Loved and Lost? It's O.K., Especially if You Win

Loved and Lost?
It's O.K., Especially if You Win
By Veronica Chambers

Published: February 19, 2006
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/fashion/19love.html

DATING for me was always like that video game: you try to follow the
dance moves, and the further you get in the game, the trickier the
moves become, until you are just a flailing mess. I was clingy and
desperate and wore my heart on my sleeve, falling madly in love
repeatedly, only to meet with heartbreaking rejection at every turn.

Which is why it is nothing short of a miracle that two years ago I was
swiftly and happily married.

Until then I was a case study in "He's Just Not That Into You," or so
I've been told. I haven't read that book: friends warned me that it
would trigger too many unpleasant memories. Apparently it is all about
women like me: women who wear blinders about the men in their lives,
who come on too strong and fall in love with the wrong people over and
over.

I'm sure there are many of you out there. And if you're one of us,
here's what I have to tell you, what I wish someone at some point had
told me: It's O.K.

It's O.K. to fall deeply for one loser after another. It's O.K. to
show up at a guy's house with a dozen roses and declare your undying
affection. It's O.K. to have too much to drink and call your ex 20
times and then to be mortally embarrassed when you realize your number
must have shown up on his caller ID. It's O.K. to stand at a phone
booth in Times Square on New Year's Eve, drenched like a sewer cat in
the pouring rain, crying your eyes out because the man you are
infatuated with has decided that he needs some space.

It's O.K. because I believe that all of these grand gestures and
heroic attempts to follow E. M. Forster's simple advice to "only
connect" are not really about this guy or that guy. Making a fool of
yourself for love is ultimately about you, how much you have to give
and the distances you will travel to keep your heart wide open when
everything around you makes you feel like slamming it shut and
soldering it closed.

Not to digress into too much pop psychology, but I sometimes think
that I never had a chance at being one of those girls who could play
it cool. My parents' marriage was a soap opera saga of dramatic exits
and mind games and affairs. When I was little, my father would force
me to choose which parent I loved more. If I chose my mother, he would
react with fury. If I chose him, he would smother me with hugs and
kisses, luxuriating in his victory, then promise to come back for me
soon.

Soon could mean two days or two weeks or two months. I learned early
on that love meant never having to follow through on your promises.

My mother, bless her heart, tried to keep me from becoming a desperate
girl with a daddy complex. In seventh grade I got my first boyfriend:
one very handsome junior high school star athlete named Chuck Douglas.
We went to different schools, so our relationship consisted of long,
meandering phone calls, most of which were initiated by me.

One day, when my mother could not reach me after school for three
hours straight, she came home early with the intention of beating some
sense into me. When she found me sprawled underneath the dining table,
the phone cord wrapped like a bracelet (or a handcuff) around my arm,
she took pity. She led me into her bedroom and asked me how often I
called Chuck.

"All the time."

"And how often does he call you?" she asked.

I shrugged.

"You can't chase boys," she said. "They don't like it."

I was 13. Chuck Douglas was dating me, a certified nerd, in a sea of
buxom cheerleaders. My mother's words meant nothing. I was already
lost to the cause.

In college I discovered women's studies and somehow managed to wrap
the words of Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis neatly around my now
well-solidified boy craziness. "I'm a feminist," I declared. "I don't
need to wait for a man to ask me out."

So I asked out guy after guy after guy: the very epitome of he's just
not that into you. I dated numerous gay men who were not yet out of
the closet. It became a kind of service after a while, coaching
ex-boyfriends out of the closet. I went out with a techno D.J. who
invited me to go sailing with his parents. I hated his taste in music,
and he was a terrible kisser, but I still cried a week later when he
dumped me.

IN my 20's I had two long-term relationships that nevertheless ended,
and I found myself back out in the wilds of the dating world. At this
time the hot self-help dating book was "The Rules." There were many
rules that were supposed to help you lasso a man, but the one I
remember said that you should never accept a date for Saturday after
Thursday.

"The Rules" reminded me of that conversation I had with my mother
about the swoon-worthy Chuck Douglas. I understood that the rules were
good for me, but so is tofu, and I just can't stand the stuff.

My friend Cassandra insisted that men are like lions; they want to
chase their prey. She suggested that I smile at a guy I was interested
in instead of barreling him over with conversation. "See what he
does," she said. "If you're feeling playful, then maybe give him a
little wink."

Soon after, I was invited by a friend to take a trip to South Africa.
One enchanted morning my friend and I were having breakfast in the
hotel restaurant. Across the room I spied a charming man with the kind
of friendly face that you feel you have known forever. Leaving the
restaurant, I stood up and saw that he was looking my way. I smiled.
He smiled back. Feeling bold, I winked, then tripped on a step and
fell on my face.

The next few minutes were dizzying as I was surrounded by hotel staff
offering me ice and bandages. Then I heard a voice amid the cacophony;
it was the man I had winked at. I turned away, mortified.

"You should see a doctor," he said.

I insisted that I was fine.

"Well, let me be the judge of that, because I happen to be a doctor."

He took me out to dinner that night and every night for the rest of my
trip. We exchanged phone numbers and even though I lived in New York
and he lived in Sydney, Australia, I called and called him because I
was so sure that what I felt for this man was, if not love, then
certainly magic.

It wasn't. To give the guy a little credit, we lived continents apart.
Even if he was that into me, it would've been a hard row to hoe.

It was about this time, when I was in my late 20's, that I read a
nugget of advice, probably in a women's magazine, that I took to
heart. This article suggested that if you knew you were going to meet
the love of your life in one year, you would really enjoy this year.
This seemed reasonable.

So while I still tended to wear my heart on my sleeve and to commit
too quickly, I also had some really fun one-off dates with guys I knew
were never going to call. I went to the theater and to hip-hop shows
and tried to relax about the whole dating and mating thing.

About a year later I met the man who would become my husband. The
friend who kept reintroducing us insisted that, unlike the vast
majority of men I was meeting in New York, Jason was a guy who could
hold his own. He was not a "Sex and the City" Mr. Big, a type I was
well acquainted with: the �ber-successful guy who keeps you at arm's
length. Nor was he a starving artist who was willing to fall in love
while nursing commitment issues about things like holding down a job
and paying bills.

Jason was a regular guy: he had a good job, owned a house, liked his
parents. Eight months after our first date he proposed.

SUDDENLY the role I had been playing my entire dating life was
reversed: I didn't want to get married. I'd never been angling for a
ring. What I had wanted all through my 20's was a really great
boyfriend: someone who called when he said he would, who would get up
early and go running with me over the Brooklyn Bridge and who would
jump at the chance at weekend getaways in the Berkshires.

I wanted someone with whom I could read the Sunday paper in bed, who
would sit next to me during foreign movies, who would bring me chicken
soup when I felt ill, who would send me flowers on Valentine's Day and
sometimes for no reason at all.

Jason said he wanted all the same things too. But to him the
relationship I described was marriage, not dating.

So I said yes.

Which is probably why after two years of holy matrimony I still make
the mistake of calling Jason my boyfriend. He is in every way the best
boyfriend I've ever had. No one ever told me that a really great
marriage can make up for two decades of horrible dating. No one ever
said that all those guys who were just not that into you can be, for
women, the psychological equivalent of notches on a bedpost.

I'm happy now that I dated the D.J., the doctor, the candlestick
maker. When I look back at those relationships, I can see that in the
midst of all the drama I managed to have a goodly amount of fun.

What would have happened if any of those relationships had lasted,
bumbling along in all their glaring wrongness? Instead of just being
dumped and consoling myself with pints of Chunky Monkey and viewings
of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," I could have been facing any one of these
men in divorce court, or being forced to see them every Saturday
afternoon, when we met to swap custody of our children or our cocker
spaniel.

Thankfully, all those men were just not that into me. They did me a
bigger favor than I could ever have known.

Veronica Chambers lives in France. This essay is adapted from "The May
Queen: Women on Life, Love, Work and Pulling It All Together in Your
30's," edited by Andrea N. Richesin, to be published by
Tarcher/Penguin in March.

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From: hazelmarie@gmail.com