Sometimes I wonder if people look at me, and my ambivalent nature towards relationships and pursuing a girlfriend, and see a hopeless person, condemned towards permanent solitude until I get off my e-feet and start doing everything online, like the vast majority of society has apparently deemed socially acceptable. Wanting to say the words “pathetic,” and/or “paranoid,” but won’t dare, at least to me, out of respect, or apprehension that I might go apeshit in retribution. Not that any of it really matters, otherwise I may have already jumped off the bridge by at least now, but it does cross my mind from time to time, most especially when I’m alone at home and bored.
Regardless of my old-fashioned, dated mentality, I still hold on to the belief that someday, I’ll come across someone the “old-fashioned way,” as in, in person, and a spark will ignite from there. I may be dated, but Googling a stranger is still fair game, but that’s typically the extent of the cyber-snooping I’d pursue if any at all, because one, I don’t Facebook/Twitter, and two, I’m too broke to go the route of investing in online background checks.
But really, as was a perfect example in my D*C missed connection girl, it was an innocuous encounter sparked by circumstance, spontaneity, and completely out of the blue, slightly nudging me out of my comfort zone, that may have possibly taken a few steps forward had I not been such a slow-witted dork at the time. Regardless of the no-result outcome, the simple interaction was still a fond moment of that weekend to me, because it’s a glimpse of proof that it could still happen.
There’s nothing at all wrong with internet match-making sites. I know lots of people who have taken the dive and successfully had dates, met interesting people, and even gotten their current spouses, through such means. Society has pretty much turned it into the norm nowadays, but I just don’t want to take that path. I don’t want to say I met my wife or girlfriend through a URL. I don’t want to go through the courting process over emails and text.
I enjoy the intimate nature of actual in-person conversation, the subtle game of reading body language and trying to gauge every fidget, movement, and what the eyes and mouth are saying without words. I’d like to feel and sense a relationship budding or inevitably not going anywhere, without there being an e-paper trail. I like those speechless moments between people, where both parties have momentarily run out of things to say, and there’s curious, lingering eye contact of deliberation, prompting someone to inevitably say “what?” Casual dates, and the feeling-out process. Finding out what we like and dislike about a person’s personality or interests, based on experiencing it, not discovering it in an online bio and deciding to avoid or pursue it before the fact.
The biggest excuse to justify the online means is time, and that there’s not enough of it. And I find that to be bullshit, and that it’s not so much a lack of time as much as it is a lack of effort, and that nobody wants to exert the effort necessary to be disconnected human beings. People have plenty of time to date and engage in the human act of communication, but the difference today is that people have a greater fear that other people are weirdoes not worth their time in the first place, and choose to either avoid communication outright, or outsource their effort to the internet.
As most of us who have ever called a company for any sort of support have experienced, outsourcing doesn’t always result in the greatest of results, so does it really make that much of a difference than braving it alone?
I’ll stick to my guns and march to my particular choice of drum beat as long as I can, but I’d be lying if I weren’t at least a little bit concerned about my general future. Long ago, I told myself that I’d want to get married young at 24, but that didn’t happen. My parents have this belief that I’ll pursue marriage when I turn 30, which will be next year, and although I doubt that will happen too, I’m sure it would relieve all parties involved if I were at least making some headway in that year.
But most of all, I’m bored. It’s not that I’m terribly ronery, miserable and sex-starved or anything, but mostly just bored. Some things I like to do, like going to Braves games, have become less enjoyable, because I’m getting bored sometimes, sitting by myself. Video games are more fun when played with others. I have tremendous friends who are awesome at entertaining me while we’re together, but the reality is that we’re all not getting any younger, and so many of them are in relationships or are already married. Some with kids, for that matter. The feeling of being the odd-numbered wheel when in certain groups sometimes grates at me. Okay, it grates at me a little more than that.
The point remains, I’m not getting any younger, and my hair’s not staying any blacker. In one hand, I don’t want to be yet another person who has to turn to the internet to find a relationship, but in the other, I don’t want to end up like some of my cousins, whom, as it appears to me, felt some sense of urgency in their upper-quartile 30’s, and married like-scurred females, and have popped out a bunch of kids immediately.
But at this point, I’d really just like to have some alleviation from some of this life’s boredom, and nothing really else, I think. Preferably under my own terms.
