How can I possibly hope to ever successfully navigate the world of dating and relationships when this is the status of marriage in our society? Clearly I'm not planning on getting married any time soon , but to follow a line of inductive reasoning the complete disregard in our society for what I thought marriage was can only follow to the realms of dating and other relationships.
In layman's terms - I have no idea what the hell I'm doing anymore. That would, of course, presume I ever had an understanding of the dating scene, which by my own admission would be a dubious claim at best.
Once again I find myself spending the whole weekend without hearing back from the girl I thought I had hit things off with.
It's become a predictable pattern. I find a girl that there seems to be some sort of spark with and we start spending time together. Over a few weeks the usual flirtation and cat-and-mouse ensues and the ambiguous line between friendship and something more is crossed in a way that would seem to indicate progress in a certain direction. And yet soon after, whether after a few days or weeks, the bottom falls out for no discernible reason.
I don't get it.
All the signs that would indicate that she (and I'm using the female pronoun to act as a general identifier since this has happened with at least 4 girls I can think of off-hand) is interested and so I respond in kind. Such response is met with seemingly equal enthusiasm, and yet while I seem to gain interest she seems to lose interest at the same rate.
I try to play things cool. I approach the situation with a "let's see what happens" mentality, never betraying any sort of undue commitment with words like "relationship" or "girlfriend". I try to establish a sense of casual dating, and yet time after time it falls apart before it has a chance to even start.
As I have already lamented countless times - I don't get it. It's not like I'm picking up girls at the bar with a clear disposition towards one night stands only to find myself scratching my head when it doesn't work out. And clearly I'm not so unappealing that at least a few girls haven't, from time to time, been attracted to me (though in my lowest moments of self-doubt and insecurity I question the veracity of this claim).
What almost makes it worse is the closeness that exists in my platonic friendships. Being in a program with an extraordinarily unbalanced female to male ratio means there aren't as many guys to hang out with, and as a result I have formed most of my close friendships here in graduate school with my female classmates. And as we have spent our time together and gotten to know each other those friendships have grown stronger, which would presumably indicate that they like me more the more they have gotten to know me. Some have even said the same thing themselves, which leads me to my ultimate conclusion...
I am eminently undateable.
In a paradoxical manner, the more women spend time with me the more they love me, so long as they have a boyfriend, or are attracted to women, or are otherwise safe in the knowledge that we will never date. If they are single there seems to be some sort of threshold that as soon as I start getting interested their interest wanes in an inverse fashion. They could be madly in love with me from afar, and yet as soon as I let it slip that I may be even the slightest bit interested they could suddenly care less.
I'm sure that the resulting comments to this diatribe will spark the debate as to whether this is self-pity or self-awareness. That being said, all I can close with is that if you have a better explanation, I'd like to hear it.
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6 comments:
Brad, I've been on the other side of this, rife with male friends but with nary a date in sight, or on date 1, things seemed great, but then I'd never get a callback.
But I'll tell you this ... if you want to meet girls while you're out, at a bar or anywhere else ... you have to ditch the girl friends. I'm sure they're nice, just like my guy friends always were, but I always wondered why I never got hit on when I was in college and, oh yeah, it's because I was out with six guys.
Other than that, I don't really know what to tell you. Dating sucks, people suck, and what are you going to do? When the right person comes around, it won't be like that -- the whole waiting for the call and wondering what happened, but in my case, I think a lot of my dating problems issued from the fact that I just really didn't *want* a relationship, at the end of the day.
Does all of this apply to you? I don't know. But it's stuff to think about, I guess.
At this juncture I can offer only one shred of advice: stop listening to MSN and Marie Claire.
Those are good points as well.
I've fallen into every good relationship I've ever been in. Like we haven't had this conversation a million times...
The Cap'n may have a point and the old cliche may be true, mayhap you're trying too hard.
I've fallen into a few relationships, but I met my current boyfriend (of six months next week) on okcupid.com ... so one never knows:)
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