I would really like to have a boyfriend.
To me, boyfriends are mythical creatures. Perhaps too fantastical to exist and I have spent the majority of my life on a quest to find one.
A pursuit I will follow all the way to my death bed if need be. Because I see no point in ever giving up.
I’m therefore very willing to tinker with myself. If I find something that might increase my odds I will try it.
No matter how horrifying it is.
The last really horrifying thing was quitting smoking.
The newest even more horrifying thing is trying to get better at flirting.
It’s awful.
Quitting smoking was easier than learning how to flirt.
This post is a continuation of the ambivalence post.
Ambivalence is a messy post where I had some vague idea of what I was attempting to say but basically had to give up on trying to say it.
Which is simply a writing process. Because it’s also a thinking process.
Most of the time we (I say we because I feel fairly confident this is a universally human thing) don’t know what a strong emotion is.
We react to the feeling but we don’t know what it is.
It took me a very long time to realize that the first drafting of writing is just the recording of a reaction to an emotion.
And emotions are not always what they seem. They can be incredibly layered. An emotion can be to compensate for another emotion that cannot be tolerated.
So emotions are both complex and very vague.
In the next blog series I do I’m going to post my early fiction writing and then try to improve it as an exercise.
My firsts writings are a very good example of totally unconscious impulses and feelings.
Because I was really just writing. I had no confidence or insecurity. No perspective. I was just in the act of writing whatever I felt like in a moment.
That’s what most of it is nonsense (if you read it you’ll see)
The attempt to edit this ‘free writing’ is the attempt to make a bunch of unconscious reactions conscious and therefore be able to see their inner workings.
And in the later stages of editing maybe even have some ability to design them into something useful and coherent.
To me flirting was all about forcing myself to show interest in a man.
Because as a kid and teenager I was cripplingly shy and I believed I needed to ‘get over’ my shyness.
Shyness creates two problems.
Problem number is that I can’t talk to people I like.
Problem number two is that I can’t say no to people I don’t like.
So the problem with this becomes that to force myself to show interest in a man I have to know for certain that I really like him. Because if I don’t know for certain I could end up not being able to say no to someone I do not like.
Which means every man I don’t like I must be insanely clear that I am not interested by being like, a bitch. (At a certain point I developed into a super bitch to overcompensate.)
The other issue I ran into was that since the men I was interested in enough to want to sleep with were rare my opportunities to practice flirting were also rare.
So rare in fact that I couldn’t be ambiguous when I did find them.
I had to be as obvious as possible as to not miss my chance.
Obviously this creates a lot of pressure and made me seem awkward and weird.
If you read my ambiguous post and my ambivalence post you’ll see that it was Dr. Alok Kanojia (love that dude) that introduced me to the idea that flirting is supposed to be ambiguous.
That it is a way to playfully indicate possible interest just to test out if the other person might also be interested.
Obviously this very pleasantly shattered my entire world view on flirting.
When that unconscious reaction I had to flirting got brought up from the depths it brought up a lot of other things with it.
It brought up ambivalence as well. The idea that I don’t actually need to be totally into a man right off the bat. I only thought that way because I had such terrible boundaries when I was young.
I can actually be conflicted on another human being. I can even be eternally conflicted.
I know some people at this very moment that I love with all my heart and soul but I’m not sure I ever want to see them again.
I’m allowed to be ambivalent on a human being. To change my mind about them multiple times.
People trying to date don’t like the idea of that. But it’s the reality. There aren’t any guarantees. We are ambivalent for a reason. Because trust and relationships take time to develop.
And from ambivalence came avoidance.
The emotion I’m still picking apart but is I think at the heart of all of it.
Avoidance is a tricky reaction. Because it sort of at the onset seems like it’s something done to avoid pain.
But I think it’s just a way to avoid doing the things that we don’t feel are actually worth our time.
There’s a lots things I avoid still in dating, I try to force myself through the avoidance of course. But it’s like swimming in quicksand.
I’m doing things that I don’t actually believe in my body, in the depths where the real emotions are, will get me anything or anywhere.
I need to bring that shit up and actually try to edit through it.
Jess lanai 