I have experienced bad dating and ineptitude with women all

In the traveler’s chronicle of the heart, a wry lament is set down: “I have experienced bad dating and ineptitude with women all across the globe, from Vietnam to Paris. When I was 21, women were an enigma; they were this code that had to be cracked. They were ‘The Other.’ I have often thought writing this stuff into stand-up and shows would be an exorcism, but it hasn’t been; it makes no difference.” Hear the rhythm: confession, metaphor, pilgrimage, and the weary shrug of wisdom. The speaker names a youthful creed—love as puzzle, woman as riddle, stage as shrine—and then breaks it: the ritual of performance did not cast out the ghost. The ache remained.

The ancients would understand the spell and the shattering. To declare someone The Other is to place them in a temple of distance: revered, feared, guessed at—but never met. In that temple, conversation becomes cipher, kindness becomes tactic, and a person’s living weather is reduced to a storm-map on parchment. Thus the young traveler moves from Vietnam to Paris, from night market to boulevard, carrying the same locked box inside his chest. Geography changes; grammar does not. He keeps asking love to answer in code, and love keeps answering in a language—ordinary, human—that he does not yet trust.

Mark the turn toward art—the hope that stand-up and shows might serve as exorcism. This, too, is an old hope: that by shaping pain into story, we can unmake its power. Often it works; laughter can cauterize. But not always. When the story preserves the old frame—“they are a puzzle; I am the solver”—the wound remains under glass, curated and unharmed. The stage lights are bright, but they do not disinfect a myth cherished as identity. Hence the verdict: it makes no difference. Technique without repentance cannot heal.

Consider a parable from the library of love: Cyrano de Bergerac, swordsman of syllables, who believed beauty stood across a moat he could never cross. He made art of the distance—letters, duets of voice and shadow—and the crowd applauded the brilliance of the masquerade. Yet the partition stayed. His eloquence, like a comedian’s tight five, turned longing into spectacle but did not touch the root: the refusal to be seen as he was, and to see the beloved as she was—neither idol nor cipher, but person. The play ends, the audience rises, and the old ache walks home with him.

There is also a humbler tale. A traveler—call him Arun—kept notebooks of every misread signal, every stalled date, in every city his work demanded. He called the entries “field reports,” as if affection were a foreign war. One evening in a café, an old woman—aproned, busy with cups—asked to read a page. She laughed, not unkindly. “You write about them,” she said, “as if they were weather. Do you write to them?” He began to write letters he would never send, not to analyze but to bless—three true things he liked, one question he wished he’d asked. The notebooks changed. He changed. The world, which had been a code, began to look like neighbors.

The quote also holds a mirror to craft. Jokes can be a shield strapped to the breastbone. We lift it and the arrows thud: rejection, confusion, shame. The audience roars; we feel invincible. But the shield blocks our own reaching, too. To grow past ineptitude is not to sharpen the shield; it is to learn an unarmored grammar—curiosity instead of control, presence instead of performance, apology instead of alibi. The mystery remains, but it is no longer an enigma to be solved; it is a person to be learned.

Therefore, take this as a traveling rule for the soul. Retire the spycraft of romance—the dossiers, the “tells,” the cleverness that keeps you safe and alone. Let The Other become the neighbor across the table. Practices for the road: (1) Replace decoding with declaring—say what you felt, wanted, and wondered, without strategy. (2) Ask one question whose answer you cannot predict; listen until the world inside the other person has room to breathe. (3) After each encounter, write facts, not theories: what was said, what was kind, what was unclear—then ask for clarity next time. (4) Use art to reveal, not to rinse—if you carry your stories to a stage, let them confess the frame you are breaking, not polish the one that failed you. In these honest labors, the globe narrows to a shared cup, Paris and Vietnam become rooms with chairs, and the old exorcism is no longer needed—because the ghost was never them. It was the distance you called wisdom.