nothing ventured, nothing…
what is it about love? what masochistic part of us keeps us coming back for more, or wanting what we don’t have, when the rest of our lives are so fantastic and exciting that we’d barely have time for it if we found it?
i have a philosophy of love, and falling in it. granted, if my philosophy of love was a self-help book, it’d be a spectacular failure only referred to as “you can buy those to prop your table up with”. nonetheless, i believe that my time and my friendships are valuable enough to me that the man who comes along to shift the sands of my life had better damn well rock the foundation as well. casual dating? waste of time. dating someone you have next-to-nothing in common with? a criminal waste of time.
i say the same thing, time and again: without exception, my friends are the most mind-blowingly amazing people i know. so if i’m going to change my life around to accomodate a man, he’d better live up to that standard of excellence. as a result, i barely make an effort to meet new men, i often preemptively reject strangers that flirt with me, and i never follow through on any of my half-hearted attempts to be more open to new people, or more trusting that love can be found in the strangest places.
this theory is starting to show its cracks. worse, it’s starting to look like sour grapes. i mean it, every word, about wanting to be with someone who shakes my world – both the bed and the mind. but stubbornly believing that my friends are all i need is starting to look a lot like making my friends all i need to avoid being hurt again. to avoid standing on the curb, heart in my hands to varying degrees of broken, while someone finds a new trap door and disappears into it. to avoid the feeling that i gave someone everything i had, proudly unafraid to love, and they politely asked for their money back.
the truth is, i do want more. my friends are a phenomenal support structure but they’re not the entire building. and i have to stop hiding behind the idea that the simplest kind of love – the kind i have with my friends and family – is ever going to be enough for me.
a few nights ago, it became impossible to ignore my own cowardice. there’s a bartender, at a bar, who made us delicious cosmos, was quite frank in his quiet flirtation, holding my eyes a second longer than usual, lingering quietly a few feet from our conversation. did i slip away from my friends and have a chat with him? no. did i even tell him my name, even though he told me his? no. why not? because i was having fun with my friends, and too thin-skinned to exchange the usual comfort of acceptance for the sharp wind of the unknown. why? scared. lazy. suddenly, inexplicably, first-time-in-my-gregarious-life … shy.
so this weekend, i’m going to do something that every safe-seeking molecule is screaming against, pulling frantically back from. i’m going to that bar. for one drink. alone. don’t get me wrong. i don’t actually want to go. but i keep remembering how sweet his smile was, how surprisingly non-sleazy it was when i felt him watching me, how very much i wished i was the kind of girl to kiss a random bartender as a thank-you for the delicious cosmo. typically, i did nothing about it, much to the dismay of my encouraging friends.
so i will go into that bar, will have one of that bartender’s absurdly good cosmos, and i will let myself consider the possibility that a complete stranger could, eventually, blow my mind.