I finally got the chance to watch WALL-E last weekend ( It's hard to find time to watch movies when you've got two little kids. We almost never go to a movie theater, and it's even hard to find the time to watch a movie on DVD. We had the WALL-E DVD for 3 weeks before I even got a chance to watch it ( and I had to watch it over a 3 day period ) ). Now that I've finally seen all 9 Pixar films, I thought I'd have a little fun by ranking the 9 movies from best to worst.
Keep in mind that "worst" is a relative term here. I thoroughly enjoyed all the Pixar movies. However, some were better than others, and it will be fun to debate which Pixar movies were the best. Yes, I said "debate". I'm expecting a little feedback here. If you're reading this I'd very much like you to leave a comment with your own Pixar movie rankings. If you have you own blog, I'd encourage you to dedicate one of your own blog post to the subject. I'd really like to collect opinions from a bunch of people, and tally up the results.
OK, on to the rankings ( WARNINGS: Lots of spoilers below, so skip the comments for a movie if you haven't seen it yet ):
1) Monsters, Inc.
I think I like this one the best because of how creative the basic premise is. Long before Pixar came along, I'd seen stories about talking toys, talking animals, talking cars, superheroes, and robots with human emotions. However, I loved the way this movie took the whole "monster in the bedroom" concept, and expanded it into a story about an alternate monster universe which is powered by children's screams. Great concept, and great execution. The film was cast perfectly - I can't imagine anybody but Billy Crystal and John Goodman in those roles ( I've also always been a been a big Jennifer Tilly fan ( OK, I admit it - I've always considered her to be REALLY hot ), so it was nice to hear her distinctive voice as the medusa character Celia ). Finally, as a parent, the Sully/Boo dynamic really touched my heart. Every time I watch it, I get a little bit choked up when Sully enters Boo's room at the end.
2) Toy Story
Not much to say here. I think this movie pretty much speaks for itself. The only thing I will address is the Toy Story vs. Toy Story 2 debate. A lot of people feel that Toy Story 2 was the superior movie. I know lots of folks loved the "When She Loved Me" song, and the whole "what happens to toys when kids outgrow them" angle from Toy Story 2, but I liked the themes from Toy Story just a little bit better. I loved Buzz' existential crisis when he realizes that he's a toy, and I love what the movie has to say about jealousy and friendship. In any case, you really can't go wrong with either Toy Story or Toy Story 2. There really isn't a lot of room that separates these two movies, though there is just enough room between them to slip in ...
3) Finding Nemo
I'll admit that the only reason I've ranked this movie so high is that I'm a Dad. People who aren't parents might not rank this movie quite as high. However, I am a Dad, and this movie made me cry - so there you go.
4) Toy Story 2
See my comments on Toy Story above.
The only thing I'll add is that I really don't see much difference in the quality of the top 4 movies on my list. I think all 4 of them are fantastic, and depending on my mood on a given day, I could rank them in a completely different order. I think these 4 movies are a cut about the other 5. I think there's a big drop between 4 and 5 on this list. I also think the movies I ranked 5 through 7 are of roughly equal quality, and then there is another drop-off before we get to movies 8 and 9 on the list.
5) Cars
I'm a bit biased about this one, because for a long time, my son Michael loved everything about cars ( now he's into math instead ). Long before he could speak in sentences, he could identify almost any car he saw on the street by company and model ( "Chevy Corvette", "Ford Mustang", "Honda Civic", etc. ). He could identify every car logo before he was 3, and could even identify a BWM or a Mercedes ( without seeing the logos ) just based on the shape of the grill. "Cars" was the first movie I ever took Michael to see, so it will always have a special place in my heart ( Plus, I like the "winning isn't everything" message. I always get a little choked up when I watch Lightning McQueen push The King over the finish line. ).
6) WALL-E
I still can't get the song "Put on your Sunday Clothes" out of my head ( and I mean that in a good way ), and I think the love story is really sweet. However, as an Engineer, there are a bunch of little things that bother me about this movie.
- WALL-E and EVE could make sounds in the vacuum of space.
- The Axiom was launched in 2105. I don't even think the most optimistic futurist could envision that we would have that kind of technology by 2105.
- The Axiom clearly employed some sort of artificial gravity field. You would think that if such a field was generated by the ship, the direction of that gravitational field would be relative to the ship. In other words, no matter which way the ship was oriented in space, you would think the artificial gravity field would pull things towards the floor ( towards the bottom of the ship ). Thus, it didn't really make a lot a sense that everyone and everything wound up sliding toward one side of the ship, just because Auto turned the wheel and tilted the ship relative to the space around it.
- Speaking of the space around the ship, that nebula the ship is sitting in is way too small. I don't think such a small quantity of gas would have enough gravity to hold itself together.
- Why the heck was the Axiom is some nebula light years away from the earth? If the original plan was to return to earth in 5 years, why did it need to be docked so far away?
- Considering that the 5-year cruise turned into a 700 year cruise, where did the Axiom get supplies from when supplies inevitably ran out? They couldn't have packed enough supplies for 700 years. Perhaps that's why the Axiom was out in deep space. Perhaps the Axiom needed to keep searching for food/water ( or at least the raw materials to synthesize food/water ). However, there are plenty of raw materials available in the Solar System, so I'm still not sure why they needed to be so far from earth ( especially if you were sending probes to Earth rather frequently ).
- Speaking of the probes, why the heck did Auto even bother to wake up the Captain to tell him that a probe had returned positive? Auto had known for 695 years that returning to Earth was no longer part of his directive. With that in mind, you would think that Auto would have arranged to have the plant disposed of and EVE's memory erased long before waking up the Captain. Considering that Auto's directive was to make sure that the Axiom never returned to earth, there's really no good reason for Auto to let the Captain know that a probe returned positive. Actually, there's no reason to even send the probes to earth, other than for show. You would think that Auto would have arranged to have any positive samples disposed of long before any human knew about it.
- Considering the frequent dust storms, and the fact that the oceans had all dried up, it didn't really look like the earth was ready to support much life at the end of the movie. It looked like it would have taken at least several thousands years for the earth to recover significantly ( hundreds of millions of years for things like fish and sea turtles to evolve again ). I really don't see how the Axiom folks could have survived on earth ( unless they spent a few thousands more years in the docked Axiom while the earth recovered - but where would they get supplies for the Axiom? ).
All that being said, I really did love WALL-E, just not enough to rank it in the top 5.
7) Ratatouille
Cute, but not great. It was certainly entertaining, but I just wasn't feeling the "anybody can cook" message. Perhaps I'll like this movie more as I improve my cooking skills.
8) The Incredibles
I remember enjoying this movie when I watched it, but after it was over, I really couldn't think of a single moment that stood out. In my opinion, this movie is kinda like a Twinkie - enjoyable, but essentially empty calories.
9) A Bug's Life
DreamWorks coulda made this. In fact, DreamWorks did make this movie ( Ants ), and they made it better.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
YouTube Goodbye
As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to stop making YouTube videos for a while. I'm not sure when ( or if ) I'll start making them again. In any case, I made a YT video video to explain why I'll be leaving for a while. The link to that video is here.
Also, I've noticed that a few of you who have watched the "Goodbye" video and have read the "Anna and Barry" blog post ( here ) have decided that these two things must be connected somehow.
Well, if you've come to that conclusion, I've got two things to say:
1) No shit, Sherlock!
2) The "Anna and Barry" post does not describe my situation exactly. The Barry character is mostly me, but the Anna character truly is a composite. All the stuff about feeling insecure, not being good enough for "Barry", and being worried that "Barry" might leave her for a prettier girl is based on an "Anna" who is not my wife and a "Barry" who is not me. All the jealousy stuff does apply to my situation, but I don't know the exact reason for the jealousy. Part of what I need to do over the next few months is figure out the real root cause of the jealousy, and use that knowledge to make my marriage better. In any case, I really can't control what my wife is feeling. All I know for sure is that *I* have been taking her for granted lately, and *I* need to do a better job to make her feel as special as she actually is.
Oh, one last thing - I just wanted to respond to "Trav" ( I assume "Trav"is one of my YT subscribers, but I don't know who he/she is exactly ). I'm definitely not the kinda of person who would every even considering going to a swinging club. Don't get me wrong, I believe consenting adults should be able to do anything they want, but I am very much Mr. Monogamy. My wife is the only girl I've every been "physical" with (I've never even kissed another girl ), and I intend to keep things that way. Also, my wife certainly doesn't need to have her looks enhanced. She doesn't like to be on YT ( doesn't like YT period, which is one reason why I'm going to stop making videos for a while ), but I do have pictures of her on facebook. If you see the two of us side-by-side I think you'll agree that if anybody needs plastic surgery, it's me.
Rich
Also, I've noticed that a few of you who have watched the "Goodbye" video and have read the "Anna and Barry" blog post ( here ) have decided that these two things must be connected somehow.
Well, if you've come to that conclusion, I've got two things to say:
1) No shit, Sherlock!
2) The "Anna and Barry" post does not describe my situation exactly. The Barry character is mostly me, but the Anna character truly is a composite. All the stuff about feeling insecure, not being good enough for "Barry", and being worried that "Barry" might leave her for a prettier girl is based on an "Anna" who is not my wife and a "Barry" who is not me. All the jealousy stuff does apply to my situation, but I don't know the exact reason for the jealousy. Part of what I need to do over the next few months is figure out the real root cause of the jealousy, and use that knowledge to make my marriage better. In any case, I really can't control what my wife is feeling. All I know for sure is that *I* have been taking her for granted lately, and *I* need to do a better job to make her feel as special as she actually is.
Oh, one last thing - I just wanted to respond to "Trav" ( I assume "Trav"is one of my YT subscribers, but I don't know who he/she is exactly ). I'm definitely not the kinda of person who would every even considering going to a swinging club. Don't get me wrong, I believe consenting adults should be able to do anything they want, but I am very much Mr. Monogamy. My wife is the only girl I've every been "physical" with (I've never even kissed another girl ), and I intend to keep things that way. Also, my wife certainly doesn't need to have her looks enhanced. She doesn't like to be on YT ( doesn't like YT period, which is one reason why I'm going to stop making videos for a while ), but I do have pictures of her on facebook. If you see the two of us side-by-side I think you'll agree that if anybody needs plastic surgery, it's me.
Rich
Friday, February 20, 2009
Anna and Barry
This is going to be another post on the subject of love and relationships. However, I've decided that instead of using awkward names like "Person A" and "Person B" to make my point, I'm just going to call our two hypothetical people Anna and Barry.
Before I even tell the story of Anna and Barry, I want to make it clear that Anna and Barry are composite characters. They are composites of many people and situations. However, I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit that there is a lot of my wife ( Ruth ) in Anna, and a lot of me in Barry.
In any case, let me get to the story of Anna and Barry...
Anna and Barry are in a long term loving relationship ( You can think of them as being married, engaged, on the way to being engaged, or perhaps just committed to living with each other for a long time ( because not everybody believes in the institution of marriage ). The bottom line is that Anna and Barry love each other, and are deeply committed to each other ). However, everything is not perfect in their little paradise.
There are jealousy issues in this relationship. Anna tend to be very jealous of Barry, even though he never gives her much of a reason to be jealous. However, while Barry isn't doing anything to make Anna jealous, he is not entirely free from blame. Much of Anna's jealousy stems from insecurity, and Barry hasn't been doing enough reduce that insecurity. He may not realize how insecure she is, and he may not even know the best way to make her feel secure, but he certainly needs to find a way to give her more reassurance. He needs to find a way to make her feel more special. He certainly feels that she's the most special woman in the world, but he hasn't been doing enough to let her know.
Anna needs more reassurance, because deep down, she doesn't feel like she's good enough for Barry. Deep down, she always fears that he'll leave her for somebody better. These fears are actually quite silly considering how much Barry loves her, especially her occasional fear that he might leave her for somebody more attractive. After all, Anna's well aware that Barry finds her attractive, and whenever a man is truly in love with a woman, I believe that the equation below applies:
(pretty girl) + LOVE = ( The most beautiful girl in the world )
As long as Barry truly loves Anna, he's going to think of her as the most beautiful girl in the world. Thus, Anna should never worry that Barry's love will fade because he finds another woman more attractive than her. What she should be worrying about is that Barry could find another woman more attractive than her if his love fades.
This bring us back to the jealously. The jealously certainly has the potential to damage the bond of love between Anna and Barry. Anna can't help being jealous sometimes, and she sometimes lets Barry know this. This isn't good for the relationship at all, because Anna's jealousy makes Barry upset. He feels like she doesn't trust him, and that hurts. It's hurts more than Anna will ever know. Barry feels like Anna doubts his love for her, and that makes him fell unappreciated. He very much wants to feel like his love is completely accepted and appreciated, but he sometimes feels Anna is not completely open to his love.
Needless to say, all of the issues surrounding this jealousy can damage the love which Anna and Barry have. Because the jealously damages the love, and the love is what keeps Barry faithful, Anna's fears that Barry will stray have the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Most people ( except for your occasional serial killer type ) really want to be good deep down. Most people really want to do the right thing. However, a little encouragement never hurts. It's easier for people to do the right thing if they feel appreciated for doing the right thing. Barry has always been faithful to Anna, and wants to feel like Anna appreciates that. When Anna expresses jealously, it's basically the opposite of of encouragement. Barry is more likely to remain faithful if he receives some positive reinforcement for his fidelity. If he doesn't get positive reinforcement, it's more likely that he will stray.
Perhaps Barry won't stray in the physical sense, but if the love fades a bit and he feels unappreciated, he could stray in an emotional sense. He could become more emotionally distant from Anna. This will invariably lead to more jealously from Anna, which will lead to more emotional distance, which can continue on in a viscous cycle until the once great love Anna and Barry had will be destroyed.
So yeah, jealousy in a relationship can be a very bad thing. It can degrade even the strongest love. However, the viscous cycle can be stopped, assuming you recognize what is happening and try to do something about it.
Anna needs to love herself more. Anna need to feel like she is good enough for Barry. Anna needs to feel like Barry is the luckiest man in the world to have her, and Barry needs to let Anna know that he is the luckiest man in the world. Barry needs to let Anna know this EVERY DAY.
These steps aren't always easy, but true love is a great and rare thing, and nothing truly great in life comes easy.
In any case folks, keep that in mind as you embark on your journey for true love. Keep in mind that true love is a journey and not a destination.
I think I'll close this post by quoting a simple ( but wise ) thing CG#1 once told me...
"It's easy to be in love, the hard part is the relationship."
See ya folks,
Rich
Before I even tell the story of Anna and Barry, I want to make it clear that Anna and Barry are composite characters. They are composites of many people and situations. However, I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit that there is a lot of my wife ( Ruth ) in Anna, and a lot of me in Barry.
In any case, let me get to the story of Anna and Barry...
Anna and Barry are in a long term loving relationship ( You can think of them as being married, engaged, on the way to being engaged, or perhaps just committed to living with each other for a long time ( because not everybody believes in the institution of marriage ). The bottom line is that Anna and Barry love each other, and are deeply committed to each other ). However, everything is not perfect in their little paradise.
There are jealousy issues in this relationship. Anna tend to be very jealous of Barry, even though he never gives her much of a reason to be jealous. However, while Barry isn't doing anything to make Anna jealous, he is not entirely free from blame. Much of Anna's jealousy stems from insecurity, and Barry hasn't been doing enough reduce that insecurity. He may not realize how insecure she is, and he may not even know the best way to make her feel secure, but he certainly needs to find a way to give her more reassurance. He needs to find a way to make her feel more special. He certainly feels that she's the most special woman in the world, but he hasn't been doing enough to let her know.
Anna needs more reassurance, because deep down, she doesn't feel like she's good enough for Barry. Deep down, she always fears that he'll leave her for somebody better. These fears are actually quite silly considering how much Barry loves her, especially her occasional fear that he might leave her for somebody more attractive. After all, Anna's well aware that Barry finds her attractive, and whenever a man is truly in love with a woman, I believe that the equation below applies:
(pretty girl) + LOVE = ( The most beautiful girl in the world )
As long as Barry truly loves Anna, he's going to think of her as the most beautiful girl in the world. Thus, Anna should never worry that Barry's love will fade because he finds another woman more attractive than her. What she should be worrying about is that Barry could find another woman more attractive than her if his love fades.
This bring us back to the jealously. The jealously certainly has the potential to damage the bond of love between Anna and Barry. Anna can't help being jealous sometimes, and she sometimes lets Barry know this. This isn't good for the relationship at all, because Anna's jealousy makes Barry upset. He feels like she doesn't trust him, and that hurts. It's hurts more than Anna will ever know. Barry feels like Anna doubts his love for her, and that makes him fell unappreciated. He very much wants to feel like his love is completely accepted and appreciated, but he sometimes feels Anna is not completely open to his love.
Needless to say, all of the issues surrounding this jealousy can damage the love which Anna and Barry have. Because the jealously damages the love, and the love is what keeps Barry faithful, Anna's fears that Barry will stray have the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Most people ( except for your occasional serial killer type ) really want to be good deep down. Most people really want to do the right thing. However, a little encouragement never hurts. It's easier for people to do the right thing if they feel appreciated for doing the right thing. Barry has always been faithful to Anna, and wants to feel like Anna appreciates that. When Anna expresses jealously, it's basically the opposite of of encouragement. Barry is more likely to remain faithful if he receives some positive reinforcement for his fidelity. If he doesn't get positive reinforcement, it's more likely that he will stray.
Perhaps Barry won't stray in the physical sense, but if the love fades a bit and he feels unappreciated, he could stray in an emotional sense. He could become more emotionally distant from Anna. This will invariably lead to more jealously from Anna, which will lead to more emotional distance, which can continue on in a viscous cycle until the once great love Anna and Barry had will be destroyed.
So yeah, jealousy in a relationship can be a very bad thing. It can degrade even the strongest love. However, the viscous cycle can be stopped, assuming you recognize what is happening and try to do something about it.
Anna needs to love herself more. Anna need to feel like she is good enough for Barry. Anna needs to feel like Barry is the luckiest man in the world to have her, and Barry needs to let Anna know that he is the luckiest man in the world. Barry needs to let Anna know this EVERY DAY.
These steps aren't always easy, but true love is a great and rare thing, and nothing truly great in life comes easy.
In any case folks, keep that in mind as you embark on your journey for true love. Keep in mind that true love is a journey and not a destination.
I think I'll close this post by quoting a simple ( but wise ) thing CG#1 once told me...
"It's easy to be in love, the hard part is the relationship."
See ya folks,
Rich
Monday, February 16, 2009
Blog bug?
Is it just me, or is the front page of my blog blank? I can see all the stuff to the right ( post archive, links, etc. ), but I can't see any of my blog posts when I go to the first page of my blog. I any case, if anybody notices this, it's not intentional - just looks like some blog bugginess.
In more interesting news, I may need to stop making YT videos for quite some time. I'd like to make a video to thank all my subscribers and kinda explain why, but I don't know if I'll even get a chance to do that. In any case, don't expect a new YT video soon, except perhaps one to say goodbye. I'll keep my videos up, and the goodbye may not be permanent, but it could be.
Rich
In more interesting news, I may need to stop making YT videos for quite some time. I'd like to make a video to thank all my subscribers and kinda explain why, but I don't know if I'll even get a chance to do that. In any case, don't expect a new YT video soon, except perhaps one to say goodbye. I'll keep my videos up, and the goodbye may not be permanent, but it could be.
Rich
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
V-Day
I'm actually not a big fan of Valentine's Day - never have been. It's not that I think it's a bad thing for two people to express their love for each other, it's just that a truly loving couple shouldn't have to wait for some specific day in February to express their love. Two people in a loving relationship should express their love every day - and if you want to to pick a special day to celebrate, isn't that what your anniversary ( either wedding or dating anniversary ) is for? ( Seriously, April 6th ( the anniversary of when Ruth and I became a couple ) will always be more special to be than February 14th ). People certainly should celebrate their love, but I feel it should be done privately on days that really have significance to the couple. "Private" is the key word in the previous sentence. Valentine's Day has never really been a private holiday, and I think having a specific day for everyone to parade their happy relationships is really cruel to people who do not have a sweetheart. I mean, it's great to have a happy relationship, but I don't want to rub it in the face of those who don't have a happy relationship. Individual couples going out to celebrate on their anniversaries is fine, but all couples celebrating at the same time when there are so many lonely people out there? That just seems cruel. I know I felt awful every Valentine's Day in the years before I met Ruth, and I hate the idea of other people feeling this way. So yeah, I'd abolish V-Day if I could, though that being said, Ruth and I do celebrate Valentine's Day ( She'd kick my ass if I didn't. ).
Anyway, I wrote a poem about the cruelty of Valentine's Day way back on February 12, 1987 ( This was two weeks before I wrote HSG#1 a letter to tell her how I felt. I had just found out that she had a boyfriend, and I was feeling really down at the time ). The poem was called "Heart's Parade", and it was all about how the happy couples parade their love while the lonely people are forced to watch. I was planning to include the poem in this post, but as I started to transcribe it, I decide the poem was total crap. I remember it as being pretty good, and it was once included in a college publication ( I submitted some poems to a publication years later ), but looking at it now, it really just seems like crap. The wording is bad, the rhymes are bad - it's really kinda embarrassing. However, I still do like the last stanza of that poem, so I'll conclude this post with that stanza.
A young man looks on,
His heart feels like stone.
The parade is gone,
and he walks home alone.
Rich
Anyway, I wrote a poem about the cruelty of Valentine's Day way back on February 12, 1987 ( This was two weeks before I wrote HSG#1 a letter to tell her how I felt. I had just found out that she had a boyfriend, and I was feeling really down at the time ). The poem was called "Heart's Parade", and it was all about how the happy couples parade their love while the lonely people are forced to watch. I was planning to include the poem in this post, but as I started to transcribe it, I decide the poem was total crap. I remember it as being pretty good, and it was once included in a college publication ( I submitted some poems to a publication years later ), but looking at it now, it really just seems like crap. The wording is bad, the rhymes are bad - it's really kinda embarrassing. However, I still do like the last stanza of that poem, so I'll conclude this post with that stanza.
A young man looks on,
His heart feels like stone.
The parade is gone,
and he walks home alone.
Rich
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Wallflower
You know, I don't need to tell any of my regular readers that I bitch and moan about being rejected by girls in High School quite a bit in this space. Yes, there have certainly been a lot of "woe is me" type of posts. However, I recently realized that I really have nothing to complain about. I certainly had my opportunities, but I was too much of an idiot to take advantage of any of them.
Well, perhaps "idiot" is too harsh of a term. The problem was that I was way too sentimental about the girls I had fallen for. After I fell for a girl, I would "only have eyes" for that girl. Somehow I felt a need to "be true" to this girl, and not pursue any other girls. So essentially, I was trying to be monogamous with a girl I wasn't even dating ( and never would date ). Hmm, I take back what I said at the start of this paragraph. I really was an idiot.
One of the best examples of my idiot ways happened in June of 1987. I was at a party at High School Girl #1's ( HSG#1's ) house. HSG#1 had rejected me in late February of that year. I guess she must have felt a little pity for me, or was hoping I would meet some other girl, because I was invited to a few of the parties she and her friends threw over the next year or so. High School Girl #2 ( HSG#2 ) was at this party as well. She was close friends with HSG#1. HSG#1 had actually introduced me to HSG#2 ( She suggested that the two of us be lab partners in a computer programing course we were both taking ). My feelings for HSG#2 blossomed not long after HSG#1 had rejected me ( clearly this was a "rebound" type of attraction ). HSG#2 rejected me in mid-May of 1987, so by the time I went to this party, things had run their course with both HSG#1 and HSG#2.
Except things hadn't completely run their course in my heart yet. I had certainly "moved on" as far as HSG#1 was concerned ( especially because she had a boyfriend ), but for some stupid reason I was still holding on to a hope that HSG#2 would eventually change her mind and date me. There really wasn't any evidence that there was any chance she would change her mind, but I still found myself lingering around her in a semi-stalkerish way, hoping that I could somehow change her mind. I eventually managed to talk some sense into myself regarding my fruitless pursuit of HSG#2, but unfortunately this didn't happen in time for this party.
So anyway, something happened about halfway through this party, which upon reflection, makes me feel both like an idiot and a jerk. This was by no means one of those rowdy rockin' house parties ( We were all relatively nerdy Stuyvesant H.S. kids ( Stuyvesant was a "magnet" public High School which only admitted the top performers on a admissions test taken across all of New York City ) ), but there was a little bit of music and dancing. Not a lot of dancing however ( because a lot of us were the nerdy wallflower types ), so at one point in the evening HSG#1 walked around the room to try to encourage people to start dancing. When HGS#1 walked up to one girl ( I honestly don't remember her name, I'm just going to call her WG, for WallFlower Girl ) and asked if she wanted to dance, WG looked right at me, smiled, and said ...
"I'll dance if Rich dances with me."
Well, I don't think I could have been given a clearer signal than that - especially from a shy girl who had barely said a word the entire night.
Well, what did I do, given this opportunity?
Nothing.
Well, actually worse than nothing. I think I kinda looked away and smiled and said something to the effect "That's OK. I don't really feel like dancing.".
Why? Well I guess I thought that following HSG#2 like a shadow all night was a more productive way to be spending my time.
What an idiot indeed - and what a jerk!
This girl put herself "out there" like that, and I just blew her off without a second thought. I'm not saying she was in love with me or anything ( We had never spoken a word to each other before she asked me to dance ), but I certainly must have hurt her feeling at least a little bit. Perhaps I might have even hurt her feeling a bit more than that. I honestly didn't even know her name that night, but she certainly knew mine.
So, on the tiny tiny chance that WG ever runs across this blog post, I'd like to offer a sincere apology.
------- Start of apology to WG --------
Hey WG, I'm really sorry that I didn't dance with you that night - sorry in more ways than you've probably ever imagined.
First of all, even if I wasn't interested in you, I should have accepted your offer to dance - especially because you made the offer in such a public way. It's not as if a single dance would have really implied anything other than we wanted to dance. Instead, I probably humiliated you by shooting you down in front of a room full of people. I'm deeply deeply sorry for that. I was a complete ass. I don't really deserve to be forgiven, but I hope you can forgive me.
Second, there really wasn't a good reason why I shouldn't have been interested in dancing with you. I should have been thrilled that you wanted to dance with me that night. It really didn't make sense that I wanted to hang out with HSG#2 instead of dance with you. After all, she had already rejected me, but more importantly, anybody who knows me well enough to know "my type" of girl ( If you are wondering what "my type" is, just read my "First Date?" blog post. ) would recognize that you are SOOOOOOO much more my type than HSG#2 ( If you are not 100% sure who HSG#2 is, just watch this video about HSG#2. The description I give in the video should be a dead giveaway. ). In fact, if you took a picture of HSG#2 and put it next to a picture of every other girl I've ever been strongly physically attracted to, HSG#2's picture would stick out so much it would be like playing the old Sesame Street game "Which of these things is not like the other?". In all honestly, if I had been computer lab partners with you instead of HSG#2, I bet I would have wound up falling for you.
So yes, I was an idiot and a big jerk. I really hope you can forgive me.
-------- End of apology ----------------
When I was reflecting on the WG story, I remembered that something similar ( though not as public ) happened during the period of time when I was pining for HSG#1 ( but had not let her know yet ). Sometime during my Sophomore year, my English teacher had everyone in her class write up "personals" - basically descriptions of ourselves complete with photos of ourselves ( seems like a really bizarre English class project in retrospect, but that's what happened ). The "personals" were then distributed among the classes this teacher covered, and everyone was encouraged to make comments on any personals they found interesting ( really low-tech match.com or "Hot or Not?"? ). Well, when my own "personal ad" gets back to me, I find 2 comments on it. One was a very flattering anonymous comment. The second comment was a reply to the first comment. The second comment ( also anonymous ) was "You've got good taste!". Well, as I'm reading the comments one of the teacher's aids ( There were two teaching interns assigned to help out with the class ) leans over tells me the name of the girl who made the "You've got good taste!" comment ( I guess this intern wanted to play match-maker. Apparently she had been standing behind ( spying on ) this girl when she made her comment on my personal ad ).
However, the intern's matchmaking attempt was wasted on me. I only had eyes for HSG#1 at the time. So, I never did try to get to know the "You've got good taste!" girl better. I probably should have, though I doubt very much this girl's feeling were hurt at all. I don't want to give her identity away to anyone from my high school who might stumble upon this blog ( EZ - You are an exception to that rule. If you want to know who this girl was, just ask me and I'll email you her name ), but I doubt very much that this girl had trouble getting the attention of guys. In fact, I just looked at her yearbook picture before I wrote this post, and let me tell you, if I was flexible enough to kick myself, I would have kicked myself real hard after looking at her picture.
So yeah, I have nothing to whine about regarding my lack of high school romances. I was just an idiot, pure and simple.
Rich
Well, perhaps "idiot" is too harsh of a term. The problem was that I was way too sentimental about the girls I had fallen for. After I fell for a girl, I would "only have eyes" for that girl. Somehow I felt a need to "be true" to this girl, and not pursue any other girls. So essentially, I was trying to be monogamous with a girl I wasn't even dating ( and never would date ). Hmm, I take back what I said at the start of this paragraph. I really was an idiot.
One of the best examples of my idiot ways happened in June of 1987. I was at a party at High School Girl #1's ( HSG#1's ) house. HSG#1 had rejected me in late February of that year. I guess she must have felt a little pity for me, or was hoping I would meet some other girl, because I was invited to a few of the parties she and her friends threw over the next year or so. High School Girl #2 ( HSG#2 ) was at this party as well. She was close friends with HSG#1. HSG#1 had actually introduced me to HSG#2 ( She suggested that the two of us be lab partners in a computer programing course we were both taking ). My feelings for HSG#2 blossomed not long after HSG#1 had rejected me ( clearly this was a "rebound" type of attraction ). HSG#2 rejected me in mid-May of 1987, so by the time I went to this party, things had run their course with both HSG#1 and HSG#2.
Except things hadn't completely run their course in my heart yet. I had certainly "moved on" as far as HSG#1 was concerned ( especially because she had a boyfriend ), but for some stupid reason I was still holding on to a hope that HSG#2 would eventually change her mind and date me. There really wasn't any evidence that there was any chance she would change her mind, but I still found myself lingering around her in a semi-stalkerish way, hoping that I could somehow change her mind. I eventually managed to talk some sense into myself regarding my fruitless pursuit of HSG#2, but unfortunately this didn't happen in time for this party.
So anyway, something happened about halfway through this party, which upon reflection, makes me feel both like an idiot and a jerk. This was by no means one of those rowdy rockin' house parties ( We were all relatively nerdy Stuyvesant H.S. kids ( Stuyvesant was a "magnet" public High School which only admitted the top performers on a admissions test taken across all of New York City ) ), but there was a little bit of music and dancing. Not a lot of dancing however ( because a lot of us were the nerdy wallflower types ), so at one point in the evening HSG#1 walked around the room to try to encourage people to start dancing. When HGS#1 walked up to one girl ( I honestly don't remember her name, I'm just going to call her WG, for WallFlower Girl ) and asked if she wanted to dance, WG looked right at me, smiled, and said ...
"I'll dance if Rich dances with me."
Well, I don't think I could have been given a clearer signal than that - especially from a shy girl who had barely said a word the entire night.
Well, what did I do, given this opportunity?
Nothing.
Well, actually worse than nothing. I think I kinda looked away and smiled and said something to the effect "That's OK. I don't really feel like dancing.".
Why? Well I guess I thought that following HSG#2 like a shadow all night was a more productive way to be spending my time.
What an idiot indeed - and what a jerk!
This girl put herself "out there" like that, and I just blew her off without a second thought. I'm not saying she was in love with me or anything ( We had never spoken a word to each other before she asked me to dance ), but I certainly must have hurt her feeling at least a little bit. Perhaps I might have even hurt her feeling a bit more than that. I honestly didn't even know her name that night, but she certainly knew mine.
So, on the tiny tiny chance that WG ever runs across this blog post, I'd like to offer a sincere apology.
------- Start of apology to WG --------
Hey WG, I'm really sorry that I didn't dance with you that night - sorry in more ways than you've probably ever imagined.
First of all, even if I wasn't interested in you, I should have accepted your offer to dance - especially because you made the offer in such a public way. It's not as if a single dance would have really implied anything other than we wanted to dance. Instead, I probably humiliated you by shooting you down in front of a room full of people. I'm deeply deeply sorry for that. I was a complete ass. I don't really deserve to be forgiven, but I hope you can forgive me.
Second, there really wasn't a good reason why I shouldn't have been interested in dancing with you. I should have been thrilled that you wanted to dance with me that night. It really didn't make sense that I wanted to hang out with HSG#2 instead of dance with you. After all, she had already rejected me, but more importantly, anybody who knows me well enough to know "my type" of girl ( If you are wondering what "my type" is, just read my "First Date?" blog post. ) would recognize that you are SOOOOOOO much more my type than HSG#2 ( If you are not 100% sure who HSG#2 is, just watch this video about HSG#2. The description I give in the video should be a dead giveaway. ). In fact, if you took a picture of HSG#2 and put it next to a picture of every other girl I've ever been strongly physically attracted to, HSG#2's picture would stick out so much it would be like playing the old Sesame Street game "Which of these things is not like the other?". In all honestly, if I had been computer lab partners with you instead of HSG#2, I bet I would have wound up falling for you.
So yes, I was an idiot and a big jerk. I really hope you can forgive me.
-------- End of apology ----------------
When I was reflecting on the WG story, I remembered that something similar ( though not as public ) happened during the period of time when I was pining for HSG#1 ( but had not let her know yet ). Sometime during my Sophomore year, my English teacher had everyone in her class write up "personals" - basically descriptions of ourselves complete with photos of ourselves ( seems like a really bizarre English class project in retrospect, but that's what happened ). The "personals" were then distributed among the classes this teacher covered, and everyone was encouraged to make comments on any personals they found interesting ( really low-tech match.com or "Hot or Not?"? ). Well, when my own "personal ad" gets back to me, I find 2 comments on it. One was a very flattering anonymous comment. The second comment was a reply to the first comment. The second comment ( also anonymous ) was "You've got good taste!". Well, as I'm reading the comments one of the teacher's aids ( There were two teaching interns assigned to help out with the class ) leans over tells me the name of the girl who made the "You've got good taste!" comment ( I guess this intern wanted to play match-maker. Apparently she had been standing behind ( spying on ) this girl when she made her comment on my personal ad ).
However, the intern's matchmaking attempt was wasted on me. I only had eyes for HSG#1 at the time. So, I never did try to get to know the "You've got good taste!" girl better. I probably should have, though I doubt very much this girl's feeling were hurt at all. I don't want to give her identity away to anyone from my high school who might stumble upon this blog ( EZ - You are an exception to that rule. If you want to know who this girl was, just ask me and I'll email you her name ), but I doubt very much that this girl had trouble getting the attention of guys. In fact, I just looked at her yearbook picture before I wrote this post, and let me tell you, if I was flexible enough to kick myself, I would have kicked myself real hard after looking at her picture.
So yeah, I have nothing to whine about regarding my lack of high school romances. I was just an idiot, pure and simple.
Rich
Saturday, February 7, 2009
First Date?
A week or so ago, I was reflecting on my early days of dating Ruth, and I was trying to decide when we went on our first date. Was it the day before we shared our first kiss, when she asked me out for dessert ( That may not have counted, because she brought her friend Amy along with her ( The first kiss story and the story of the dessert "date" can be found in this video. )), or was it the day after our first kiss when we went out to a movie ( Edward Scissorhands )? It's probably the latter of the two, which means Ruth and I actually kissed before we dated. This a probably a little less than typical, but it all had to do with the way our first kiss happened. Once again, I will encourage my blog readers ( who were pretty much all originally YT watchers ) to click the link above and visit my YT channel to get the full story, but for the sake of this blog post, I will give a little nugget from the story.
------ Nugget -------
Ruth and I met late at night to have a talk on the night we became a couple ( She had asked me to meet her near her place ). I actually thought she might be meeting me to reject me more firmly than she had done before, but instead she told me she had decided that she wanted to go out with me. Well, I was very happy to hear that, but we were outside in a public place ( not many people around that time of night - but still public ), so as much as I might have wanted to kiss her, I didn't do anything at the time. Anyway, I figured our first date ( which I knew would happen soon enough ) would be the appropriate time to have a romantic first kiss. So, after she gave me the good news, I told her how happy I was, and we started to walk back to her dorm building. When we got to the door of the building, I told her I couldn't wait to see her again and said goodnight. It was then that she looked me square in the eye and said "Aren't you going to kiss me?". Well, we were still in a kinda public place at that point, so went inside her dorm building, found a nice deserted room, and that's where we had our first kiss.
---- End of nugget ----
Anyway, the little nugget above actually has nothing to do with the main point of this blog post, but I just love to tell that story. :)
The main point of this blog post has to do with my first date. When I started to think about it a little bit more, I realized that my first date might not have been with Ruth. It have have happened a few months earlier. It may have happened during my time in Texas ( Yes the same time in Texas when I got my finger caught in a steel door and got thrown in jail. ). I'm not actually sure if it was a date, but ...
... but I'll let my wonderful readers decide.
Her name was Lisa. I don't usually use real names here, but I'm never going to see her again, I don't know anybody who knows her, and I don't think I've even told any of my IRL ( BTW - To answer a question from a recent blog comment: IRL = in real life ) friends about her before, so I might as well just use her real name ( It's a lot easier than using "The girl I met while doing an Engineering Internship in Texas" = TGIMWDAEIIT ).
Lisa was another Engineering Intern at the company I worked at from Sept 1990 to Dec 1990. I had just gotten over my fixation with College Girl #1 in August of 1990, and I didn't meet Ruth until February of 1991, so the last few months of 1990 was kinda a period of transition for me.
I didn't actually meet Lisa until rather late into my stay in Texas ( she was from a different school and was working with a different group ( she was a Chemical Engineer, while I was a Mechanical Engineer ) , but soon after I did, I decided it might be interesting to ask her out on a date.
Why? Well, I'm sure a large part of it had to do with the fact that Lisa was the first girl my age I'd really met after getting over CG#1 ( I'd also recently gotten out of jail. Yes, it was only 14 hours of jail time, but you know what they say about guys and jail. JK - I probably had more of a chance to meet women in jail than I did as a free man in those days ). Lisa was also undeniably attractive. Actually, when I think about it, out of all the girls that I dated ( just Ruth ), fell for, or tried to date in my life, Lisa was probably the girl who the average American male would find the most attractive. I say that because Lisa was tall ( about 5 feet, 9 inches tall ), blonde, and had big boobs.
However, while I recognized Lisa was attractive, the tall/blonde/big_boobed type of girl has never really been my type in the physical sense. I'm not saying this to appear un-shallow, it's just the way it is. It's not that I necessarily find height or big boobs to be unattractive qualities in a woman, it's just that when you discover at an early age that your are primarily attracted to women of Asian descent ( I discovered this at the age of 4, when I first saw Bernadette Yao on the TV show ZOOM ), you quickly become conditioned to not care about height or boob-size when deciding whether or not a woman is physically attractive.
Yes, so it was wasn't as if I was un-shallow or not horny - it was just that was horny about different things than most guys. Boobs never did it for me. For me, it was always legs that made me horny. And I'm not talking about the long type of legs epitomized by the famous World War II pinup photo of Betty Grable, but rather the short and shapely kind a legs that a lot of Asian women have. Back in my High School days, I'm sure my grades were a little bit worse in the warmer months, because instead of staring at the blackboard, I often found myself staring at calves of girls who were sitting in front of me.
I mention everything above just to make it clear that I am the typical honry guy with "impure thoughts" ( as they like to say in Catholic religious instruction ), but that Lisa wasn't the type of girl who would typically make me very horny. She would probably get most guys really horny, but not me ( This fact comes into play later in the story ). Still, she was attractrive, she was the only girl I knew within a 1000 miles radius, and I very much wanted to "move on" from my fixation with CG#1. So, soon after meeting Lisa, I decided to ask her out.
I called Lisa up and asked her whether she would like to go out for dinner one night. She told me that she thought it might be more fun if we took a trip together to San Antonio ( We were in Houston, Texas. San Antonio was about a 3-hour drive away ). She even offered to pick me up in her car. Well, as the old saying goes, "Beggars can't be choosers", so I agreed to this "date" on her terms.
There's really not much to say about the "date". She picked me up early on a Saturday and we drove to San Antonio. We saw The Alamo, we saw the River Walk, we had lunch and dinner together, and then we drove back. Nothing really interesting to report about most of the trip. The interesting part of the trip happened at the very end.
When we got close to my place, she started talking about how tired she was and how she really needed some coffee ( or some drink with caffeine in it ) before she drove back to her place ( I lived on the west side of Houston ( the side closer to San Antonio ) and she lived on the east side ).
Now, I know what a lot of guys reading this ( OK, I actually think only two males ever read this blog - If there are any more of you out there - please comment to let me know! ) might be thinking ...
"Hmm! Sounds like she wanted to come over to your place for 'some coffee' and the end of your 'date'. Could she have been implying something else?"
Well, I must admit that the thought did cross my mind briefly, but I wasn't really after "something else". I'm not really that type of guy ( though I sometimes wonder if I would have been so noble if Lisa had been a cute 5' 2'' Asian girl with nice legs ). So, I took what Lisa said completely at face value. I told her that I didn't have any coffee at my place, but that I could get her a soda for the road.
So, I really didn't really invite her in. Perhaps it may may been the polite thing to do, but it also kinda felt like it might have been a sleazy thing to do, so I certainly didn't invite her in to stay a while. I don't exactly remember, but I think she may have followed me into the apartment briefly when I got the soda ( It was a first-floor apartment, and the door to the my apartment was right next to the parking space she was parked in ). She may have even started drinking the soda in my apartment, but I certainly didn't give her the impression that she should stay a while. In any case, pretty soon she was back in her car ( I honestly don't remember if she got out of the car when I got the soda ), and the "date" had come to an end.
So that was that. Seemed like a nice enough "date" to me, but I soon got the impression that Lisa wasn't particularly happy about the way the "date" went. She kinda ignored me and gave me the cold shoulder over the few weeks that followed ( after that, the internship was over, and I went back home ), which of course made me wonder about what might have been wrong with the "date" we had. I wondered if it was something I did on the "date", or if was something I didn't do. I thought was a perfect gentleman on our "date", but perhaps she didn't want me to be as much of a gentleman as I was. I dunno - I'm not trying to flatter myself or anything. I'm not trying to say that she wanted to "get with me", so to speak. However, a girl that looked like she did was probably used to getting more attention on a date than I gave her. Perhaps she was insulted that I didn't give her a little bit more of that kind of "attention". I dunno. For what it's worth, by the end of the "date" I didn't detect any of those IT ( see my last post if you don't know what I mean by IT ) attributes in her, and as I wrote earlier, she wasn't actually "my type".
So yeah, that's the whole story. I'm still not sure if that was my first date or not. I guess it was in a strictly technical sense. I did ask a girl out, and then spent almost an entire day alone with her. So I guess it was kinda a date, but it never really felt like one to me. In any case, it was a good first step in moving on after the 22-month obsession with CG#1. I was a little bit more ready to start my courtship of Ruth.
Rich
------ Nugget -------
Ruth and I met late at night to have a talk on the night we became a couple ( She had asked me to meet her near her place ). I actually thought she might be meeting me to reject me more firmly than she had done before, but instead she told me she had decided that she wanted to go out with me. Well, I was very happy to hear that, but we were outside in a public place ( not many people around that time of night - but still public ), so as much as I might have wanted to kiss her, I didn't do anything at the time. Anyway, I figured our first date ( which I knew would happen soon enough ) would be the appropriate time to have a romantic first kiss. So, after she gave me the good news, I told her how happy I was, and we started to walk back to her dorm building. When we got to the door of the building, I told her I couldn't wait to see her again and said goodnight. It was then that she looked me square in the eye and said "Aren't you going to kiss me?". Well, we were still in a kinda public place at that point, so went inside her dorm building, found a nice deserted room, and that's where we had our first kiss.
---- End of nugget ----
Anyway, the little nugget above actually has nothing to do with the main point of this blog post, but I just love to tell that story. :)
The main point of this blog post has to do with my first date. When I started to think about it a little bit more, I realized that my first date might not have been with Ruth. It have have happened a few months earlier. It may have happened during my time in Texas ( Yes the same time in Texas when I got my finger caught in a steel door and got thrown in jail. ). I'm not actually sure if it was a date, but ...
... but I'll let my wonderful readers decide.
Her name was Lisa. I don't usually use real names here, but I'm never going to see her again, I don't know anybody who knows her, and I don't think I've even told any of my IRL ( BTW - To answer a question from a recent blog comment: IRL = in real life ) friends about her before, so I might as well just use her real name ( It's a lot easier than using "The girl I met while doing an Engineering Internship in Texas" = TGIMWDAEIIT ).
Lisa was another Engineering Intern at the company I worked at from Sept 1990 to Dec 1990. I had just gotten over my fixation with College Girl #1 in August of 1990, and I didn't meet Ruth until February of 1991, so the last few months of 1990 was kinda a period of transition for me.
I didn't actually meet Lisa until rather late into my stay in Texas ( she was from a different school and was working with a different group ( she was a Chemical Engineer, while I was a Mechanical Engineer ) , but soon after I did, I decided it might be interesting to ask her out on a date.
Why? Well, I'm sure a large part of it had to do with the fact that Lisa was the first girl my age I'd really met after getting over CG#1 ( I'd also recently gotten out of jail. Yes, it was only 14 hours of jail time, but you know what they say about guys and jail. JK - I probably had more of a chance to meet women in jail than I did as a free man in those days ). Lisa was also undeniably attractive. Actually, when I think about it, out of all the girls that I dated ( just Ruth ), fell for, or tried to date in my life, Lisa was probably the girl who the average American male would find the most attractive. I say that because Lisa was tall ( about 5 feet, 9 inches tall ), blonde, and had big boobs.
However, while I recognized Lisa was attractive, the tall/blonde/big_boobed type of girl has never really been my type in the physical sense. I'm not saying this to appear un-shallow, it's just the way it is. It's not that I necessarily find height or big boobs to be unattractive qualities in a woman, it's just that when you discover at an early age that your are primarily attracted to women of Asian descent ( I discovered this at the age of 4, when I first saw Bernadette Yao on the TV show ZOOM ), you quickly become conditioned to not care about height or boob-size when deciding whether or not a woman is physically attractive.
Yes, so it was wasn't as if I was un-shallow or not horny - it was just that was horny about different things than most guys. Boobs never did it for me. For me, it was always legs that made me horny. And I'm not talking about the long type of legs epitomized by the famous World War II pinup photo of Betty Grable, but rather the short and shapely kind a legs that a lot of Asian women have. Back in my High School days, I'm sure my grades were a little bit worse in the warmer months, because instead of staring at the blackboard, I often found myself staring at calves of girls who were sitting in front of me.
I mention everything above just to make it clear that I am the typical honry guy with "impure thoughts" ( as they like to say in Catholic religious instruction ), but that Lisa wasn't the type of girl who would typically make me very horny. She would probably get most guys really horny, but not me ( This fact comes into play later in the story ). Still, she was attractrive, she was the only girl I knew within a 1000 miles radius, and I very much wanted to "move on" from my fixation with CG#1. So, soon after meeting Lisa, I decided to ask her out.
I called Lisa up and asked her whether she would like to go out for dinner one night. She told me that she thought it might be more fun if we took a trip together to San Antonio ( We were in Houston, Texas. San Antonio was about a 3-hour drive away ). She even offered to pick me up in her car. Well, as the old saying goes, "Beggars can't be choosers", so I agreed to this "date" on her terms.
There's really not much to say about the "date". She picked me up early on a Saturday and we drove to San Antonio. We saw The Alamo, we saw the River Walk, we had lunch and dinner together, and then we drove back. Nothing really interesting to report about most of the trip. The interesting part of the trip happened at the very end.
When we got close to my place, she started talking about how tired she was and how she really needed some coffee ( or some drink with caffeine in it ) before she drove back to her place ( I lived on the west side of Houston ( the side closer to San Antonio ) and she lived on the east side ).
Now, I know what a lot of guys reading this ( OK, I actually think only two males ever read this blog - If there are any more of you out there - please comment to let me know! ) might be thinking ...
"Hmm! Sounds like she wanted to come over to your place for 'some coffee' and the end of your 'date'. Could she have been implying something else?"
Well, I must admit that the thought did cross my mind briefly, but I wasn't really after "something else". I'm not really that type of guy ( though I sometimes wonder if I would have been so noble if Lisa had been a cute 5' 2'' Asian girl with nice legs ). So, I took what Lisa said completely at face value. I told her that I didn't have any coffee at my place, but that I could get her a soda for the road.
So, I really didn't really invite her in. Perhaps it may may been the polite thing to do, but it also kinda felt like it might have been a sleazy thing to do, so I certainly didn't invite her in to stay a while. I don't exactly remember, but I think she may have followed me into the apartment briefly when I got the soda ( It was a first-floor apartment, and the door to the my apartment was right next to the parking space she was parked in ). She may have even started drinking the soda in my apartment, but I certainly didn't give her the impression that she should stay a while. In any case, pretty soon she was back in her car ( I honestly don't remember if she got out of the car when I got the soda ), and the "date" had come to an end.
So that was that. Seemed like a nice enough "date" to me, but I soon got the impression that Lisa wasn't particularly happy about the way the "date" went. She kinda ignored me and gave me the cold shoulder over the few weeks that followed ( after that, the internship was over, and I went back home ), which of course made me wonder about what might have been wrong with the "date" we had. I wondered if it was something I did on the "date", or if was something I didn't do. I thought was a perfect gentleman on our "date", but perhaps she didn't want me to be as much of a gentleman as I was. I dunno - I'm not trying to flatter myself or anything. I'm not trying to say that she wanted to "get with me", so to speak. However, a girl that looked like she did was probably used to getting more attention on a date than I gave her. Perhaps she was insulted that I didn't give her a little bit more of that kind of "attention". I dunno. For what it's worth, by the end of the "date" I didn't detect any of those IT ( see my last post if you don't know what I mean by IT ) attributes in her, and as I wrote earlier, she wasn't actually "my type".
So yeah, that's the whole story. I'm still not sure if that was my first date or not. I guess it was in a strictly technical sense. I did ask a girl out, and then spent almost an entire day alone with her. So I guess it was kinda a date, but it never really felt like one to me. In any case, it was a good first step in moving on after the 22-month obsession with CG#1. I was a little bit more ready to start my courtship of Ruth.
Rich
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Things I learned after it was too late
Actually, this post will only be about one thing. I think I might make "Things I learned after it was too late" into a series of posts that cover many things, but today there will only be one topic.
For today's topic, I'm looking for a little bit of feedback in the comments. I think I now understand something that I didn't understand before. However, I also might just be talking out of my ass, so please let me know if I'm actually making any sense of not.
The "thing" I learned too late probably won't be much of revelation to most people, but it's something I didn't understand for a long time.
OK, enough with all these little preliminary remarks - the "thing" is ...
- One single person can find another single person physically attractive, charming, and can think that person is a great person, and yet not have any romantics feelings for that person.
OK, that's a rather complex sentence I just wrote, so let me break it down and qualify it a little bit more.
When I say "romantic feelings", I mean the feelings that would make you say to yourself "Hey, I'd really like to date this person", or "I think I have a crush on this person", or "I think this person could be THE ONE for me".
Let me clarify my statement I bit more ...
Let's say you've got two people, person A and person B.
Both person A and person B are single. Both are roughly the same age and live in roughly the same place. There are no religious/cultural reasons why person A and person B could not be a couple.
Person A thinks person B is physically attractive.
Person A thinks person B is a great person.
Person A thinks person B is fun and entertaining.
Person A and person B share many of the same values.
Person A thinks person B is a "great catch" and would love to set
person B up with his/her friends.
And yet, person A may not have any romantic feelings for person B.
This can be very hard to understand sometimes, particularly if you are person B, and you do have romantic feelings for person A.
Why do I bring this up? Well, obviously this has something to do with me (doesn't it always? ).
However, first of all, let me make this post even longer than I had planned it would be by going off on a little tangent.
There's and old song that goes "It's So Easy to Fall in Love", but actually it isn't so easy. Perhaps it's easy to become attracted to somebody quickly in a "Love at first sight" kinda way, but in order for one person to really fall in love with another person, three hurdles must be cleared.
1) First of all, a certain level of physical attraction must be there. I know that looks matter less to some people than to others, and we sometimes think of those who focus on nothing but looks as "shallow", but none of us are completely un-shallow. We all draw a line somewhere. Some people might draw the line at "looks like a model" and some might draw the line at "not particularly unattractive", but we all draw the line somewhere. I don't know if a lot of other people share my feelings about this ( there must be some people who do, because I can't possibly be that unusual ), but when it comes to determining whether I could really fall for a woman, I've always rated looks in a rather binary way. When I say "binary", I mean my rating system consists of a 0 and a 1. I could potentially fall for woman who I would rate 1, and I couldn't fall for woman who I would rate 0. That's not to say I don't have strong and specific opinions about what I find physically attractive, it's just to say the once the physical beauty of a woman crosses my own personal "line in the sand", the level of that beauty has never really mattered much. "Gorgeous" and "pretty" have always both rated a 1 on my binary scale, and after that, all the other factors take over. Sure, I'm not going to deny that gorgeous girls always caught my eye more quickly than pretty girls, but I never fell deeply for a girl until I met her, and after I met her, the question of whether or not I would fall for her was almost 100% determined by factor 2 described below. Anyway, I guess the point I'm trying to make it is that while physical attraction is definitely a hurdle that needs to be cleared before you can fall in love with somebody, I don't think it's the hardest hurdle to clear. If somebody thinks of physical attraction in a "binary" way, it may not be that difficult a hurdle to clear ( assuming the person doesn't draw his/her "line in the sand" at the "looks like a model" level ). However, I think hurdle number 2 is always a very difficult hurdle to clear.
2) You can't really fall for somebody deeply, unless there is something about that person's personality and mannerisms that does something to you. You may not be able to put a finger on what IT is, but unless IT is there, you are almost certainly not going to fall for that person. IT may be that person's "energy" or "confidence" or "sweetness" or "sensitivity" or "enthusiasm" or "wittiness" or some crazy combination of several factors, but IT has to be there. You may not know what IT is, you may not be able to describe IT, but what you do know is that being with that person makes your heart smile.
I think that this is by far the hardest hurdle to clear, as well as the hardest hurdle to explain. It's the most important hurdle to clear, because this is very often the hurdle that needs to be cleared before dating starts.
Let me try to clarify my definition of IT a little bit more by drawing from a few examples from my past.
The first story is about College Girl #1 ( For those of you who are new to my blog, there were three girls who I had strong romantic feelings for in the years before I met my wife. All three of these girls ultimately rejected me, but I think I learned some valuable lessons from each experience. I met two of these girls in High School, and one in college, so rather than use their real names I just refer to them as High School Girl #1, High School Girl #2, and College Girl #1 ). I met CG#1 during the first semester of my Freshman year of college ( mid-October, 1988 ). My friend Jerry had become friendly with her ( we were all Freshmen Engineering students ), and one day he invited me to come with him for a hangout/study session at CG#1's place. CG#1's dorm room ( A room she shared with two other Engineering girls ) happened to be on the top floor of one of the oldest and most beautiful buildings on campus ( Baker Tower ). CG#1 had told Jerry how nice the building and the dorm was, and Jerry was curious to see it.
So anyway, Jerry, my friend George, and I headed off to Baker Tower on a Friday night to meet CG#1 and her roommates. That night would have a pretty big impact on the next 22 months of my life.
It was that night, when I really discovered the power of IT.
It's really hard to explain this IT that she had, but IT affected me like nothing else ever had before. Let me start out by saying that she was a pretty girl ( certainly would have rated a 1 on my binary scale ) , but she really didn't have a look that I would generally be strongly physically attracted to. In other words, if I had seen her at a party ( and not met her at all ), my jaw wouldn't have dropped, and my eyes probably would have quickly wandered to some other girl.
So, I don't think there was any kind of "Love at first sight" dynamic going on that night, but after hanging out at her place for 4 hours, there was an incredibly strong "Love at first meet" dynamic.
It's really hard to describe what happened, but I'll never forget how intense the feelings were and how quickly they hit me. There was just something about her. There was something about her that made me feel all happy inside. I don't know exactly what it was, but it kind of made me feel like sighing all night. I guess, if I had to pick one word to describe her, I'd pick "ebullient". She was really like a ray of sunshine. She was the type of person who could somehow light up a room when she walked into, and make you feel better about yourself. I don't know exactly what it was, but by the end of that night I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do other than be in her presence.
So yeah, I fell for her. Fell really really hard. Fell for her so hard that it ultimately was emotionally crippling. She rejected me in March of 1989, and even though there was no hope for a relationship with CG#1, and I was a young man on a campus full of girls, I found that I wasn't able to think about any other girls until August of 1990.
I guess the main point I'm trying to make here is that none of this makes any sense. It made no sense that I would fall for her so hard and so quickly ( I mean - how well can you know a person after 4 hours? How could I have let those 4 hours impact the next 22 months of my life? ). However, IT usually doesn't make sense. You can't quantify IT, you can't put your finger on IT, but IT is definitely real. At least from my experience, IT is a more powerful force than all the physical attraction in the world. I'm sure I've thought thousands of different girls were pretty, but less than a handful of girls really had that IT factor.
I think IT is required to really fall for somebody, and you never really know why you feel IT. Sometimes you don't feel IT at all, when objective analysis suggest that you should. I know this, because I can think of one example of my life where I didn't feel IT at all, even though there was no objective reason why I shouldn't have.
I'll call this girl High School Friend ( HSF ). She was one of the folks in the letter writing society I was part of ( details in Old School Blog video ) in high school. We didn't really hang out much, but we were close in the sense that we knew each other's secrets ( via the Old School Blog ), and we became even closer when she headed off to college ( she was 6th months older than me, and 1 year ahead of me in school ) and we started to exchange long letters and engage in long phone calls.
Sometimes the way you feel about somebody is shaped by context, and I'd be lying if I didn't say context played a role in the way I felt about HSF. When I met HSF I already knew ...
a) She had a boyfriend.
b) My best friend ( who was not her boyfriend ) had fallen for her.
So, in that context, it was very unlikely that I was going to fall for HSF, and indeed I didn't.
However, while I'm 100% sure that I would have never tried to court HSF under those circumstances, I know from experience that circumstance have never stopped me from falling for a girl. If HSF had that IT that CG#1 had, I would have certainly fallen for her, even under those circumstances. I wouldn't have taken any action under those circumstances, but I would have fallen for her. However, HSF never had that IT which makes me fall for a girl. Even years later when the circumstances changed ( she was single and my best friend was in a happy relationship ( which eventually led to marriage ) ), I never felt any romantic feelings for her.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. A guy certainly isn't going to have romantic feelings for every female friend he has, but when I compare CG#1 to HSF, it really underscores what an elusive and mysterious thing IT can be.
HSF was certainly pretty - certainly would have rated a 1 on my binary scale of physical attraction. She also was ( well actually is - we got back in contact recently ) a great person. During the years when we would exchange frequent phone calls and letters, I was probably as emotionally close to her as I've been to any woman in my life. I told her about all my courtship sob-stories, and she certainly cried to me over the phone more than once. I certainly got emotionally closer to HSF over the years than I had gotten to CG#1 in the first 4 hours I spent with her, but I felt zero romantic feelings for HSF, while I became fixated with CG#1 for 22 months. I certainly loved ( and still do love ) HSF, but it was the kind of love you would feel for a big sister ( I've always though of her as the big sister I never had ). She simply didn't have that IT ( Oh, and for what it is worth, I'm 100% sure that HSF's feeling for me were exactly like my feelings for her. In other words, I think she thought of me as a little brother she loved. So, we always had a very comfortable relationship in that way. ).
So, I guess my point is that you really can't pick who gives you those IT feeling, and you can't make somebody else feel IT. It's either there or it's not, and you really shouldn't try to fight the power of IT.
If I had understood that sooner, I think I would have handled rejected much better ( and I certainly wouldn't have had such a fear of rejection ).
3) I think that hurdle number 3 is something that you usually encounter when you've reached the dating stage of a relationship. Often when two people date, it's because the first 2 hurdles of romantic love have been cleared by both people. If the third hurdle is cleared, then marriage might be in the cards. If the third hurdle isn't cleared, then a break-up is almost inevitable.
OK, this is where I might be really talking out of my ass. I've never broken up with anybody ( I married my first girlfriend ), so I'm probably not the person who should be talking about break-ups. However, I do think I've learned a lot about human nature over the years, so just bear with me, and hear what I have to say. If I really am talking out of my ass, feel free to call bullshit on me.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons why people break up that have nothing to do with these "Three Hurdles of Romantic Love" that I've just made up. Everything I've written so far is based on the assumption that everybody who enters into a relationship is looking for romantic love. Obviously, that isn't the case. There are plenty of people that aren't looking for long-lasting romantic love in a relationship. A lot of people are afraid of commitment. A lot of people just want to "have fun" and "play the field". Quite often when two people enter into a relationship, one or both people never really intended for the relationship to last a long time. Obviously in those situations, it's not surprise when those two people eventually break up.
It's also true that people sometime break up for practical reasons. Perhaps one person moves far away, or the the families of the two people don't get along ( or parents don't approve of the relationship ), or there are religious or cultural issues that doom the long-term prospects for the relationship. That's all true, but for the sake of my little "Three Hurdle" theory, let's assume that we are talking about a relationship where both people are looking for romantic love, and there are no external hurdles ( distance/family/religion/etc. ) that would keep the relationship from being a success.
With that in mind, what exactly is hurdle 3? Well hurdle 3 is what tells you whether or not the feelings you felt when you passed hurdle 2 are real or an illusion. As you get to know somebody better, your first impressions are either confirmed or proved to be false. You begin to find out what a person really believes. You begin to find out what a person really values. You find out how the person treats his/her friends and family, and perhaps more importantly you find out how he/she treats people he/she doesn't really like. You see the person at his/her best and his/her worst, and you see if you are really compatible with that person.
Anyway, what I said above is pretty standard stuff. It's probably a good idea to make sure hurdle 3 is cleared before you get married or decide to have a very long term-relationship, but sadly, I don't think things always work that way. After you've cleared hurdle 1 and hurdle 2 in your mind, you're pretty much in love with the other person - and being in love, you very much want to believe that hurdle 3 can be cleared, even if there is evidence to the contrary. It's almost impossible to be objective when you are in love, so sometimes you just have to be lucky to avoid getting hurt. My wife's sister wasn't so lucky with her boyfriend from college. She was with the guy for 10 years, and we always assumed they were going to get married someday. They lived together in Boston for many years ( They met at MIT ) , and we figured they would get married when she finished medical school and he got his PHD ( In some kind of Marine Biology field ). Well, she became and an MD, he got his PHD, and he was offered job as a professor at a university in Hawaii ( This was about 4 and a half years ago ). It was at this point that we assumed that they would get engaged, and when it didn't happen, my wife's sister told her boyfriend that she'd like to get engaged before making the commitment of moving out to Hawaii with him. Well, to the surprise of everyone ( I always assumed he would be my brother-in-law someday ), he kinda freaked out and started to ignore her ( even thought they were living in the same place ). So, that was pretty much the end of a 10-year relationship.
Now, my sister-in-law eventually did get a happy ending. She eventually found and married a better guy, who is nicest and coolest brother-in-law a guy could have. So, that's all good, but my point is that sometimes it takes a very long time to see somebody's true colors when you are in love with them.
---- End of tangent ----
Good gravy, that was quite a long tangent! I'm not even sure what my point was anymore. I've written a lot of rambling blogs, but this might be my rambling-est.
I guess I should get back to the whole Person_A/Person_B scenario. I guess my main point is that there are a lots of reasons why Person A might not fall in love with Person B, and most of these reasons ( especially the hurdle 1 and hurdle 2 reasons ) don't really say anything bad about Person B.
I guess this blog post is kinda a follow up to the serious parts in my "The Stalker". In that video, I spoke about how you shouldn't let the opinion of one person ruin your self-esteem. I was mostly talking about looks ( the hurdle 1 factor ) in that video, but now I realize that I should have spoken about the hurdle 2 factor ( the IT factor ) some more.
I realized this when I remembered something High School Girl #2 ( HSG#2 ) told me when she rejected me. This little thing I remembered is what led to this huge rambling blog post. When she rejected me, she told me that she thought I was a nice guy, and that she thought I was good-looking. I distinctly remember not believing her at the time. I figured she was just saying that to be nice. I figured that she thought I was ugly and/or a complete loser, and that belief adversely affected my self-esteem for years. I couldn't imagine why a girl wouldn't want to go out with me if she thought I was good-looking and a nice guy. However, now I realize ( almost 22 years too late ) that she might have actually been telling the truth. Sure, I have no way of knowing what she was really thinking. She certainly could have thought I was an ugly loser, but for my own mental well-being, I should have just taken what she said at face value. It's quite possible that she could have meant all those nice things she said about me, but I just didn't have that IT that would make her fall for a guy. Yes, it's quite possible, and if that was the case, I shouldn't have really felt that bad. I couldn't really blame he for not seeing IT in me, and I couldn't have blamed myself for not having IT.
Yeah, so I guess that's my really long-winded point. If I had understood the power if IT back in my high school days, perhaps I would have been better off. I don't know if I actually would have dated anyone, but at least I would have felt a lot better about myself.
God, what a long-winded self-indulgent post! Sorry about the folks. I promise the next post will be more fun and interesting ( I have a story from my Texas days! ).
Anyway, it's getting quite late, so I should go to bed. Thanks for reading.
Rich
For today's topic, I'm looking for a little bit of feedback in the comments. I think I now understand something that I didn't understand before. However, I also might just be talking out of my ass, so please let me know if I'm actually making any sense of not.
The "thing" I learned too late probably won't be much of revelation to most people, but it's something I didn't understand for a long time.
OK, enough with all these little preliminary remarks - the "thing" is ...
- One single person can find another single person physically attractive, charming, and can think that person is a great person, and yet not have any romantics feelings for that person.
OK, that's a rather complex sentence I just wrote, so let me break it down and qualify it a little bit more.
When I say "romantic feelings", I mean the feelings that would make you say to yourself "Hey, I'd really like to date this person", or "I think I have a crush on this person", or "I think this person could be THE ONE for me".
Let me clarify my statement I bit more ...
Let's say you've got two people, person A and person B.
Both person A and person B are single. Both are roughly the same age and live in roughly the same place. There are no religious/cultural reasons why person A and person B could not be a couple.
Person A thinks person B is physically attractive.
Person A thinks person B is a great person.
Person A thinks person B is fun and entertaining.
Person A and person B share many of the same values.
Person A thinks person B is a "great catch" and would love to set
person B up with his/her friends.
And yet, person A may not have any romantic feelings for person B.
This can be very hard to understand sometimes, particularly if you are person B, and you do have romantic feelings for person A.
Why do I bring this up? Well, obviously this has something to do with me (doesn't it always? ).
However, first of all, let me make this post even longer than I had planned it would be by going off on a little tangent.
There's and old song that goes "It's So Easy to Fall in Love", but actually it isn't so easy. Perhaps it's easy to become attracted to somebody quickly in a "Love at first sight" kinda way, but in order for one person to really fall in love with another person, three hurdles must be cleared.
1) First of all, a certain level of physical attraction must be there. I know that looks matter less to some people than to others, and we sometimes think of those who focus on nothing but looks as "shallow", but none of us are completely un-shallow. We all draw a line somewhere. Some people might draw the line at "looks like a model" and some might draw the line at "not particularly unattractive", but we all draw the line somewhere. I don't know if a lot of other people share my feelings about this ( there must be some people who do, because I can't possibly be that unusual ), but when it comes to determining whether I could really fall for a woman, I've always rated looks in a rather binary way. When I say "binary", I mean my rating system consists of a 0 and a 1. I could potentially fall for woman who I would rate 1, and I couldn't fall for woman who I would rate 0. That's not to say I don't have strong and specific opinions about what I find physically attractive, it's just to say the once the physical beauty of a woman crosses my own personal "line in the sand", the level of that beauty has never really mattered much. "Gorgeous" and "pretty" have always both rated a 1 on my binary scale, and after that, all the other factors take over. Sure, I'm not going to deny that gorgeous girls always caught my eye more quickly than pretty girls, but I never fell deeply for a girl until I met her, and after I met her, the question of whether or not I would fall for her was almost 100% determined by factor 2 described below. Anyway, I guess the point I'm trying to make it is that while physical attraction is definitely a hurdle that needs to be cleared before you can fall in love with somebody, I don't think it's the hardest hurdle to clear. If somebody thinks of physical attraction in a "binary" way, it may not be that difficult a hurdle to clear ( assuming the person doesn't draw his/her "line in the sand" at the "looks like a model" level ). However, I think hurdle number 2 is always a very difficult hurdle to clear.
2) You can't really fall for somebody deeply, unless there is something about that person's personality and mannerisms that does something to you. You may not be able to put a finger on what IT is, but unless IT is there, you are almost certainly not going to fall for that person. IT may be that person's "energy" or "confidence" or "sweetness" or "sensitivity" or "enthusiasm" or "wittiness" or some crazy combination of several factors, but IT has to be there. You may not know what IT is, you may not be able to describe IT, but what you do know is that being with that person makes your heart smile.
I think that this is by far the hardest hurdle to clear, as well as the hardest hurdle to explain. It's the most important hurdle to clear, because this is very often the hurdle that needs to be cleared before dating starts.
Let me try to clarify my definition of IT a little bit more by drawing from a few examples from my past.
The first story is about College Girl #1 ( For those of you who are new to my blog, there were three girls who I had strong romantic feelings for in the years before I met my wife. All three of these girls ultimately rejected me, but I think I learned some valuable lessons from each experience. I met two of these girls in High School, and one in college, so rather than use their real names I just refer to them as High School Girl #1, High School Girl #2, and College Girl #1 ). I met CG#1 during the first semester of my Freshman year of college ( mid-October, 1988 ). My friend Jerry had become friendly with her ( we were all Freshmen Engineering students ), and one day he invited me to come with him for a hangout/study session at CG#1's place. CG#1's dorm room ( A room she shared with two other Engineering girls ) happened to be on the top floor of one of the oldest and most beautiful buildings on campus ( Baker Tower ). CG#1 had told Jerry how nice the building and the dorm was, and Jerry was curious to see it.
So anyway, Jerry, my friend George, and I headed off to Baker Tower on a Friday night to meet CG#1 and her roommates. That night would have a pretty big impact on the next 22 months of my life.
It was that night, when I really discovered the power of IT.
It's really hard to explain this IT that she had, but IT affected me like nothing else ever had before. Let me start out by saying that she was a pretty girl ( certainly would have rated a 1 on my binary scale ) , but she really didn't have a look that I would generally be strongly physically attracted to. In other words, if I had seen her at a party ( and not met her at all ), my jaw wouldn't have dropped, and my eyes probably would have quickly wandered to some other girl.
So, I don't think there was any kind of "Love at first sight" dynamic going on that night, but after hanging out at her place for 4 hours, there was an incredibly strong "Love at first meet" dynamic.
It's really hard to describe what happened, but I'll never forget how intense the feelings were and how quickly they hit me. There was just something about her. There was something about her that made me feel all happy inside. I don't know exactly what it was, but it kind of made me feel like sighing all night. I guess, if I had to pick one word to describe her, I'd pick "ebullient". She was really like a ray of sunshine. She was the type of person who could somehow light up a room when she walked into, and make you feel better about yourself. I don't know exactly what it was, but by the end of that night I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do other than be in her presence.
So yeah, I fell for her. Fell really really hard. Fell for her so hard that it ultimately was emotionally crippling. She rejected me in March of 1989, and even though there was no hope for a relationship with CG#1, and I was a young man on a campus full of girls, I found that I wasn't able to think about any other girls until August of 1990.
I guess the main point I'm trying to make here is that none of this makes any sense. It made no sense that I would fall for her so hard and so quickly ( I mean - how well can you know a person after 4 hours? How could I have let those 4 hours impact the next 22 months of my life? ). However, IT usually doesn't make sense. You can't quantify IT, you can't put your finger on IT, but IT is definitely real. At least from my experience, IT is a more powerful force than all the physical attraction in the world. I'm sure I've thought thousands of different girls were pretty, but less than a handful of girls really had that IT factor.
I think IT is required to really fall for somebody, and you never really know why you feel IT. Sometimes you don't feel IT at all, when objective analysis suggest that you should. I know this, because I can think of one example of my life where I didn't feel IT at all, even though there was no objective reason why I shouldn't have.
I'll call this girl High School Friend ( HSF ). She was one of the folks in the letter writing society I was part of ( details in Old School Blog video ) in high school. We didn't really hang out much, but we were close in the sense that we knew each other's secrets ( via the Old School Blog ), and we became even closer when she headed off to college ( she was 6th months older than me, and 1 year ahead of me in school ) and we started to exchange long letters and engage in long phone calls.
Sometimes the way you feel about somebody is shaped by context, and I'd be lying if I didn't say context played a role in the way I felt about HSF. When I met HSF I already knew ...
a) She had a boyfriend.
b) My best friend ( who was not her boyfriend ) had fallen for her.
So, in that context, it was very unlikely that I was going to fall for HSF, and indeed I didn't.
However, while I'm 100% sure that I would have never tried to court HSF under those circumstances, I know from experience that circumstance have never stopped me from falling for a girl. If HSF had that IT that CG#1 had, I would have certainly fallen for her, even under those circumstances. I wouldn't have taken any action under those circumstances, but I would have fallen for her. However, HSF never had that IT which makes me fall for a girl. Even years later when the circumstances changed ( she was single and my best friend was in a happy relationship ( which eventually led to marriage ) ), I never felt any romantic feelings for her.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. A guy certainly isn't going to have romantic feelings for every female friend he has, but when I compare CG#1 to HSF, it really underscores what an elusive and mysterious thing IT can be.
HSF was certainly pretty - certainly would have rated a 1 on my binary scale of physical attraction. She also was ( well actually is - we got back in contact recently ) a great person. During the years when we would exchange frequent phone calls and letters, I was probably as emotionally close to her as I've been to any woman in my life. I told her about all my courtship sob-stories, and she certainly cried to me over the phone more than once. I certainly got emotionally closer to HSF over the years than I had gotten to CG#1 in the first 4 hours I spent with her, but I felt zero romantic feelings for HSF, while I became fixated with CG#1 for 22 months. I certainly loved ( and still do love ) HSF, but it was the kind of love you would feel for a big sister ( I've always though of her as the big sister I never had ). She simply didn't have that IT ( Oh, and for what it is worth, I'm 100% sure that HSF's feeling for me were exactly like my feelings for her. In other words, I think she thought of me as a little brother she loved. So, we always had a very comfortable relationship in that way. ).
So, I guess my point is that you really can't pick who gives you those IT feeling, and you can't make somebody else feel IT. It's either there or it's not, and you really shouldn't try to fight the power of IT.
If I had understood that sooner, I think I would have handled rejected much better ( and I certainly wouldn't have had such a fear of rejection ).
3) I think that hurdle number 3 is something that you usually encounter when you've reached the dating stage of a relationship. Often when two people date, it's because the first 2 hurdles of romantic love have been cleared by both people. If the third hurdle is cleared, then marriage might be in the cards. If the third hurdle isn't cleared, then a break-up is almost inevitable.
OK, this is where I might be really talking out of my ass. I've never broken up with anybody ( I married my first girlfriend ), so I'm probably not the person who should be talking about break-ups. However, I do think I've learned a lot about human nature over the years, so just bear with me, and hear what I have to say. If I really am talking out of my ass, feel free to call bullshit on me.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons why people break up that have nothing to do with these "Three Hurdles of Romantic Love" that I've just made up. Everything I've written so far is based on the assumption that everybody who enters into a relationship is looking for romantic love. Obviously, that isn't the case. There are plenty of people that aren't looking for long-lasting romantic love in a relationship. A lot of people are afraid of commitment. A lot of people just want to "have fun" and "play the field". Quite often when two people enter into a relationship, one or both people never really intended for the relationship to last a long time. Obviously in those situations, it's not surprise when those two people eventually break up.
It's also true that people sometime break up for practical reasons. Perhaps one person moves far away, or the the families of the two people don't get along ( or parents don't approve of the relationship ), or there are religious or cultural issues that doom the long-term prospects for the relationship. That's all true, but for the sake of my little "Three Hurdle" theory, let's assume that we are talking about a relationship where both people are looking for romantic love, and there are no external hurdles ( distance/family/religion/etc. ) that would keep the relationship from being a success.
With that in mind, what exactly is hurdle 3? Well hurdle 3 is what tells you whether or not the feelings you felt when you passed hurdle 2 are real or an illusion. As you get to know somebody better, your first impressions are either confirmed or proved to be false. You begin to find out what a person really believes. You begin to find out what a person really values. You find out how the person treats his/her friends and family, and perhaps more importantly you find out how he/she treats people he/she doesn't really like. You see the person at his/her best and his/her worst, and you see if you are really compatible with that person.
Anyway, what I said above is pretty standard stuff. It's probably a good idea to make sure hurdle 3 is cleared before you get married or decide to have a very long term-relationship, but sadly, I don't think things always work that way. After you've cleared hurdle 1 and hurdle 2 in your mind, you're pretty much in love with the other person - and being in love, you very much want to believe that hurdle 3 can be cleared, even if there is evidence to the contrary. It's almost impossible to be objective when you are in love, so sometimes you just have to be lucky to avoid getting hurt. My wife's sister wasn't so lucky with her boyfriend from college. She was with the guy for 10 years, and we always assumed they were going to get married someday. They lived together in Boston for many years ( They met at MIT ) , and we figured they would get married when she finished medical school and he got his PHD ( In some kind of Marine Biology field ). Well, she became and an MD, he got his PHD, and he was offered job as a professor at a university in Hawaii ( This was about 4 and a half years ago ). It was at this point that we assumed that they would get engaged, and when it didn't happen, my wife's sister told her boyfriend that she'd like to get engaged before making the commitment of moving out to Hawaii with him. Well, to the surprise of everyone ( I always assumed he would be my brother-in-law someday ), he kinda freaked out and started to ignore her ( even thought they were living in the same place ). So, that was pretty much the end of a 10-year relationship.
Now, my sister-in-law eventually did get a happy ending. She eventually found and married a better guy, who is nicest and coolest brother-in-law a guy could have. So, that's all good, but my point is that sometimes it takes a very long time to see somebody's true colors when you are in love with them.
---- End of tangent ----
Good gravy, that was quite a long tangent! I'm not even sure what my point was anymore. I've written a lot of rambling blogs, but this might be my rambling-est.
I guess I should get back to the whole Person_A/Person_B scenario. I guess my main point is that there are a lots of reasons why Person A might not fall in love with Person B, and most of these reasons ( especially the hurdle 1 and hurdle 2 reasons ) don't really say anything bad about Person B.
I guess this blog post is kinda a follow up to the serious parts in my "The Stalker". In that video, I spoke about how you shouldn't let the opinion of one person ruin your self-esteem. I was mostly talking about looks ( the hurdle 1 factor ) in that video, but now I realize that I should have spoken about the hurdle 2 factor ( the IT factor ) some more.
I realized this when I remembered something High School Girl #2 ( HSG#2 ) told me when she rejected me. This little thing I remembered is what led to this huge rambling blog post. When she rejected me, she told me that she thought I was a nice guy, and that she thought I was good-looking. I distinctly remember not believing her at the time. I figured she was just saying that to be nice. I figured that she thought I was ugly and/or a complete loser, and that belief adversely affected my self-esteem for years. I couldn't imagine why a girl wouldn't want to go out with me if she thought I was good-looking and a nice guy. However, now I realize ( almost 22 years too late ) that she might have actually been telling the truth. Sure, I have no way of knowing what she was really thinking. She certainly could have thought I was an ugly loser, but for my own mental well-being, I should have just taken what she said at face value. It's quite possible that she could have meant all those nice things she said about me, but I just didn't have that IT that would make her fall for a guy. Yes, it's quite possible, and if that was the case, I shouldn't have really felt that bad. I couldn't really blame he for not seeing IT in me, and I couldn't have blamed myself for not having IT.
Yeah, so I guess that's my really long-winded point. If I had understood the power if IT back in my high school days, perhaps I would have been better off. I don't know if I actually would have dated anyone, but at least I would have felt a lot better about myself.
God, what a long-winded self-indulgent post! Sorry about the folks. I promise the next post will be more fun and interesting ( I have a story from my Texas days! ).
Anyway, it's getting quite late, so I should go to bed. Thanks for reading.
Rich
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