It is.
And that is how I feel about the last guy in my life who burned me. And about another one as well.
Martha Wainwright wrote the song that this post is titled from, and it is one of those tunes that just captures the angst and unsettled feeling that a woman gets when she has somehow ended up chasing up a man, and she wishes she could just be a man for a second so that it could be okay to make a fucking move without sending that man running.
That's what it feels like to me, when I listen to it. And it has been going through my head since the latest heartache has errupted.
So here's how it went.
I spotted this guy at my department store job. He was a mechanic for the store, but I had never realised what his job was, nor paid much attention. Until one day, when I went for a coffee near work and he happened to be sitting in the cafe, reading a novel, wearing a purple shirt. He was magnetic. I could feel the pull between us, that feeling you get when you are hyperaware of someone's presence and feel like they are noticing every time you blink an eye. So we sat there, about 30 feet across the room from each other, magnetized from that moment on, and when I got up to leave, he gave a simple "goodbye" to the girl he had seen but never spoken to.
And from there things blossomed the way we all love a new romance to, both of us exchanging glances and stares and smiles and hellos until he finally came to buy something at the counter I was working at. We flirted endlessly, talking about an irrelevant ceiling fan for ten minutes. I could feel it then, and that was when I realised that I was crushing.
All of the girls at the counter I was working at began to fuss and squeal with me, and it soon became our preoccupation at work. Maybe this made me rush into things, or maybe it had been so long since I really liked someone new, and he was intimidating, and I didn't know how to handle things and forgot about dating rules, because I was late-night-Googling everything about men.
The ceiling-fan encounter led to numerous other similar experiences in the next few weeks. He would "just happen" to bump into me on the elevator, I would "just happen" to see him around the escalator. The mystery mechanic man was suddenly always around, and I liked it that way. He gave me his number under the pretense of "jamming" and I called him the next day, we talked about everything but and he asked me out.
The next few days we didn't see each other, and I saw him go talk to his ex and act shy with me, so rather than playing it cool, I wrote him a text telling him I felt like he was feeling weird talking to his ex in front of me, but that I thought he was cool and wanted to know more about him and wanted to know if he was on the same page.
RED ALERT.
That was exactly where everything went wrong. And it never got completely back on track.
NEVER DO THIS TO YOURSELVES, WOMEN. This is apparently not the thrilling event we had anticipated, where we can just be honest and open and this "special" man will somehow understand, and not see our impatience as cute and honest.
As we'd hoped.
All this did for me was yield a "let's just be friends" email response. I responded to his email by bumping into him in person, and us talking and him telling me he "just really isn't ready for anything". Okay, cool, then let's just be friends.
Instead of pulling back at that point like I obviously would have in my right mind, my hormones were telling me to send him an email inviting him to a concert, and then following up on his non-response with a week-later text asking him to hang, once again.
WHAT WAS I THINKING?!
I can't even believe this as I am writing it. Everything that I do, when I do it, seems, if not normal (it usually isn't), at least justified by some Anne Universe Rule, such as "follow your emotions", which now I realise, maybe isn't such a good one for me lately.
Back from the tangent, he responded to my text with a non-committal response about hanging that weekend. I never answered, he never called, I drunk-texted, he didn't respond, and everything was looking dim.
When out of the blue I got an email from him. Thus began our short-lived but much-liked email correspondence. He would send me links to videos he found interesting. I would sit at home, debating as to whether or not I should comment on the vids, tearing every single notion I got from the guy apart and wondering what I should do next to make him like me.
You can't make someone like you.
But I was still learning that lesson. And I don't even accept it now. I know that I should, and that it's probably true.
So one night I decide to write back to an email, and fell asleep and dreamt about him, and then woke up, went shopping, and bumped into him. He invited me to sit and have a coffee with him. My dreams were literally coming true.
Things went really well, and I felt like he was into me. We kept talking, and went out again two weeks later. We went for drinks, the night was going really well, we were laughing, bonding, connecting... which turned into a drunken adventure, jamming, and going back to his place, talking until 5, having amazing sex, even better morning sex, a goodbye kiss, and non-awkward day-after syndrome. It was pleasant.
Things took a complete turn-around. I don't know now if it's because he felt like he owed me something, but I like to hope he really did like me. The following week was full of phone calls and meetings for coffee. We were integrating each other more, but I still felt like there was a wall up, in both our cases. I was still trying to play the game, and he was letting his interest show but still keeping his guards up.
I could share with you with the details of how things detangled, but it is 1:50 am and I am tired, and I feel like things are dragging here, quite like the romance itself. That's probably the best way to describe what happened. Dragging. I dragged him into something he wasn't willing to be dragged into and expected him to stay there. He didn't want a relationship, so rather than saying goodbye before hello, or at sneakiest pretending I just wanted to be friends and not pressuring him as much as I could handle, I gave him all the ugly characteristics of a girlfriend that you don't want. Impatience, dependance, misunderstanding, insecurity to name a few.
Maybe I am just being hard on myself. My friends would say so. But maybe I have to look at things critically, so I don't wind up causing myself the same pain again later.
At the same time, he was fucked up. Mixed signals galore, which pushed me to react like the uncool girl that I don't want to be.
So maybe the moral here is that sometimes things just don't quite match, and you can't blame either party.
Or maybe the moral of the story is, when you take two compatible people who are at unstable points, things are bound to fall apart, especially if you push it.
But here's what I think the real moral of the story is. When you like someone, don't put it all out there. Showing your cards too soon fucks up the whole game, and you inevitably lose.
The end.
Anne
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