A Big "Fuck You" To Romance

Honestly, most of the time, the thought of romance gives me the shits. As a perfectly modern woman who's all for things like gender equality and splitting the bill, some of the absolutely ridiculous gender stereotypes that arise from dating seem so illogical that at times, I wonder if all these decades of love songs, poetry, Disney films and saccharine Nicholas Sparks novels have made our race borderline retarded. Now, I'm not saying we're like this all of the time. When human beings are capable of being objective, rational and calm, we can make some fairly decent decisions. However, throw in some fevered glances and the strong desire to touch each others' genitals and we devolve back into the sex-crazed primates from whence we came. Love, lust, desire, infatuation, ill-timed erections or whatever you care to call it, makes us incredibly stupid. I wouldn't really mind this, but often it's a stupidity most of us could really live without. Maybe I'm just bitter because my love life runs about as smoothly as a giraffe with four fractured ankles. Maybe love and sex just turn people into stupid, inconsiderate assholes. All I know is that when I play word association games with my therapist, whenever she says "love", I say "the pain of being fucked in the ass by a massive freshly cut diamond."

I may need a quick drink or five before we continue. 

Consider briefly the whole male-female dichotomy. The way I see it, the reason why we are so divided is purely based on sexual tension. Case in point, when I was a young, slightly overweight lass with acne, braces and no sense of style, I could easily be "just one of the bros" (a phrase I hate, by the way- what, you can't just be friends with someone just because they have a vagina you have the slightest possibility of entering some day?). However, then something happened. I became marginally more attractive and suddenly everyone realized that YES, I am a GIRL with BOOBS and a VAGINA. Funnily enough, this directly coincided with my forays into the world of underage alcohol consumption, and so for years now I have been becoming wearily accustomed to this simple equation:

 Male friends and acquaintances + alcohol  = I'm going to be felt up... a lot.

Every dude I know after a few drinks.

Don't get me wrong, it's not strictly a male thing. In fact, it's a rather human thing. Bring alcohol into the picture and suddenly everyone's a possible conquest. Any magical liquid that makes everyone slightly more attractive and silences that little voice in the back of your head that stops you doing stupid things is going to cause a lot of sexual misadventures. However, from a strictly personal level, sometimes it can be a little disheartening that so few of your friends stick to their boundaries when they drink. It's even more disheartening when the same shit happens when you're sober. Again, I know I'm picking on men, and I apologise- I'm sure that every possible gender and sexual orientation (because fuck, there's so many these days) does it. But I'm speaking from personal experience... and from personal experience, I'm starting to kind of hate it.

Okay. Time for a little personal anecdote of mine, which is kind of hard to share, because honestly, I'm still embarrassed over it. It was kind of a game changer for me, in the sense that it took my massive ego and chiseled it back down into something that would let me function in everyday life, but without being a massive tool. Honestly, that probably needed to happen. Let me try and put it into perspective for you readers who probably have no idea what I'm rambling on about.

From the age of about nine until I turned fourteen, I considered myself to be extremely ugly. Not just plain, not just unattractive, but mirror-shattering, eye-melting, brain-exploding ugly. I realize already that this is probably going to be taken as a way for me to blatantly fish for compliments, but honestly, I can assure you it's not. One, I no longer think of that- while I have my ups and downs, I managed to somehow stitch together some sort of borderline healthy self-image that keeps me well-adjusted most days. Two, I probably wouldn't accept them anyway, because compliments on my looks make me sort of uncomfortable. Actually, any sort of comment on my looks generally makes me uncomfortable. This is probably because I used to have people repeatedly come up to me when I was little and tell me how ugly I was. I'm not really sure why this is, it's just one of those many things from childhood I couldn't explain.

Anyway, predictably enough, this resulted in me having extremely low confidence when it came to attracting dudes. Luckily, it was in the sense that I was actually too scared to approach them least I get rejected, rather than surrendering my vagina to the first semi-interested party and getting knocked up.

This could have been me.

And BOY, did I get rejected a lot. Still do, actually, so I'm hoping it's just one of those facts of life and not because I have some weird birth defect no one thought to tell me about (seriously, guys, if the reason you keep disappearing on me after we hook up is because I have some tiny deformed baby face on the back of my head, I'd like to know). While everyone around me was reveling in their two week long relationships and school social hook ups, I was getting used to hearing the same line over and over again: "I think we're better off as friends". Which, of course, is the polite way of saying "it's really awkward that you like me because I find you less attractive than a small pile of  nutty squirrel poo, so please take your misguided romantic interest elsewhere". I'll admit it, the first few times it hurt quite a lot. I've lost count of the many times I had a big, typical teenage girl melt-down where I lay on my bed and cried my eyes out to bad indie folk songs because I was so certain that no one would ever love me back.

But of course, then something explicitly strange happened. I managed to get myself a boyfriend. I know, I was surprised too. However, it happened, it lasted for a good two years or more and without going into majorly upsetting details, ended. And then my reign of romantic terror finally began. You see, suddenly, for whatever reason, I wasn't being rejected any more. I managed to date a bunch of dudes that I regarded as basically unattainable (and then, while dating them, realised they weren't actually that fantastic after all. Whoops). This had the unfortunate side effect of turning me into a egotistical, overly confident monster. Basically, if I saw a dude I liked, I went after him without fully thinking it through. Trust me, it sounds like an okay way to deal with things, but at the end of the day, you are leaving yourself with a whole airport carousel of emotional baggage. 

All this is just background information. The real story still needs to be told. In truth, part of the reason I'm dawdling so much over this contextual bullshit is probably because this is a story I'd rather not share. Few things in life can make me feel so utterly shamed for me to completely avoid talking about them, but I think this comes close. It's not even just that it makes me feel pretty embarrassed. It also makes me feel pretty sad, because I think the one big consequence of this whole shitty debacle is that I lost the chance of making a good friend. While I won't accept complete responsibility for what happened, because it takes two people to occur anyway, I still regret blowing that friendship because of some hormone-driven drunken fumbling. Who knows, maybe if I'd been smart and held off, everything would be okay.

Okay, Mr Sloth Therapist.

I'm going to be as vague as possible with details because, well, in a nutshell, I think it'd be a lot less awkward for the person I'm talking about and myself if no one has any idea what the fuck I'm talking about. In fact, most of what you're about to read is heavily fictionalized, apart from the very real emotions and the general gist of what was going on. Understood? Okay.

So I was standing in a first class lounge in Abu Dubai, my elegant, slender fingers wrapped around a crystal champagne flute as I pondered my next French undeerwear modelling campaign, when Nicholas Holt shot me a sultry glance from across the bar- too unrealistic? Really? There's not the slightest chance I could somehow get into modelling and end up making love to Nicholas Hoult in an underwater hotel suite? Fine. If you insist, I'll try to aim for a touch more realism.

Sorry Nick, my darling, the story of our love affair will have to wait.

There was this guy. I guess he could really be like any other guy, except for some reason, I happened to get this weird anxious, slightly bubbly feeling from being in the same room as him. Not that it happened very often. Except, then it started to get more frequent, particularly after I moved. We'd be at the same things, and usually pretty drunk, and I'd find it harder and harder to ignore that for some reason, I really wanted to impressed this particular person. The carefully cultivated "fuck everyone, I'll do what I want" attitude that had been my sole achievement of the last few crazed months was suddenly abandoned as I found myself carefully watching what I'd say and do in front of this one person. Why this was, I'm not really sure. Maybe after spending so much time being controlled and repressed, I couldn't help but fall for the first guy who acted like a complete gentlemen towards me. Maybe after all the loneliness experienced from first starting university, I couldn't stop myself from reaching out to a person who I saw as someone very similar. Either way, my emotions got the better of me, and it wasn't smart or logical, and it didn't make sense. When I realized I actually had some weird, complicated feelings for the poor dude, it was like getting hit in the face with an exercise ball.

Okay, honestly, that metaphor wasn't a coincidence, I just really wanted to post this gif.

This is the point where I wish I could have just been content with how things were. There was a person in my life who was actually pretty interesting to talk to, who I could occasionally flirt with and that was the way things should have stayed. But of course, my massive ego wouldn't let that happen. Because I was so caught up in feeling desirable for the first time in my life, I had to push it. So I got drunk (he was drunker), we kissed  (to my credit, he started it), shit happened (but not what you think) and now on the rare occasion that we're in the same room, there's a horrible awkward barrier between us. A barrier that can only be defined as the knowledge that two people did something laughably stupid together and only one of them was dumb enough to wonder if it meant anything later. 

To my credit, my ultimate desire isn't for this person to suddenly turn around, confess their undying love to me and drive us off into the sunset. For one, that's corny as fuck. For another, I know better than to pine after uninterested parties (having spent most of my adolescence doing so). What I want, more than anything else, is to be able to interact normally with this person again. No more stilted attempts at conversation. No more avoiding eye contact. No wondering if it's okay to turn up to the same venues... It'd simply be nice to be able to share a laugh or smile again.

The amount of gay that last statement was.

Anyway, basically, the point of that awkward semi-confessional anecdote was to demonstrate why I'm so bitter about dating, romance, sexual tension and all the rest. I'm sick of it because I'm honestly tired of missing out on good friendships because of it. Sure, dating someone, or even trying to date them, seems like a good idea at the time. You find someone you find cute that you get to potentially snuggle up with, and that feels pretty good. But these things always come to an end somehow, and then you're not only without a person to cuddle, but there's one less person in your life you can connect with. Ditto having sex with them, unless you come up with a really good arrangement. I've said it before, and I'll say it again- sex and love makes us all into gibbering, genital-obsessed idiots.

So, at least for awhile, I quit. I give up. If a nice guy wants to come sweep me off my feet at some stage, he's welcome to try, but I'm not actively looking for anything. After years of having to deal with the shitty complications that come with love, sex, liking someone, not being liked in return, I think it's about time I enjoy being on my own. There are far too many good books to read for me to fritter away time and energy worrying about romantic entanglements. And if worst comes to worst... there's always lesbianism.