Share personal tales about Venusian and Martian close encounters. Conversations, revelations, confrontations, explanations... If it's not a communication-translation, post it here.
I've never written a true blog post in my life, so bear with me. In fact, I tend to be rather skeptical of blogs in general, as they seem to imply that one simple person holds some sort of mystic wisdom over others via The Great Internet. But this post is about one person in my life who did hold some mystic wisdom and who passed it on to me in a dorm room freshman year. We're no longer the close friends we were, but I will say in all sincerity that she did change my life. So I'd like to pass on that wisdom in the hopes that someone might read it and take her advice to heart like I did.
Until I was nineteen I'd never been kissed. I thought, or thought I knew, that something was wrong with me. I guessed that maybe I was too fat, or too loud, or too obnoxious, or too awkward, or that my lack of experience was all too apparent to the boys that crossed my path. Deep down, though, I knew it couldn't be that easy. I had good friends and a reasonably healthy self-image. So I thought, if nothing is wrong with me, what's wrong with them?
Damn boys. All I wanted for my sixteenth birthday was to be kissed. Same with my seventeenth. Eighteenth. By the time my nineteenth birthday was looming before me, I was terrified that I'd somehow missed my chance. I'd watch my friends, once kissing virgins like me, cross over the great divide. Embarrassed and proud, I'd never ask what I desperately wanted to know: What did it feel like? What did you do? How on earth did you ever manage to get a boy to kiss you? I couldn't even begin to imagine what kind of situation would need to occur in order to make any physical contact feasible. This wasn't the movies; it was my life. And not-being-kissed became a huge problem that I was determined to "fix."
Until she told me what I should have known. "You don't want to be kissed," she told me, while I sat curled in a ball on my bed. "To kiss someone is easy. To kiss someone you care about, that's the hard part, and that's what you want." It sounded simple, but it wasn't. She was right. I could have kissed a hundred boys. I could have, but I didn't, because I didn't care about them enough to try. The physical act of kissing wasn't what I wanted to experience; it was the feelings that made the kissing happen.
When I told her how hurt I was about the high school boy and how he wouldn't even look at me after he forced me to draw my own conclusions, she convinced me that he wasn't ready for the things I'd wanted. Maybe it wasn't his "fault" that he couldn't see what a good thing he had standing in front of him, but that he just wasn't ready to have those feelings for me. And by taking away all of the blame, I could forgive him and let him become one of my best friends.
And I was sold on the Ready Theory. I realized that even if I was ready for a boyfriend, maybe "he," wasn't ready to be my boyfriend. This theory was later proved when I confessed to the freshman boy down the hall that I was ready to be more than friends. Unfortunately he wasn't...yet. Add a summer, a 19th birthday party, and a few weeks of awkwardness, and he was ready. He's a fucking great boyfriend.
So maybe it's not as easy as speaking two different languages or wanting two different things. Maybe it's as simple as being in the same place at the same time. Maybe all your friends are right, and nothing's wrong with you. Nor is anything wrong with him. You can't predict it; and you can't control it...but you can be ready for it.
"The Ready Theory"
ReplyDeleteI've never written a true blog post in my life, so bear with me. In fact, I tend to be rather skeptical of blogs in general, as they seem to imply that one simple person holds some sort of mystic wisdom over others via The Great Internet. But this post is about one person in my life who did hold some mystic wisdom and who passed it on to me in a dorm room freshman year. We're no longer the close friends we were, but I will say in all sincerity that she did change my life. So I'd like to pass on that wisdom in the hopes that someone might read it and take her advice to heart like I did.
Until I was nineteen I'd never been kissed. I thought, or thought I knew, that something was wrong with me. I guessed that maybe I was too fat, or too loud, or too obnoxious, or too awkward, or that my lack of experience was all too apparent to the boys that crossed my path. Deep down, though, I knew it couldn't be that easy. I had good friends and a reasonably healthy self-image. So I thought, if nothing is wrong with me, what's wrong with them?
Damn boys. All I wanted for my sixteenth birthday was to be kissed. Same with my seventeenth. Eighteenth. By the time my nineteenth birthday was looming before me, I was terrified that I'd somehow missed my chance. I'd watch my friends, once kissing virgins like me, cross over the great divide. Embarrassed and proud, I'd never ask what I desperately wanted to know: What did it feel like? What did you do? How on earth did you ever manage to get a boy to kiss you? I couldn't even begin to imagine what kind of situation would need to occur in order to make any physical contact feasible. This wasn't the movies; it was my life. And not-being-kissed became a huge problem that I was determined to "fix."
Until she told me what I should have known. "You don't want to be kissed," she told me, while I sat curled in a ball on my bed. "To kiss someone is easy. To kiss someone you care about, that's the hard part, and that's what you want." It sounded simple, but it wasn't. She was right. I could have kissed a hundred boys. I could have, but I didn't, because I didn't care about them enough to try. The physical act of kissing wasn't what I wanted to experience; it was the feelings that made the kissing happen.
When I told her how hurt I was about the high school boy and how he wouldn't even look at me after he forced me to draw my own conclusions, she convinced me that he wasn't ready for the things I'd wanted. Maybe it wasn't his "fault" that he couldn't see what a good thing he had standing in front of him, but that he just wasn't ready to have those feelings for me. And by taking away all of the blame, I could forgive him and let him become one of my best friends.
And I was sold on the Ready Theory. I realized that even if I was ready for a boyfriend, maybe "he," wasn't ready to be my boyfriend. This theory was later proved when I confessed to the freshman boy down the hall that I was ready to be more than friends. Unfortunately he wasn't...yet. Add a summer, a 19th birthday party, and a few weeks of awkwardness, and he was ready. He's a fucking great boyfriend.
So maybe it's not as easy as speaking two different languages or wanting two different things. Maybe it's as simple as being in the same place at the same time. Maybe all your friends are right, and nothing's wrong with you. Nor is anything wrong with him. You can't predict it; and you can't control it...but you can be ready for it.