October 23, 2006:
I understand now, I think, what he was looking for.
All his life he'd felt such isolation. That the things which mattered to those around him were not the things that mattered to him. And that the things he was good at were not things which mattered to those around him.
More than a companion, he sought a peer. Someone who would understand his identity, what was important to him, and what he was good at.
Not only understand, but participate.
He felt that his other relationships were hollow. That the only way others would accept him was if he were charming them, that is, if he entertained them.
So that it was inevitable that the two of them would become totally isolated in each other. He felt that he was at last able to drop his entertainer mask, be himself, communicate for the first time with a peer who understood him without pretense.
A self-fulfilling prophecy, in its way. Because he was no longer entertaining the other people in his life, the isolation became all the deeper.
The dialectic is of co-dependence. Yet it's not hard to understand how he would have experienced it as liberation.