"I think I need to talk to him," my friend tells me over the phone… again. It's like the ninth time we've had this conversation. She never does manage to "talk" to him.
They've gone out about five times, though "gone out" is probably pushing it. They've had dinner or drinks together without the usual gang of friends they both usually surround themselves with. They can't really be
called "dates" because neither party is sure that's what they want them to be. But it's more action than she's had in a long time. And she's in a state. She needs to know how he feels about her. But she's terrified of being rejected. He told her before they started hanging out one on one that he doesn't think he's up for a relationship. She doesn't know that she is either. But she needs something. This limbo is killing her.
"Don't worry about it," I tell her yet again. "If you don't feel comfortable taking it to the next level, don't push it. Just hang out and get to know him. You don't need to decide if it could be a relationship right now." "But I worry that I'm avoiding the next step," she replies. "That I'm so scared of getting into a relationship that I won't even let myself go there."
I love my friend dearly but she's making me crazy.
"So talk to him," I repeat patiently. "But keep it casual. Ask him how he's feeling about hanging out together. Be honest. Tell him you're really unsure about your ability to get into a relationship but you'd
really like to keep hanging out with him and see where it goes. That gets you both off the insta-relationship hook but lets him know you're interested."
"That sounds great and it's exactly how I feel but I don't think I can say those things," she bounces back. "I get too nervous when I see him and end up babbling about everything but us."
"Then don't talk to him and just do things together until you're more comfortable with him," I try, knowing full well that I could tell her to put cigarette butts out in her forehead at this point for all she's really listening to me. She has worked herself into that place where nothing anyone says really matters but you must talk to your friend about it obsessively and then let her do whatever the hell she wants to anyway.
"But what if I'm too casual about it and he thinks I'm not interested and he loses interest?"
Sigh.
***
My friend is what an article in the new issue of Utne Reader (October 2000) calls a "quirkyalone," a new breed of perpetually single people that is on the rise now that marrying in your 20s is no longer in vogue.
Singledom is their natural state.
"I am, perhaps, what you might call deeply single," writes, Sasha Cagen, the author of the piece. "Until recently, I wondered if there might be something weird about me. But then lonely romantics began to grace the covers of TV Guide and Mademoiselle. From Ally McBeal to Sex in the City, a spotlight came to shine on the forever single."
When I am single, I tend to see it as a temporary state, a sometimes fun, sometimes lonely rest stop on the way to the next relationship. That's not to say you can't be happy alone or that being in a relationship (especially a bad relationship) is better than being single. In fact, I quite enjoy bouts of singledom but I'm ultimately happier having some kind of romantic interest in my life, even if it's only -- or especially if it's only -- a crush or a fling. Maybe that makes me shallow. I think it makes me human.
