Girls and Boys: Notes on the Subject from 2005
So what’s this dating I keep hearing everyone talk about?
I’m a twenty-six year old single white female with a master’s degree who lives in the heart of Red Sox Nation. I don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, don’t drink until I fall down -- usually. I have a charming disposition, go to the gym at least four days a week, and rarely eat red meat. I believe in god, though not religion, and I never call in sick. I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket, never spent a night in jail, never bailed on a friend in need. I am a natural blonde.
But I repeat: what is this dating?
I’m sitting here thinking really really hard. I’m also looking at the calendar and trying to remember the last time I went on a date. Now I’m trying to decide what constitutes as a “date” and I’m hoping the definition is as liberal as Boston because otherwise...
I am a midwestern girl on her fourth New England winter and I’ve gotten used to the severity.
And I really don’t get this dating thing.
I’m convinced I’m doing something wrong. I know men like me and I know I like men, but something always gets lost when I try to make the leap from being a man’s “some girl I know” to “some girl I know.” Usually, I end up in an angry or bitter dispute over either demanding too much or not enough and I’m back to sleeping alone and spending hours drinking with any gal pal I have so we can highlight every miniscule moment I ever spent with the guy. It’s pathetic. It’s the life of the single people in Boston. I mean, for a place with so many young people, la vie amor is about as likely to flourish as a thawed Ted Williams.
So maybe this all sounds a bit bitter. Well, it is bitter. I moved to this city for graduate school and I achieved my goal of completing my masters, but I’d be foolish to sit here and say that was all I hoped to achieve in my East Coast shuffle. I was leaving love of the confusing sort behind in the midwest. I was going to have me a real bonafide love affair and then I was going to move to the West Coast and do it again.
Well. It’s not that I’ve had zero success here in this windy city. It’s not that I haven’t been shown a good time by members of the grittier sex. It’s really more that none of these men have stuck around long enough to suggest we go steady, let alone mumble an “I love you,” and I’m an idealistic girl. I want more than a phone call every two weeks. I want more than a stack of excuses and when those excuses are followed by apologies, I don’t want them to be flat. And, god damn it, I want to be the only lady on the radar for once in my life.
I’m asking for too much and I realize that, gentlemen.
But it’s not just me. I’m surrounded by single ladies with the same complaints, the same terrible date stories, the same loser dudes doing the same loser things. If I had a dime for every time I heard the phrase, “Well, he said he would call...”
Uh huh.
Not too long ago, a few of my friends and I indulged in the infamous He’s Just Not That Into You book to see what sort of advice Greg and Liz could provide. All I can say is for a book that seems to advocate women’s empowerment, it made us all feel like total losers. Because the kind of man Greg says we deserve does not exist. I do not know one person who has a man (or a woman, for that matter) who always calls when he says he will, never makes his work a priority over his woman, and does all the things he says he’s going to do when he said he would do them. Yet, strangely, I know people in successful relationships -- my roommate just interrupted my tirade to announce her sister got engaged -- so what does Greg know? No man can be the super hero that he says we ladies deserve, and, frankly, we ladies shouldn’t expect such heroism. Relationships are two-way streets, and to play that cliche like a three-string bass, even in a one-traffic light town, driving conditions can still suck. Greg’s solution to the slightest sign of less-than-100% is the dude isn’t into you. While that may not always be wrong, it certainly isn’t always right, either.
My friends and I were curious enough about Greg’s theories -- particularly his harsh stance on the word “busy” and how said word was the “relationship weapon of mass destruction” -- to try and test them out a little. We stopped being the ones who made the first move, who called all the time, who needed these losers. But the bottom line was, we’re not robots. We’re passionate women who know what we want and it was really hard to sit back and wait for some dude to make the move we wanted to make ourselves. Greg says a man who doesn’t make the first move is either not interested (thus the reason he has not asked you out) or lazy. I think men are generally pretty stupid when it comes to relationships and it is always the woman’s job to drop some sort of hint. Ask me out, you idiot. After about two weeks of following Greg’s advice, though, as a sociological experiment of sorts, all I can say successfully is my phone lay silent and my nights out were with the ladies.
So I decided to shake things up a bit and ask our target audience: a man. But not just any man. I asked my old college buddy Chad. Now, it is important to note here that I, at one time, had a mad hot fever for dear old Chad and I had thunk he’d felt the same about me, but despite the fact that we saw each other nearly every day and spent hours discussing relationships and futures, he opted to have sex with one of his neighbors instead of me. That was all years ago, though, and I cried my tears over it already. Chad and I are still strangely close friends and he’s often someone I look to for relationship advice, as crazy as that might seem. It only seems crazy because you don’t know him. He’s a romantic at heart and he believes in love. He also manages to tell me every time I speak with him that he really messed up when it came to me, so that doesn’t hurt my inclination to forgive and forget. Trust me, Chad’s the sort of dude you want on your side because he’s straightforward and clear-focused. If you give him the information, he always comes back with a reliable take on the situation. So I came to him with Greg’s words of wisdom and Chad shot them all down, kamikaze style. A soundbite:
See that book is about playing the game, it's not a game, love is not a game but something that happens through fate, not because of what you say or do, the person meant for you will love you for who you are, what you do, the habits you have, the life you live someone who just doesn't stand through all that, but agrees with doing so because that is what everything in his body tells him to do.
See why I loved him, ladies? And the scariest part about it is Chad means it. He’s not feeding me a line, whether you believe that or not. He’s also not “trying to get back with me,” as my best friend insisted when I told her about the conversation. What he’s doing is giving me and the rest of the ladies who have the fortune of hearing his take some hope for mankind -- womankind is already set.
What about Greg’s theories? Chad set out to debunk all of those, repeating that love isn’t a game, people aren’t as black and white as the pages of Greg’s book. Sometimes busy people are really busy, Chad says. It might be an excuse, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
Truth be told, none of this has helped me at all. I’m still a single white female with a masters degree flying solo in Red Sox Nation. I’m still the catch uncaught. I still fall for the guys who never call you back. I still spend more time helping my friends succeed in their love lives than I spend proactively helping myself. And sex? Ha, I barely remember what it’s like to be kissed. Despite all the odds, despite all the impossibilites this facet of life generates, I am not giving up, exactly. No, I’m getting to the bottom of it -- once, and most importantly, for all.
