I’m no player, but not too long ago I was talking to three different guys at the same time. Having been a boyfriend kind of girl, this pseudo Sex and the City world is a bit foreign to me. Normally, it is only when I’m a little bit off and am “getting back out there”, or when I’m completely confident and don’t give a shit that things like this tend to happen. When you don’t know what you want, you go on dates just to push your boundaries, when you totally know what you want, well, you go on dates because you have nothing to lose. The worst part is, sometimes I could leave it as easily as I could take it.
When I’m content in my own skin, in my own place, with my own hobbies, and my own friends…I am not worried about meeting anyone. That’s actually when I seem to attract. However, the funniest part is that right when you feel you are at the top of your game and you are fine with or without another, that’s when people come along to jack your style. You don’t have time for nobodies, time-wasters, and bloody poor kissers. You barely have time for you.
All that being said, you still glance down at that biological clock and think, but if not now, when. Like Rachel lamented in Friends (when she was 30 dating a 25 year old)…well, I want a kid by 35, which means probably getting pregnant at 34. I’d like to be married for about a year first, which means 33, and I want a 1 year engagement, which is 32 and I’d like to know the guy a couple of years first…which makes me 30. Suddenly, in that moment, she decides that she needs to dump her dead-end boy toy because to have the life she wants, she can’t keep living the life she likes.
But, what if you want to be in that “date for the heck of it”, or “don’t date at all” phase? Do you need to look at the clock? Do you need to do Benjamin Button backward math and do you need to worry?
All I know is when I lamented to a co-worker that I can’t possibly talk to 3 people at once, I am not cool enough, am not saucy enough and cannot find the time….she asked to see their pictures. Pretty much I received a slap upside the head.
She insisted they were all cute, fit…and she had been with her husband for about 20 years now. My young, early 30’s #firstworldproblems were in fact not problems. She begged me to go on all the dates, tell her all the stories and let her live vicariously through me. No matter how old (or young) you are…the trials of dating are trials for life…and the trials of dating while you don’t give a shit are in fact not trials…not too short, too tall, too hyper, too game show host, too cheap, too ethnic…but, shirtless, employed, date-paying opportunities that really you need to embrace and learn from.
Don’t look at every situation as life and death or every date as forever…but relish in the opportunities you will have. And if you have 1, 2, 9 at once…figure you will know the right one when you know the right one…or if you don’t, then maybe you don’t need a right one at all. Maybe, just maybe you are looking at the right one every day in the mirror. Anything above that is just a perk in this thing we call life.
The Ginga Ninja
The Ginger Girl Chronicles 