You've Come a Long Way, Baby

Earlier today I received an email from one of the boys of Spring, one of the two who made the months of March through June the emotional free-for- all that it was. Upon reading that he had been thinking about me, I scoffed in disgust and logged out of my account. In emailing a couple of friends about it, I got to thinking. A year ago, I would have immediately pressed "Reply" thrilled by the attention. I would have agonized over the most appropriately "breezy" response. I would have pushed away the memory of him being dull, unappreciative of my company, and bad in bed. I would have told myself that by doing these things I was being "optimistic." In considering my options today, I now see that optimism more as recklessness, neediness, and a general disregard for my own welfare. In short, a bad idea, and not "bad idea" in that way that I often tend to romantisize, like "tee hee, what a great entertaining train wreck that will be", but "bad idea" in the "even if it is entertaining haven't I done this enough, shouldn't I lookout for myself this time" kind of way. It was a great revelation. I have decided to ignore him, at least for the next several days. It is after all tempting to find out what he wants, but I doubt there is any kind of reward to following up with him.

On a related note, I found myself confronted with the reality of a friendship this weekend that I hadn't yet considered and it cast the situation in a darker light than how I am accustomed to looking at it. So I have this friend without benefits, who I have written about in the past who I really cannot go into details about for a variety of reasons. He's great, I love him to death. For a while now, he has hovered on the periphery of the crazy ven diagram that is my romantic life. Sometimes we get drunk and he floats in for a brief moment, but he quickly runs right back out. There are about a million and half reasons why he should remain there, and a million reasons why he should be smack directly in the middle of the crazy ven diagram. Up until very recently, I had adopted a totally "woe is me" attitude about the whole thing. "Oh woe is me this can't happen and yet I wish it could, perhaps it will someday." You get the gist.

And then it hit me.

He is totally setting the terms of everything. He has all the power. He decided things couldn't be a certain way and refuses to look past it, or doesn't want things to be a certain way and is hiding behind the current set of circumstances because he's too scared to offend me by being truthful. He is the one who is a complete pussy. And yet, and yet! I completely lap up the attention when he flirts with me, get all happy when he compliments me and will generally bend over backwards to do him a favor, all because I am living out some sort of lame fantasy that things will eventually be different. Maybe they will be, and my life really is mirroring a Meg Ryan movie, but I'm starting to feel falsely optimistic. More than anything else though, I see this as the time to start setting some terms of my own.