I don't know if I've truly overcome my desperate dating ways or if I've just learned to manage them. I've always been a desperate dater starting at the ripe age of 11. Ahhhh. 6th grade. Here is where desperate dating all began for me:
Chapter 1
In the 6th grade I had a crush on a boy with striking blue eyes and a photographic memory. And he acted like he hated me. In my 6th grade class, there was only one other girl who I perceived to be my competition in the popularity contest for queen-of-the-playground. I thought I was hot stuff. I had my leggings and my NKOTB t-shirt and I was climbing my way to the top.
Well, Blue Eyes saw me one day out in front of the school after all the other kids had gone home. We both lived in the neighborhood and he was riding his bike around and I was leaving school after some extra-curricular-popularity-enhancing activity. When he saw me, instead of calling me a ho-bag or trying to throw something of mine on the roof, he merely started talking to me.
I was sooooo flattered. And after that we began having secret love chats on the phone and in person but at school he still acted like a turd towards me. And I accepted this. I accepted the fact that I acted like a total idiot chasing him around at school (which I am sure he secretly liked) while he repeatedly refused to acknowledge me.
This finally ended in the summer when another boy who was rather troubled and turned out to be a big liar showed some more interest in me and I dumped Blue over the phone for the troubled lad (although troubled lad had never officially asked me to be his girlfriend).
Now, this behavior MIGHT be appropriate (on some adolescent planet) for a 6th grader but unfortunately it seems that I never outgrew it. I continued well into my 20s to be willing to be involved with guys who really didn't care that much about me or who weren't mature enough to be in a relationship. I don't know why I did this. Or maybe I do but there isn't enough space here for me to explain it.
All I know is that these, my friends, are the signs of desperate dating!
Chapter Two (unfortunately, the story is not over)
Thanks to the evil that is named "myspace", I was reunited with Blue a couple years ago. We were both still single and stunned that many of our classmates had walking, talking, school aged children. He, as a grownup, was smart and funny and we flirted intensely over myspace; then email; then text; then phone. Then he came to visit. It was a disaster. He thought he was coming to get laid and I thought he was coming so we could fall in love and start our life together.
That was a bit of a miscommunication.
The Moral Is:
Neither chapter one or chapter two of this story would exist if it weren't for my lack of self esteem, my desire to be included, and my feelings of desperation regarding relationships.
I've always felt that I was "running out of time" even when I was 13 years old. Being an old maid is something I secretly believed to be my fate from pre-puberty. Why? Heck! I still don't know the answer to that. I just always thought that I was the kind of girl/woman that men were repulsed by and found unacceptable. Even in my leggings and NKOTB shirt, I was just a fraud and once they got to know the real me, they'd run away screaming. The fact that Blue Eyes only ran away screaming on the playground but not in private was, to my 6th grade thinking, an excellent sign for our future as a couple.
One point that I'd like to make is this: Desperate dating does not necessarily have anything to do with age. It has to do entirely with a sense of panic and dread and feeling essentially unacceptable to the opposite sex. That sense of panic can be present long before puberty.
The only way I know to overcome desperate dating is to take a step back and a) start coaching yourself (or actually get someone to coach you) to value yourself deeply and b) to take a big step back and commit to figuring yourself out before you run off chasing any more potential partners.
That is all for now!
