So I’m on my few days off with my job (these are some of the benefits of shift work) so I’ll try to catch up with some of the blogging that I’ve seemed to have missed.
I was with a friend over the weekend and she’s slowly embarking on one of her first relationships. And I’m jealous and envious of how she smiles when she says his name or how the conversation just slowly steers towards him. It’s such a fun time of life. Yet it’s not where I am whatsoever.
I’m not saying I don’t have options but I’m not in the right mindset… I have 2 guys texting me right now. But this is going to turn some heads but they’re both a year younger and it just puts a sour taste in my mouth and makes me skeptical of what could actually happen and how far it would actually go.
Now before you start to argue with me about being conventional (a word seldom used to describe me but in this instance, you would be totally right), there’s a little bit of my background which I think might be why I feel the way I feel. To start off with – I don’t have a problem with age differences in relationships. My parents were 12 years apart (my father 12 years senior to my mother) and my best friend’s parents are 8 years apart (the mother 8 years senior to her father). I don’t think that there is anything wrong with it – I know couples that are 2 or 3 years apart and they seem to make it work perfectly fine.
But for myself – I picture myself as being the younger person in the relationship. And the reason for that is because I have some life experience that is beyond my years already so don’t know how I would relate well to someone that is younger than me. (Footnote: my father passed away suddenly when I was 12 years old). I think this is why I feel uneasy about going out with someone who is younger than me. I have plenty of friends who are a year or two younger than myself and there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m not saying it would never happen in one of my romantic relationships but I will repeat my unease.
And I find myself in a Catch 22 position – I want to have an open mind about these relationships but I already have such a dismissive point of view that I can’t shake. Although am I creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by going out with them with already such a dismissive view of the relationship?
The one boy just boggles my mind. Near the end of our first date, he asked to see me again and we scheduled our next free date. Afterwards, he talked about having some space between us and not obsessively calling each other. I laughed because it just showed how little he knew me but agreed that I wouldn’t call him all day everyday. And then on our second date, he revealed how he told his aunt and her boyfriend about me. He continually called me “hun” or “babe” and talked about how “gorgeous” I am and how he feels like he can really open up to me… Am I the only one that sees that as being totally opposite as to what was said the previous week? Haha.
The second boy shows how nervous he is – his message to see if we wanted to hang out included the word “sometime” twice and the sentence didn’t even make a whole lot of grammatical sense. You could tell that his heart was pumping hard when he wrote the message that he couldn’t even see straight to reread the message before hitting send.
I’m happy that I can make people this excited and that people can still feel this excitement about dating. The problem is that I’m not very excited at all. I’m looking at all the negatives of dating rather than the positives (I just don’t think that my mind is in the dating space right now). Maybe one day soon I will feel that excitement. For now, I’m just making sure that these two boys know that I’m just not excited right now and I’m okay with it and they have to be too.
The Young Adult 