Looking

Last night I was talking to a friend and I asked her if any of her friends were single and "weren't creeped out by the thought of me." While informing me that just about all of her friends weren't single or were creeped out by me, she offered me a piece of advice which I'm feel a bit conflicted about.

She told me that it was foolish for me to start looking, especially so soon after Shanndra. It was her philosophy on relationships that if one goes out looking for them, the ones one will find will just be ones one has already gotten: the ones that break one's heart. She tried to make me promise that I wouldn't look, that I'd just let love find me. In the end, I did, but I'm still not sure whether or not to follow her advice.

To a certain extent, I agree with a deal of her logic on the matter. Just rushing into a relationship is not going to end well at all, a certain friend's experiences has taught me much about that. To the same end, I know I need to "love myself before I can love others," as my friend Rob so frequently stresses. But to not look at all and just wait for love to come to me? It sounds romantic, it really does, but it also evades practical sense.

The reason it evades my idea of relationships is matter of sense and personal experience. Anyone and everyone has told me that I have to put myself out there, that opportunity doesn't just come up to the door and knock. Just as an amature writer lacks the weight of JK Rowling or Alan Moore, and must submit to publishers in order to get known, I really do not think it is as easy as me just standing up and waiting for the first girl to glomp me. I'm not some super hot guy that girls fawn over. (I'm not my brother.) Nor with my emotional awkwardness am I particularly attractive in personality. Yeah, as much as I'd like the girl of my dreams to walk up to me and tell me, "You're cute, you're nice, I love you, let's get married," I'm not good enough for that to ever, ever happen.

The first 19 years of my life were spent waiting, waiting for "the one true love" to find me. It didn't. The closest I ever got to waiting for a connection to fall into my lap working out was Heather, and my lack of action is part of what I think caused that to fail. The lesson I learned from my thing with her was that the idea of economic risk was at work in love. You have to risk money to make money. To the same end, I think you must risk getting hurt to find love. So I must beg to differ, Julie. Life for a nerd like me does not work that way. Love will never seek me out, so I must find it.

However, there are a couple things that I can incoperate from your advice that make sense. I already mentioned that I shouldn't rush, but I think the basic rule to substitute to your rule of never looking ever is to just not be desperate. I think there is a fundmental difference for looking for a person with specific traits that one desires emotionally, and just not having standards. Because I have standards; afterall, my standard of loving the person I'm with and having her love me is what ended the relationship between Shanndra and I. Still, I need to meet people in order to at least see if they'd work or not, hence why I'm trying to see if there is anyone avalilble and willing to go out with me.