I know a lot of girls who don’t think they’re mental, and if anything that’s worse, because it means they are and they don’t see it, so they never do anything about it.
I know I’m nuts. I mean, on top of all the stuff that could probably get me institutionalized, I’m girl-nuts. I do my best to weigh my natural reactions against the plumb line of rationality, but it doesn’t always work, or at least not right away.
The point of all this preamble?
I met a boy.
Something about putting that statement in its own paragraph makes it seem overblown, like I’m about to launch into a love story worthy of Nicholas Sparks. It isn’t that. I just met a boy, and he was nice, and there was something nice about meeting him.
I make it a policy not to develop crushes. I’m prone to many things, but two which seem to frequently occur in tandem are obsession and rejection, so I do my best not to obsess myself into a crush, because then the ensuing rejection is that much worse.
When I started to realize I might like this boy, my natural inclination was to obsess. I wanted to do what I’d always done: sit down with my friends and analyze (or, rather, over-analyze) every moment we’d spent in each others’ company and look for clues that he might be interested.
Since we’d only spent a half dozen hours together, and two of those were while watching a movie, there wasn’t a lot of evidence to work with. But trust me, I am sufficiently prone to obsession and over-analysis that I could have spun that into weeks of driving myself up the wall.
Fortunately, I rather quickly realized such an exercise would be — in a word — stupid.
I mentioned to a girlfriend that I was thinking about just asking him, and she shook her head vehemently and insisted, “Girls don’t do that.”
And, in another moment of irrationality, I listened.
It took me a week to circle back to the “this is stupid” line of thinking, but upon arriving there, I sent him a Facebook message.
(What. You didn’t think I was going to say it to his face, did you? Pfft.)
I twiddled my thumbs while I awaited a reply, and texted a (different) girlfriend to let her know I may have just made a potential friendship very awkward. Her response amused me.
Within a couple hours I got a message back from the boy in question. It was, as I suspected, more “do not want” than “i can haz”. But in the boy’s defense, he does rejection very well. Batman, literature, and petticoats came into play. It may have been my favourite rejection thus far.
The whole reason I’m blogging about this is to show another way in which I’m trying to take my life in a new direction. I could have gone into far greater detail about the raging clusterfuck that has been my romantic life up to this point, but that would have made for a very long read. I can pretty much sort every aspect of it into one of three categories: I can’t pick up on signals to save my life; I stand passively in a dimly lit corner hoping someone will notice me despite my deliberate attempt at invisibility; I run like a bat out of hell from anything even remotely resembling functional human interaction.
(A clusterfuck of my own doing is a clusterfuck all the same.)
The point is, I’m tired of having unhealthy, dysfunctional, or utterly nonfunctional relationships. I’m tired of wondering and analyzing and being irrational for the sake of social convention.
My new plan: Want? Ask. Closed mouths don’t get fed.
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