I desperately need some male attention. It's been too long. Any sort of male attention will do (as long as it's positive). It's gotten to the point that I will eye-flirt with complete strangers on the el. Clearly being a single senior on a campus where all the men my age are either a) engaged, b) proposing, c) chasing after the young naive freshmen girls, or d) just plain creepy, sucks. Yes, I'm twenty-one. And yes. I just used the word sucks to describe a situation. This is not going to be an eloquent post. Stop reading now if you're expecting beautiful prose, because tonight, it's gonna be everything but.
No matter what I say, I'm still a die-hard romantic at heart. I'm all for women breaking through that proverbial glass ceiling, but at the end of the day, I still want someone to open my doors, someone to hold me, someone to reaffirm my belief in myself. No matter how many times I might tell myself that I'm completely happy single - and my dating experience seems to echo that sentiment - there's a part of me that just wants to cut ahead through the whole dating ritual and find the one.
I never dated in high school. Idealist that I was (and might still be), I wanted to find someone who perfectly and completely complemented me, date, and then settle down. And clearly, I didn't find anyone who fit my list. At the year-end journalism banquet, as I passed the feature page torch on, my successor presented me with a children's book that summed up my love philosophy - Shel Silverstein's the missing piece. I've just started to realize that I might still be stuck on the first page of that book - I'm waiting around hoping that my missing piece will come along and find me, when clearly, I need to play a more active role and start searching. And I can't expect that the first wedge that I find will fit me. I'm going to need to try on rectangles and pentagons to find my triangle.
Two Fridays ago, I was caught in a massive snowstorm that forced me to seek shelter in our local Barnes and Noble, where a new fiction bestseller caught my eye. The Year of Yes. In it, the author pledges to say yes to everyone who asks her out. I'm going to adopt that philosophy as well. In the past, I would passed up rectangles, because at face value, they're clearly not triangles. But as Shel Silverstein's book taught me, I don't know that they don't fit me, unless I try them on for size.
So many people say that unless you know who you really are as an individual, you shouldn't date. Bah humbug to that. Dating helps you realize what defines you. It makes you realize what your deal-breakers are, and conversely, how things you once thought were deal-breakers are actually bearable. The missing piece found that it could become whole simply by rolling along, trying new experiences (read: shapes); it could become it's own entity, with nothing missing. Similarly, I pledge to stop waiting for things to happen and start rolling, taking risks along the way.
So here's to the new yes me. Bring on the eye flirting. Bring on the older men whom I wouldn't have dated in the past. Bring on the tattooed, pierced eyebrow, quintessential bad boy. Bring on the nerds. Bring on the new experiences. I will break down these walls that I've built, stop crossing off lists, and learn to fly by the seat of my pants.
3 years ago
