When I first moved to California, I set up a number of
dates in
advance (thanks, online dating!) so that I’d be
able to hit the ground running when I got there.
My first date I set up for one week after I’d arrived (I wanted a
little time to unpack and make my place presentable first... plus,
after a 5-day cross-country drive, I really just wanted to settle in
for a few days and see some friends in town before I dialed up on
girls).
When that first date showed up one week later, I was floored – she’d
looked good in her pictures,
but in person
she was absolutely smoking
hot. I fell instantly in love. But she never quite reciprocated those
emotions to me, and when we ended up back at my apartment at the end of
the date and I tried to kiss her, she rejected this, told me she was
uncomfortable, and left.
My second date was the next night. For this date, I drove about 30
minutes north of town and met her near where she lived. She met me
wearing a white, modest wedding-style dress (unbeknownst to me, she’d
apparently just gotten
married – when I saw it, I thought, “Is that a wedding dress? Nah...
there’s no way,” but apparently, it was), sipping a plastic cup of
champagne. She was very cute, with a quite
attractive face and waist-length hair, but I wasn’t super impressed at
the time. We slept together a few hours later, and I was pretty happy then, because not only did she have
a pretty face and great hair, but her body was absolutely killer. I
hadn’t really realized it when I saw her in her modest (wedding) dress.
The girl from the first date I saw a few more times over the years,
and only years
later did I realize that face-wise, she wasn’t really that
cute. And body-wise, well, she was thin by American standards, but not
so by international ones, and her breasts were non-existent.
She just dressed and acted sexy. Bright colors, big
sunglasses that left more of her face to the imagination, alternately
suggestive and aloof behavior, like what we talked about in “Elegance, Sexiness, and Average, Normal
People.”
Yet, she’d been the one I was excited about, while the one who was
the whole package I’d merely thought “meh” at the time about.
And I see so many guys doing this all the time, getting caught up on
the wrong girls, and then getting bitter because of how
those girls treat them.
It’s kind of a clown show that we all fall victim to.
Love is an incredible feeling. That wonderful warmth you get when you wake up and read a text from a girl you really care about is one you can’t replace. The thought of her can lift your spirits through the struggles of day-to-day living, and you suddenly feel like you’re ready to conquer the world.
When I first moved to California, I set up a number of
dates in
advance (thanks,