April12012
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
When it comes to dating I’m often in the field with Burns and his mousie, looking around at the shambles and trying to figure out what happened to my schemes.
If I’m having fun being single, I’ll ruin it all by falling for someone emotionally unavailable and/or unready to date.
If I’ve resolved not to date anyone for a while, until I get that someone out of my system, someone sweet will come along and ask me out and I’ll say yes even though I shouldn’t.
If I’m dating someone nice and sweet and things are going swimmingly, someone else will come along and ruin it with moonlight and passion and a tender kiss.
Then I’ll hurt that nice guy, because I’m that awful person that doesn’t know what she wants until its right in front of her and I can’t lie and say that I don’t really want it.
I’d rather end up with a bad reputation and broken heart than to spend my whole youth confined to the safe choices. For if now isn’t the time to make such mistakes, when is?
And as a good friend once told me, “Youth is disagreeable time, for it is neither possible then nor prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.”
January222012
Well, I guess I changed the tagline of my blog a little too early.
For those reading on their dashboards, it used to be “Tales of bad dates, elephant rides and life after college on the Indian subcontinent”. But then I only went on like two elephant rides, and never wrote any tales about them. And my bad dates were getting fewer and further between, and I wasn’t really writing about them either.
But I guess I tempted fate to serve up more bad dates when I thought I was out of the woods and changed the tagline to 365 Days in India.
The actual bad date part is not that bad. Its a few hours of time that you won’t get back, but you usually get a nice meal out of it.
The reason I like going on dates (as opposed to “just hanging out with”) with someone, is that how someone behaves on a date unconsciously reveals so much about what type of person they are.
Do they pick you up on time? Do they treat you with respect? Can you talk to them uninterrupted for two hours and not get bored? Do they have any “dealbreakers” as Liz Lemon would say?
To take this evening’s example: I know instinctively that I’m just never going to seriously date a guy who (very liberally)says that his neighbor is “a gay” and that he thinks there’s nothing wrong with gays because its their feelings about their sexuality and they can’t help it. (In India, FYI, this is an unusually liberal viewpoint).
I mean this wasn’t the only issue - he showed up 20 minutes late, mostly talked about himself, and we didn’t have anything in common. So on the whole, its fine that it didn’t work out, that I don’t want a second date, that it was a kind of a bummer night. Eventually dating karma will come back around with something good.
November112011
So I’ve gotten back into the dating game with my blind date a few weeks back, and I have to say how much fun it is to be out there again. It spices up the boring work routine to have a crush to day dream about or to get a text message from.
This article really struck a chord with me about how impersonal, how bizarre it is to just date. Most of us, even if not serial monogamists like the author, don’t leave college knowing how to date. College teaches you how to be in a couple and it teaches you how to hook up, but not how to just date. In a pre-selected dating pool of mostly smart mostly good looking people your own age, you don’t have to do all of the needle-in-a-haystack searching that is dating in a big city.
Not to mention dating abroad, which is a whole different story. When most of the people you meet have a completely different background from you, the pattern of first dates changes. You can’t bond over the same tv shows or music or books that you like, because your references are on different continents. They don’t necessarily get your jokes, and you might still wonder why they still live with their parents. (You know its not as bad as it is at home, but still?)
But this can be helpful, because without the filler of shared likes and dislikes to distract you, you can more easily figure out whether you like someone. The feeling of making a true connection, by virtue of its rarity, becomes easier to spot. Eventually, you get into the groove of figuring out who you like and who you don’t, who’s potential friend material and who’s a do-not-call-again-ever. It starts to be fun, and you make jokes with your colleagues about the different letters of the alphabet that you’re collecting (A,D,N and M for me). You start to like your single life again.
