my shady past... with dating. part 3.

If you've read the two posts from last week about my tawdry affair with dating, then you know about the pitiful lack of experience I had with boys by the time I turned 18, you've seen me do some annoying number crunching that went nowhere, and you've also maybe read about the fact that in college and beyond I rocked at finding men to date. I mean, they were the wrong men. But still, they were there, dating me.

At 18 I dove headfirst into the waters of the college dating feeding frenzy instead of considering what I was comfortable with, what I was looking for in a guy, and what I expected a relationship to be.  I went ahead and just let whoever was giving me attention sort out all that stuff. *

 

*(Except sex. I hung onto that V-card like a sacred flower.)

 

Getting into a pattern like that is easy peasy and also totally unhealthy because it's a hard cycle to break and sometimes it hits you one day that you're 24 years old, a shitty partner, and you have no idea what you actually want.

 

Thankfully, I did 'wake up' so to speak. And once I was up, there were reminders of my passive journey through Relationshipland everywhere.

 

For instance, one day I had just set off on an all-day drive. I popped in the first cd I found whilst digging around in the center console without looking and Social Distortion started rocking through the speakers. I could have slid on my sunglasses and sung along but instead I fixated on the fact that I had no idea if I actually liked this band or if I just knew all of the words because a former flame loved this band and I thought I could make him love me by liking the music he liked.

 

What the hell? I've always been a strong, self-confident, outspoken female in nearly every other facet of my life, but when it came to men I was reduced to some malleable substance vaguely resembling play dough.

 

Granted, I do think we pick up a lot of things from the people we date. After all, we like them, we spend a lot of time with them, and we ideally learn a lot about them when we're together. For instance, I still run my toothbrush under the sink before and after I put toothpaste on it due to a former beaux. It's just a habit I picked up that I ended up liking. I don't often think of them, but he's the identifying source of said habit.

 

But I think a large part of my problem was that I spent a lot of energy trying to become the perfect girls for every guy I was dating than considering if they had a potential to be my perfect guy. Or even a guy I was compatible with.

 

I know it seems strange that I say I never intentionally entered into a relationship or really wanted one- and then I go on to talk about how much I lost myself in the guys I was seeing. It doesn't really make all that much sense to me either, and it didn't happen overnight, but gradually, which I probably why I didn't notice it at the time. Because of the guy I was dating, I've been full-on country, punk rock, a total hipster, and extremely preppy. You should see my closet, it STILL looks like an overflowing costume trunk.