Love and Loss, or: too much info about my personal life, Part 2

II.

You see, while I was abroad, I met a guy. I know, I know – shocking. Something that is so normal is big-ass deal for me. Seriously, all of my guy friends, save one or two, since elementary school have been gay. So meeting as straight guy who seemed to like me and I liked and who wasn’t a douche and whom I actually had stuff in common with was a miracle. It seemed too good to be true. It was.

[X] was convinced that he liked me after I mentioned to her that I liked him. Which I conveniently realized at the end of the trip, when it was too late to do something. Fail. But when I returned home, I friended him and wrote him a message, asking about the rest of his trip. He was polite, but not forward – if he liked me, he wasn’t doing anything about it. So, after taking some advice from [X], I asked him out for coffee. Which he agreed to. I couldn’t believe it. I was high on delight and hope.

By this point, some of my friends were already referring to him as my boyfriend. I didn’t like this, as nothing had happened yet, but one friend said it was “inevitable” that we would be going out.

So we went to coffee. It was fun, sweet, charming. But I wasn’t sure I’d gotten my point across. He seemed to recognize that it was a date, but I wasn’t sure that he got that I liked him. So I told him via text that I had a good time and that he should let me know if he wanted to do something again. I basically got an “ok” and that was it. Frustrated, I waited a few days and, rolling with the advice of a pal from the Scotland trip, asked him if he wanted to do anything that weekend (okay, so the friend said to call him but I felt more comfortable with texting. As said before, I apparently don’t know how to use a phone). He said he was busy so I asked if he wanted to do something after my trip to Indiana to see family. He said he’d have to see. I was not happy, to say the least.

So I went to Indiana (which is a story in itself) and came back home, waiting for text, a call, a message, anything. Nothing. I refused to text him – mostly from the bidding of my friends, who said it was his turn to do the work. And besides, he’d shown no clear signs of liking me – which meant anything I did would look rather clingy and desperate.

However, things with [X] after returning to America were not so great. She went back to acting the way she did before we left – ambiguous about certain topics, very judgmental, and confusing with her use of sarcasm (namely, it’s impossible to see if she’s being serious or teasing – and if she is teasing, whether she means to be funny or somewhat cruel). When I’d first met the guy I’d end up going out to coffee with, [X] told me (as they go to the same college) how much she disliked him. It all seemed rather silly to me – they were both in the same major so it seemed more like competition than anything else that stemmed [X]’s dislike. But then, woe and behold, when I said I liked him, she said that she’d gotten over her dislike and that she was supportive of my feelings. She said she’s work with his friends to make things click (as that’s what someone did to get her and her boyfriend together) – she would later refuse to do this, saying she didn’t trust his friend to “handle this with the delicacy it needs.” When we returned home, things changed. I was told by another friend that [X] thought I liked the guy because we were both very “similar” (which, considering she thought he was awkward and not highly skilled in the ways of communication was not very, shall we say, inspiring). When communication became a problem, suddenly it was all about how much of a child he was and how he wasn’t very mature and that I was going to have to a lot of the leading in this. And then suddenly, after I hadn’t heard from him after I got back from Indiana, it was “maybe you shouldn’t date him” – as in don’t date him at all. A night out swimming turned into an advice session about this situation which all turned into the same thing – don’t text him. Which I understood (I wasn’t happy about it, but I understood) but the reasoning behind this advice was different. Most of my friends told me this because they cared about me and wanted me not to put too many feelings into a relationship that was going nowhere.

However, the way [X] phrased things was utterly ambiguous – she didn’t want me to text him, but she explained why he wouldn’t – making me feel like I’d made some sort of communication mistake, thought I’d done nothing but follow her advice. She said he was busy with school stuff which either meant he didn’t have time for a relationship or had already returned to campus and thus was unavailable (how she knew this stuff about him when it didn’t seem like she talked to him much, I don’t know. Later I would think that she’d purposefully told him something about me that made him avoid me, along with a few other darker conspiracies like this, but this was due to a psychotic part of my grieving when I felt like people were out to get me). And finally she told me I shouldn’t date the guy because of the “bromance” he had with one of his friends, and how he acted needy and how he’d mentioned that he was single a bunch of times while abroad – and it seemed that she was insinuating that he was just desperate and trying to take what he could. To add on to this, [X]’s boyfriend hates the guy (for reasons I don’t know or don’t understand) and said I was too good for him. It’s not totally inspiring that the first guy I’ve liked who hasn’t been at least six years older than me or fictional (here’s looking at you, Mr. Rochester) is apparently “just desperate” and “not good enough.” It’s exasperating – and not unusual in modern love.

So last week I started going through the “letting go” process – simply because there’s nothing I can do. Though [X] seemed convinced that the guy liked me, I’m beginning to think that he actually didn’t and that maybe I just read the signals wrong. Maybe I just want to believe that no one would be that bad at communication. I can’t decide which is worse – whether he actually doesn’t like me (and thus I’ve still yet to meet someone who reciprocates my affection) or whether he does and he’s still waiting for me to message him or something. The issue I’ve realized with this whole affair is that, before, when I liked someone, there was a different sort of risk. I risked going too far with infatuation, but I knew, deep down, that the object of my desire could never respond with mutual affection. Because when you like someone who is much older than you and you’re unable to show it, then you’re basically loving an image, not a real person. It’s like swooning for a movie star – they’re real (and in this case you actually have contact with them) but you can’t tell them without looking nutty and clearly they have other things going on than to deal with a school-girl crush. It hurts but you never run any risk - unless they find out you like them. With fictional characters, well – they’re fictional. End of story – you can dream and imagine and desire after them ‘til the cows come home but you’ll never know if they like you or not, so you’re playing a safe game. You can’t get your heart broken – though at the end of the day, you feel kind of empty and still wishing they were real.

This, however, was the first time I’d ever tried to tell someone I liked them – or at least did something about it – and liked someone who could actually like me back. It was a big step forward – and fortunately, the failure it’s come to hasn’t set me back too much. At least now it hasn’t. I was absolutely a basket case week or two ago, going through the stages of grieving (denial that he was not going to message me and thus checking my phone a thousand times, bargaining that if I stopped complaining about [X] and other people that things would work out, anger (“Why won’t he fucking text me? It’s not that fucking hard!”), some more denial (“he’ll message me now, any day, since I’ve gotten into this doubt and then it’ll be awkward”) and then the dark hole of depression (“why me, God, why me?”) when I didn’t even want to crawl out of bed in the morning because it hurt to think how things had turned out. And then, acceptance – or at least the path to acceptance, which I expressed to [X] in message, asking her to please not be a douche to him when they head back to school (she’d warned before that she was totally going to hate him after this, which I think is dumb. I have right to be angry at him; not her – and I’m not angry at him, so there). If he is actually interested in me, well – I’d handle it if and when that comes up. But no more “ifs” – I had way too many of them going on here. I had way to many hopes built up on very little action and now I’m suffering the consequences. It’s like the song from Wicked called “I’m Not That Girl” – “Don’t dream too far, don’t lose sight of who you are” (depressing, yes, and a mistake I’m a pro at making). I, at least, wasn’t looking another half to complete myself – I was just looking for someone to help me feel more me. I’m okay being single – I have been for my entire life, so I’d better be strong on my own :) - but there’s that need to find someone who understands you and loves you for who you are (read: boyfriends/girlfriends). It felt like I’d found that and I had all these high expectations and that things were going go just peachy. I was young, in Scotland and in love. Thus, crashing down from this peak has been a bit painful. Of course, it doesn’t help when someone acts like there’s all of this potential and that you’re totally going to be dating the guy – only to turn around and say, “Well, he’s totally not good enough.” It’s a bit dizzying.

If I were a super bitch – okay, I am a super bitch, but let’s say if I wanted to express myself that way – I could blame a lot of this on [X]. She’s only started dating here recently so her advice was crap, she dislikes the guy so she never wanted things to work out, she didn’t live up to her promises, etc, etc, etc… But this doesn’t include the fact that the guy NEVER TEXTED ME. Not once (sorry, dude – ball was in your court. I am NOT taking the fall for this). Maybe it was wrong of her to keep my hopes up when it was clear that he either wasn’t interested or wasn’t getting the hint. But it would be worse for me to blame people (the guy included, actually) in a situation that is so… uneventful. Nothing really changed here. Except for me.

Yes, things with [X] are still strained (but that’s due to a thousand other things besides this incident – in fact, this incident doesn’t factor into that divide too much right now) and I’m still single. But weirdly enough, I’ve learned a lot. I feel stronger, more assertive, more confident. So what if one guy doesn’t like me? It’s not the end of the world (of course, my mind is trying to compensate for this by showing all the little things I didn’t like about him now – “Oh my God, he doesn’t like city girls, that makes him totally undateable.” Untrue, actually. And also another thing that [X] pointed about him… hmm…). And there is a subtle difference that I’ve acquired in thinking about love, thanks to the wisdom of my classmate and my own experiences. It’s not something that’s going to make me feel complete. In fact, trying to date made me feel more lonely than ever, because no one exactly understood what was going on (perhaps if things had gone more smoothly I wouldn’t have felt this way, but who knows). Regardless, dating isn’t easy for anyone I know. It’s become this terrible, terrible risk that you take that no one can figure out how to do. And when you’re surrounded by fairytale stories of soul mates and statistics sighting that divorces are on the rise, it leaves you completely confused as to what the fuck you’re supposed to be doing to find love.

So here I am, still me, still naïve in the ways of the heart and yet feeling like I understand it more than I thought I did. Maybe the guy wasn’t “the one.” There probably is no “one,” but still… I felt something after meeting that awoke a part of myself that had been dormant for years – a sort of completion, actually. I finally feel connected to past “me’s” – the little kid I was in Indiana, the awkward girl I was in junior high, the anti-social angsty high schooler. I’m getting closer to embracing all these parts of my personality, rather than trying to hide them. Whether it was the guy or the trip that made this clear, I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t fall for the guy – maybe I fell in love with Scotland. Maybe both. I don’t know. No one knows. Life (and love) is a learning process, and I’m still learning and working it out. So I’m going to face the world with this view, from Dr. Seuss: “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” and Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Because I’m done letting confusion take over. Perhaps part of the problem was because I didn’t trust myself enough to know what to do. So what if I make mistakes? That’s part of life. Or, as Oscar Wilde says, “Experience is the name everyone gives their mistakes.” Yes it is, Mr. Wilde. Yes it is.