Kissing Frogs

So, basically, dating in my 20’s was a pain. It wasn’t fun. It was scary. I was never relaxed. Always thinking, does he like me? Do I like him? What did he mean by that? Do I look fat? Will my hair frizz? What kind of question was that? The hair always frizzed! Will he kiss me? If he does, what should I do? If he doesn’t, what should I do? Why is he smoking pot while he’s driving? That can’t be a good thing. Why does he keep leaving the table to talk on the phone? If I get rid of him early enough, I can still meet the girls at Channel 80. If I’m lucky, maybe Momo will be there. Why is he checking out that girl over there? She’s definitely not as pretty as I am,,, I think.

So, with all these questions running through you’re head during a date, who could have a good time?

After the divorce thing, I was too frightened of men to go out. But once I did it was better. The transitional boyfriend was a good thing. If he wasn’t 11 years younger than me and more into himself than he was into me, perhaps it could have worked out. But that’s a long story too. I supposed I’ll devote some time to it later on. But by the time all this was done, I was 35. Oops. Where’d the time go? Yes, it passed by, with little to show for it but some degrees, some money, and great hair. (They finally invented some really good hair products.) Ok, the hair, you could see, but some more happened in there, that was not visible. That’s the cool stuff.

I found myself kind of bummed out for a while for all my bad luck with men. But then I got cracking. I decided I wanted to have children before I was 40, so I better find their father. I started to give up on the Frank Sinatra dream and hit reality. Like Kirsty Alley in “Look Who’s Talking”. She set out to find a good father for her bastard child. The only difference with me was that there was no bastard child to be found.

I stopped looking at my favorite “bad boy” hotties and started taking notice of successful nice guy types. I still wasn’t very attracted to them, but I decided to ignore that because that always got me into trouble anyway. I started accepting blind dates, joined dating services, placed personal ads, answered personal ads, pursued on-line dating, went to singles dances and events and met through introduction. I thought the more people I met, statistically, the likelihood of meeting a good guy would increase.

This still got me nowhere. But what it did do was make the whole dating thing less mysterious. A desensitization process. It wasn’t such a huge event if I had a date. I just threw myself together and went. I was less stuck up. Before, I’d refuse a blind date. “I can find my OWN dates, THANK YOU!” I was insulted at the fact that anyone would think I would NEED to be set up on a date. After all, I was a creature unlike any other (The Rules). GET OVER IT LADIES!

Dating became similar to job interviewing. You know, if you take each interview too seriously, and are upset over each one you don’t get, you’ll be real sick real soon. But, if you go on enough of them, after a while, they’re all the same. Desensitization. You go. You do it. Go home, eat dinner and get on with your life as usual. If you get a phone call, fine. If not, have breakfast and take a piss. Now I approach dating in much the same manner. Go to the date, then come home and go on with my life as usual. Who the hell cares if he calls again?

After all, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.