The Game

I remember once my friend compared this girl to a video game. Something about guys having to keep putting quarters in her to see how far they can get. Somehow this amused her tremendously. I repeated the comment to a girl and it went really badly. I told me friend what had happened and her cried, "You did what!? You can't just go around doing that to just any girl." That's when I realized, I was really in trouble.

Through most of college, I was single. However, given the dating pool, I felt I was better off for it anyway. When my friend and roommate finally moved away from Miami, Florida, he told me it was a shame we had not gone somewhere else for school because we had wasted some of our best years on some of the most materialistic and mean women ever. I thought he was probably right, but when I went to a different university for my advanced degree, I knew he was right. It was ok. I had so many friends to keep me occupied that it really never bothered me. When I did have a girlfriend she would get jealous of my female friends and think I was sleeping with them. Suddenly I lost my autonomy and my freedom. Besides, I was still figuring myself out. There was no real necessity to have a girlfriend.

After I finished school, I suddenly had about a tenth of the friends to hang out with. They were scattered throughout the country, and in some cases the world. The friends I did have worked terrible hours or had significant others and so I didn't see them as much. I decided that I now needed a girlfriend, and that I was ready to have one. I had finished my degrees, I had a solid career ahead of me, things were looking up and I was tired of just hanging out with myself at the end of the day. However, I wanted a cool girlfriend. I wanted one that was fun to hangout with, someone that I would hangout with even if I wasn't sleeping with her. I had this theory - beauty fades, but personality is forever. So I had to genuinely like the person that I was with for more than their body. Don't get me wrong, there had to be some sort of physical attractiveness, but it was not high on my list. She only had to be "cute".

The problem was that I don't like hanging out with that many people consistently, and the ones that I did like hanging out with were already my friends, and I was not going to try and convert a friend into a girlfriend. That was just not an option, which may or may not be wise. Well there was always that one girl that became my friend after I tried to date her for two years, I would have totally converted that one, but she was too busy sending me mixed messages. For example, one day after I listed my requirements for a girlfriend, she asked me, "so which one of those qualities don't I have?" What an unfair question. The other problem was that I didn't meet women my own age through work or something like that. I am about half the age of most people I work with so it's hard to have office romances or be introduced to young friends of co-workers when their young friends are 40.

As I reflect upon all of this, I wonder how it will all shake out in the end. I am not really sure, but I think I definitely need to find some extracurricular social activities to meet new friends and such. Unfortunately, I really have no idea where I will find the time, nor which ones I should join. A lot of the clubs I look into joining are also filled with old people. Where did all the young people go? I think they must all be chained to desks slaving away, and not joining clubs.

This post was partially inspired by Kiki.