One’s college years are supposed to be wild and crazy,
filled with booze and sex. But that
wasn’t really my experience. While I had
the booze part down to a science, I struggled with the second half of that
equation. The first three and a half
years of my college career were spent completely celibate. It might save me some face to claim that it
was by choice, that I was waiting for the right person to come along, but that
would be a lie. I would have loved to
have had date after date with any willing participant. It just wasn’t my reality.
I’d like to say there were many
factors that led to the lack of a love life.
I did go to an extremely Christian school that had single sex dorms and
a curfew seven days a week. It really
puts a hamper on romance when you get kicked out of a girl’s room at 10:00 or face possible expulsion. There also was an abnormal number of married
undergrads. The whole Christian thing
led to people getting married young or at the very least being in very long
term, very committed relationships. It
really cut down the dating pool. And to
top it all off, a decent portion of the girls who were available weren’t going
to have sex unless they were married because of their faith. At least, they weren’t going to have normal
everyday sex. I knew of a few girls who
believed that sex, as talked about in the Bible, was just vaginal, so they
could have all the anal penetration they wanted and not have to worry about
eternal damnation. While many guys I
know would have jumped all over this, it doesn’t really appeal to me.
While all
this certainly played a role in my womanless existence, I really have no one or
thing to blame but myself. There were
certainly girls that had romantic possibilities, I just couldn’t make it
happen. It’s hard to know how many girls
I could have dated in college if I actually had the guts to ever push
things. Looking back the three and a
half years I went without a girlfriend, there were certainly a bunch of girls
that could have fit the bill. There were
even a couple that I could argue I actually was dating, it was just never
framed that way and things never got physical.
I’m sure I created a new realm of psychosis where I hung out with the
same girl almost every night for months, talked with her exhaust fully on the
phone, even drove her to pick up her brother over an hour away and brought him
back to campus, yet never breached the subject of what our relationship
actually was. What I’m trying to point
out is that it wasn’t like I didn’t have options or opportunities; I was
invited to formals, went to parties, had dinners and nights out, I just never
closed the deal.
What I
needed was a girl who was forward enough to make her intentions clear or a
friend who had inside information. Of
course I’ve always been my own worst enemy, so I did what I could to make these
options even less possible. Everything
is so much clearer when you look back 15 years, but at the time I had a way of
running my mouth on topics I should have kept quite on. I’ll never forget one day when I went to
lunch with three very attractive ladies who I was good friends with. Somehow the topic of conversation got around
to the idea of friends with benefits. All
three women fully supported the premise.
What I should have done was either agree or sit there quite, but what I
actually did was jump up on my soap box and argued that a situation like that
never worked out. All these years later
I still believe that friends with benefits is a no win proposition, eventually
one of the two partners is going to want more of a relationship or one is going
to find another partner and the other will be hurt, it’s inevitable, but I now
realize that you don’t spout these thoughts around a group of hot women who are
all about it. I have no way to prove
that this event had any effect on anything that happened or didn’t happen
later, but hard to imagine that it didn’t.
I immediately put myself in the friend zone with all three girls and
insured that they would never try anything with me because I didn’t believe in
that type of thing.
I would
love to play the role of the martyr when it comes to my love life. I would love to claim that I’ve done
everything in my power to find and keep a healthy relationship, that I’ve made
myself totally available to any and all female possibilities, and it’s the
universe that is against me, but that would be distorting the facts. Time and time again I’ve shot myself in the
foot or not stepped up to the plate when it comes to relationships, and there’s
no one to blame for that but me. I’ve
always loved the line in the song “Spidersong” by the band Say Anything, “I am
cold, to cool to call you, far too stoned to leave my bed, I wrote this song to
win you kiss but stayed asleep instead.”
It kind of sums things up for me and my love life. I spent years complaining that I couldn’t
find a girl, but when I look back now I see the effort was just never
there. When the opportunity arose, I
went to bed.
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