Masks.

The benefits of masking, real or imagined, make us reluctant to drop the mask.We might, among other things, be forcing a relationship other people do not want. Or we might be risk being rejected. Yet the very wearing of the mask can cheat us of relationships we want. Do we gain as much as we lose? Take the case of my friend Claudia. Claudia is attractive in a thin, intense way. Because of her job in a large investment firm Claudia comes in contact with many men during the course of her day, and she dates a great deal. But she is still single and, though she hates to admit it, still a virgin.

 

 It's not for want of desire, Claudia insists. She is a passionate girl and looks ahead with horror to the prospect of a sterile old maid's life. Why then can't she become involved with a man emotionally and sexually? Claudia does'nt understand why, but the men she dates can.

 "she turns you off", one of them explained. "Hell, I like Claudia, At work she's great gal and I've taken her out, but the moment something begins to develope she freezes up and the message is very clear. Don't touch. I'm not having any. Who needs that?"

Who indeed. Who can see past Claudia's forbidding facade to the warm and passionate woman underneath? Claudia, in terror of rejection, does the rejecting first before anything can develop. In that way she's never hurt.

She's never refused because she does the refusing first.

Stupid? Pherhaps, but effective if being rejected is the worst thing in the world that can happen to you. For Claudia it is. So rather than take a chance she'll live out her days in loneliness.

 Claudia's masking is unnecessary and wasteful, but there necessary maskings decreed by the society, The person who masks according to this rule may despirately want to use body language to communicate, but isn't allowed to by custom.

 

An example of this masking is a nubile young friend, a girl of seventeen, who came to my friend with a problem.

"There's this boy I ride home with on the bus every day, and he gets off at my stop and I don't know him, but he's cute and I'd like to know him, and I think he likes me , but how can I get to be friendly?" My friend, out of the wisdom of experience, suggested a couple of awkward, heavy packages for the next bus ride plus a carefully rehearsed stumble to send all the packages flying as she left the bus.

To my amazement it worked. The accident called forth the only possible response, since they were the only two passengers who left the bus at the stop. He helped her with the packages, and she was obliged to drop the mask. He, too, could now unmask, and by the time they reached her house she was able to ask him for a Cole, and so it went.

  At the proper time, then, the mask should often be dropped, must indeed be dropped if the individual is to grow and devlope, if any meaningful relationship is to come about. The big problem with all of us is that after wearing a mask for a lifetime it is not so easy to drop it. Sometimes the mask can inly be dropped when further masking takes place. The man who dresses up in a clown suit for some amateur thearitical project looseness  and freedom. The masking of darkness allows some of us the freedom to make love without masks, and for others the mask od anonymity serves the same purpose. I have had male homosexuals tell me that they have had ecounters with men, complete from pickup to sexual satisfaction, without even divulging their own names or learning their partners names. When I asked how they could be so intimate without even knowing their partners names, the answer was invariably, "But that adds something to it, I can be relaxed and do what I want to. After all, we did'nt know each other, and who cares what we did or said?''

  To an extent, the same is true when a man wisits a prostitute. The same anonymity may hold  and bring with it a greater freedom.

   But these are simply cases of double masking, of putting up another defense so that one may drop the mask. Along with the constant need to guard our body language, to keep a tight reign on the signals we send out, there is also a paradoxical need to transmit wildly and freely, to tell the world who we are and what we want, to cry out in the wilderness and be answered, to drop the mask and see if the hidden person is being in his own right, in short, to free ourselves and to communicate.