After a while all these stores start to sound the same. They almost all come down to the same issue,
that I have the dating skills of a 13-year old.
Call it a lack of confidence, a fear of rejection, a need to never appear
vulnerable, but it still all boils down to a lack of skill when dealing with
the opposite sex. As much as I tend to
paint myself as the type of guy the ladies just aren’t that into, someone they
find ugly and uninteresting, that really isn’t the case. I’ve never had a hard time finding girls who
were attracted to me or at the very least really enjoyed my company. The real issue has been finding girls I’M
attracted to, who are single, and who return my feelings, and when I find them
actually sealing the deal. A guy my age
should be able to meet a girl he likes and not have any problem expressing
those feelings. I, on the other hand,
revert to a 13-year old whenever I’m in the presence of a girl I like, becoming
silent and awkward, spiraling into a vortex of self-doubt and self-hatred. It makes getting a girlfriend pretty
difficult. Every once and a while, I
somehow rise above that behavior though, and something nice comes of it.
I entered
my senior year of college hopelessly single.
I had spent the last three years pining over my relationship with Sara,
a relationship that had long been over, and doing whatever I could to prevent any
new ones from springing up. The cliché
goes something to the effect that loves happens when you least expect it. I guess that’s what happened to me. I showed up to work one day (I worked
backstage of the school theater) and was introduced to a new female co-worker
wearing a large hoody that hid a boyish frame, we’ll call her Michelle. There was nothing strikingly attractive about
her or anything that really stood out, so she kind of melted into the
background as I went about the tasks I needed too complete. Then one day, during a slow point in a show
call we were both working, she made some comment and I fell almost instantly in
love; she came charging out of the shadows and I saw the beauty that had been
in front of me for weeks. It’s a little
sad to say, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it was she said
anymore and I know that hurts the story, but I it was something depressing and
existential and I knew from the moment she uttered it that this was someone who
got it, who would get me.
So, I
started to talk to her more at work, tried to match up my tasks with hers so we
could spend more time together, and continued to find more and more we had in
common. We both worshipped professional
wrestling (yes, there was a time when my career aspirations were to write for
the WWE), we enjoyed the same styles of music (punk, alternative rock, 80’s
hair metal, anything with super depressing lyrics), we watched the same stupid
television shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, South Park, Monday Night Raw), we
loved the whole experience of seeing movies in the theater (literally any
movie), we drank like fish (she told tales of finishing a 5th of
Whiskey herself, I was impressed). And
she had a dark side, a side that was deeply pessimistic and searched for
meaning in everything. It ended up being
too dark a side, but it was certainly the side that I feel head over heels
for. But there was one major problem, a
theme that has reared its head more times then I would like in my love life,
Michelle had a boyfriend, a boyfriend that she hated and never had anything
nice to say about, but a boyfriend none the less. So, we became really good friends, and she
would come over my place and watch wrestling pay-per-views, and we would go out
to dinner and movies, and go to concerts together, and I would tell her about
Sara and she would talk about the jerk she was dating and nothing would happen.
I remember
quite clearly the day that everything changed.
I showed up at her dorm room, picking her up for a night in Santa
Monica, dinner and a movie (I think it was Office Space, but might have been Shakespeare In Love) and she announced
to me that she had finally called things off with her boyfriend, she was
finally single. I wasn’t sure how I was
supposed to react. I mean, inside I was
doing back flips, it was the greatest news I had ever heard, but as is always
the case with me, there was still that little bit of doubt that this news
really changed nothing. We had been
friends for months, really close friends, did she want anything more now that
she was free from the asshole or was our relationship already deeply entrenched
in the friend realm? I spent the next
month debating this question endlessly to the point of complete
debilitation. I read into every phrase
she uttered and every move she made and couldn’t get myself to do anything
about it. All of sudden, all the things
that I took as old hat when I thought of her as a friend weighed down on me so
heavily I began to spiral into depression and self doubt.
The pinnacle of the ridiculousness the
relationship ascended to came during our spring break. Some how we got the idea that we needed to go
camping in Northern California even though neither one
of us owned a tent or any equipment that such a trip would require. The two of us, alone, pretending to be just friends,
drove five hours up the California coast, stopping at a Wal-Mart for the tent, and
spent three days camping in a couple of locations, visited her brother in
Sacramento, and spent a night with her parents before heading back to school
still just friends. I look back on that
trip as a full grown adult and have no idea what I was thinking. We spent two nights alone in a tent, sleeping
so close I didn’t even need to reach out to touch her, with her complaining
about being so cold she had to put on four layers of cloths, and nothing
happened. Who goes on that trip and
doesn’t expect something to happen? A
13-year old boy, that’s who.
Everything
came to a head the day after St. Patrick’s Day.
Sara was coming out to visit the following week, a trip that had been
planned for quite a while but had it’s ante upped less then a month earlier
when she suddenly became single. Much
like the idea of “The Rub” from Swingers,
the minute I gave up on her and found something new, what I had waited years to
happen occurred. I had reached a point
where a decision about where Michelle and I were headed had to be made. I had to know if there was something between the two of us or
not before I tried to go down a road already traveled.
On St. Patrick’s Day a bunch of us
went out drinking to celebrate and Michelle was our driver. At this point my closest friends had started
to openly call me “Sackless Wonder” due to my inability to close the deal with
her. I got so shit faced off Long Island
Ice Teas (that classic Irish beverage) that she had to pull over on the way
home so I could empty my stomach. We
both had work the next day and while hung over like never before I somehow
found the strength to trap myself into saying something to her. While in the middle of a project, I told her
to remind me that I had something to ask her at lunch. It was the perfect plan. There was no backing out because she was
going to ask what I wanted and I was too hung over to come up with anything
clever off the top of my head. She
thought I was going to ask her to pick up Sara at the airport, but instead I
asked if she had ever thought of us being more than friends. I know, super cheesy and super juvenile, but
it worked and thus began one of the most intense relationships I’ve ever been
in.
It’s
easy to make fun of how I handled things, of how long it took me to address
what seems so obvious now, of how juvenile my whole handling of the situation
was, but at the end of the day, does it make much difference? Is the journey as important as the
destination? I can’t say the fact I
struggled with how to turn a friendship into a relationship affected anything
that happened after. I had to go through
a process to get where I needed to be and is that process really any better or
worse then what most would expect to happen?
Have I lost out on a relationship or two because of my issues? Sure, but at the same time, the relationships
have been that much stronger and important to me because of what I put myself
through to get there. I don’t know that
I could have ended up dating Michelle any other way. And I don’t know that I want to end up dating
any one else without going through the same struggles. We all have our own ways of doing
things. I have mine. My way has worked well enough for me so
far. I maybe single at the moment, but
I’ve known love a few times over and that’s more then most can say. It may not be pretty, I may revert back to adolescence
every time I become enamored with a girl, but I guess it gets the job done.
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