Girls. I like girls. I can’t help it, I think it’s some kind of biological thing. Maybe there is some research out there that can confirm this for me.
Lately though, girls keep confusing me. They never seem to know what they want, and they are always causing me and my friends troubles. What gives?
Actually, that’s not fair. Boys give my friends a lot of trouble too, so I guess it’s not strictly a girl thing. It seems that as I get older, relationships among my group of peers just get more and more problematic.
Is this something that all late 20s people experience? Can you divide your friends into the “terminally coupled” and the “terminally single”? I sure can. Many of my friends coupled towards the end of college, or shortly thereafter. They now concern themselves with landscaping and, shudder, babies.
The other camp are the terminally single, a camp which I’m pretty familiar with. We date, we go to parties, we go to clubs, and we bitch to each other about not being able to discuss landscaping with anyone. Or at least not with anyone who cares.
There are many problems that face the terminally single, and I really don’t have any answers, so I’m just going to enumerate the problems, in the hopes that some of you sage readers will know how to deal with them. Or at least identify with them.
Meeting people. The first problem with being terminally single as you get older is meeting people. When you run in circles with the attached, you just don’t meet as many singles as you might like. That means you either settle for the slim pickings around you, or you have affairs with attached people, which leads to a whole new realm of problems we won’t go into here.
Dating people. Am I the only person that is just a little tired with the whole dating scene? You meet someone (see problem #1). You ask them out. You go out. You have the same conversations over and over with each new date. Where are you from? What do you do? Where do you work? Do you like it? I’m beginning to think it would be easier to just write up a bio to give someone before that date. Just get the whole thing out of the way so you can move on to some interesting conversation during that awkward first date.
Sleeping with people. Here you have two choices. Do it or wait. Neither one seems to work out very well. It seems like when you go out with someone and there is immediate physical attraction, you do it fast. And then the relationship goes to hell because you just jumped into the sack and rather than intimacy based on anything substantive, it’s just crazed monkey lust.
Nothing wrong with the occasional fling, mind you, but jumping into bed does seem to destruct relationships or relegate them to fuck buddies.
Holding out doesn’t really seem to fare much better. Then you build up something in your mind that no human could really live up to, and you end up disappointed with the first physical encounter because you’ve built it up to much, or you wait too long and the other person loses interest. There is no winning.
So what can be done about all this? Nothing, really. I’m not suggesting any solutions. I’m just venting. I have a friend who walks around leering at every woman he sees, he loves strip clubs and objectifies women at every opportunity. And then he’ll turn right around and say that he just wants intimacy, to be loved for who he is and to love someone for who they are. He’s a walking set of contradictions: a horn dog pervert and a loving, caring friend. He’s no different from you and me.
And maybe that’s what keeps so many of us single: we have these conflicting personalities. We want raw physical sex. We want close, intimate love making. We want to laugh with someone at the same jokes, but we want someone who can challenge us to be the best we are capable of. We want someone who is perfect in every way, but who will accept us for all of our flaws. God forbid they should have any flaws of their own. Is that what keeps us alone in the world? I wonder.