The game
Isn't love supposed to be in the air in the springtime? It's October, people. Give me a break. I'm just kidding. But today I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine from Wash U and a few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine from Wichita and it really made me think: How do we learn to play the dating game? I was never good at the dating game until very recently and to be completely honest, I'm not sure I'm that good at it now. I just happened to find a guy who's playing with the same strategy that I am, with all the same pieces, my dating board game twin you might say. But in high school I had the usual crushes (waaaaaay too many) and about 95-99% of them had at least 200:1 odds that they were never going to make it past, "Oh, he knows my name?" Sure I ended up dating a guy my senior year but that didn't turn out so great and we broke up shortly after I left for college. So what went wrong? Well, apparently I was clingy and didn't have enough backbone of my own. At least that's what he said. Maybe I was just a bad kisser and he never owned up. Who knows. Boyfriend #2 was a lot more friend than boyfriend. We parted amicably and are still sort of friends as in we can be civil if we're in the same room together but it's not like we talk all that often. Cut to now: great guy, great relationship, looks like it's going to turn out just fine. I'm not complaining. I am currently living a very charmed relationship life. Everyone should be so lucky/blessed. But there are so many ways to look at the dating game. Of the friends with whom I've had the discussion lately it seems like dating can fall into a few categories. There's the casual dating, of which I'm not a big fan, there's the dating-because-the-hook-ups-are-good-so-hey-why-not dating, of which I'm an even smaller fan than of the casual dating, and then of course there's that fine line between "dating" and being, for lack of a better term, "boyfriend/girlfriend." There's also a cost-benefit analysis involved with dating. Do the benefits of the potential of it working out well outweigh the costs of the risks you might have to take right now? If one or the other is more invested, who ends up paying the price? What if you're friends first ... does that screw the friendship over? It's a lot of food for thought! As someone who doesn't understand the benefits of casual dating or the hook-ups-are-good style dating, there have always been a large amount of overanalytical thought going into each of my relationships. Probably too much. My friend Dan pointed out last year: God gave Abraham and Isaac wives ... and now we live in a culture where somehow we're at least partially responsible to find a soulmate. Dan's argument was basically, "Not fair!" On the other hand, if you believe in God's plan, then in some ways, God will provide you with your soulmate, right? You just have to be on the lookout for when he/she arrives. Pay attention to the signs and all that. Still though ... God is sometimes nebulous in his communication. There have been times when God basically beat me over the head (i.e. telling me to move to Chapel Hill, the night JJ and I got together ... ) and really it would have been absurd for me to try anything else. But then there have been times when I've definitely had to go, "Could you be a little clearer? This is sort of a big decision ..." and God either has been silent, or I haven't been listening hard enough. Is it really a game? Do we just roll the dice and hope we've guessed the right numbers? Wait for the dealer to hand us our cards and place our bets? Or is the game fixed and no matter what happens we're going win or the house is going to take us under? I have no idea. This post has been very "Sex and the City" in nature. I heart "Sex and the City." Don't knock it.