But I still wasn't worried. The snake seemed quite small; only a metre long - it was difficult to tell in the darkness - and I felt no pain from a bite. Maybe it had only grazed me, I thought. I told Alexis I'd just go home and sleep it off.

"Stop being such a bloke. Get it checked out."

Women - ever so sensible.

Now, any fool knows the correct procedure if you're bitten is to immobilise the limb. I, of course, set off on foot to the taxi rank a few hundred metres distant.

Halfway there, my head exploded. Walking had sent the venom coursing through me, setting off a cranial sledgehammering like I'd never experienced. KABOOM! KABOOM! KABOOM! Sweat dripped, poured, streamed off me. And my already full stomach just exploded, swelling out like a woman's in late pregnancy. And like a woman in labour, I felt like I was going to split in two, like my belly would simply rip right open. I was more scared than I'd been in my entire life. Strangely, I was far less worried about the poison killing me than I was about dying from a ruptured stomach. Near delirious with pain, I began thrashing about.

Thank God for morphine. But Byron Hospital, unbelievably, lacked a snakebite test kit. An hour after arriving, I was bundled into an ambulance and shunted off to Tweed Heads, 45 minutes distant. Around 3am my stomach finally burst. Well, it wasn't my stomach really, more my rear end, exploding with diarrhoea, fetid and malevolent.

At 6am, eight long hours after I'd been bitten, a doctor delivered the authoritative verdict: "We think it was a tiger snake."

"You have two choices," he continued. "You may take the antivenom, and you might die. Or you may not take the antivenom . . . and you might die." With that, he turned on his heels and left.

But then the nurse explained. "We have to make you aware that antivenom may result in anaphylactic shock. Potentially, it can kill you."

"But I don't really have any choice, do I?"
"No," she replied. "Not really."

She returned minutes later to shove a gargantuan needle into my arm. "It's just some adrenaline," she casually told me. "We just want it on standby; if your heart stops, we'll be able to jolt it back into action."




At precisely that point I realised I should have married Alexis. Yes, should have married, not should marry. I'd heard the words "heart stop" and immediately began thinking of myself in the past tense. It now dawned on me for the first time the extent of my irredeemable selfishness.

In the face of potential death, I saw that my aversion to commitment, my desire to never grow up, was a completely, utterly bullshit reason not to get married. It was a mere façade. I was already committed; I loved this woman with my heart and soul, and had done so for 10 years. If I truly had been afflicted with commitment-phobia, I never would have been in a relationship this long. No, I'd used commitment-phobia as a mask for the fact that I was inexcusably self-centred, enough to let something as minor and as feeble as a point of philosophical pride stand between my and Alexis's happiness.

This was not a slow-dawning realisation; the epiphany was instant. And I can't ever remember feeling like a bigger dickhead.

What's worse, I couldn't be sure I'd even get the chance to redeem myself; I still had the anaphylactic-shock bullet to dodge. The fact they'd assembled a team of six medical staff to be on hand when they gave me the antivenom didn't exactly bolster my confidence.

But I pulled through, and then spent two nights in intensive care resting up. Alexis returned to Byron. She hadn't slept in days and, anyway, with the morphine I was out of it. By the time I returned to some state of mental clarity, I was alone.

I lay there wondering why it takes our personal worlds to descend into chaos before we admit we love and need and depend on those around us? Or in my case, and that of many other men, to commit?

And each time I thought about it, I came back to the same reason, the one that I saw so clearly in the emergency ward: pure self-centredness. Well, at least that's what I saw as my reason. I suspected I wasn't alone, though. So many men worry about being seen as too soft. Some, like myself with my commitment aversion, run from feeling too grown-up. Lying there, I saw this as nothing more than an indulgence of pride.

In retrospect, I see this episode, my greatest Butterfly Effect moment, as a blessing. Many men aren't so lucky - I almost wasn't - as to experience a crazy chain of events that leads to an epiphany that changes their behaviour forever. I still don't want a mortgage, nor to be tied down in terms of experiencing the world. But I realise now that commitment-phobia-gene or no gene-can be used as a mere pretext for selfishness. Some things really aren't much to give up for those we love.

Three nights after deciding to eat Mexican, I was released from hospital. I took a bus back to Byron and returned to our hotel. Alexis was asleep. I gently woke her and gave her a hug. And then I proposed.

http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/mens-health/sex-relationships/couples/article/-/6219647/snake-in-the-grass/