Tuesday, November 11, 2008

being straight forward

So I did something today that is somewhat out of my ordinary behavior. I told a girl that enough was enough, and pretty much to leave me alone.

There was this girl in my algebra class last fall that I would talk to all the time in class, we studied outside of class together frequently and talked on the phone several times about completely non-school related things. She was really cool and I probably would've really taken to her, except that I found out pretty early on that she had a bf so I never really let myself get involved. We were just friends the whole semester, and we had great fun in algebra class, my favorite class that semester.

We bumped into each other once the following semester, and texted back and forth a few times here and there to keep in touch. I enjoyed keeping in touch with her about how my other math classes were going, but mostly I was keeping up with the hopes that someday I would ask again about her boyfriend and she would be single, and that then I could be like "Hey, let's go grab dinner sometime, catch up." but no. A year later I get around to asking, hoping it'd been long enough, but no. She's still seeing the guy, and apparently they've been seeing each other for like 4 years so...yeah...that sounds pretty serious.

Well so that was the last time we sent text messages back and forth, like a couple weeks ago, and that's when I asked her about her boyfriend. Well, so she texts me again tonight, and she's just asking like, start questions. "Hey you, how are you doing?". And I'm all thinking, "why is this girl teasing me so?". Well I'm sitting next to my brother, and I'm all thinking out loud what I'd like to say about how she's totally taken and small talk is pointless and it's just confusing me, and he's like "well then tell her that". So I did. I pretty much told her straight up that I thought she was really cool and that if she wasn't seeing someone that I would be interested in taking her out, but aside from that, I wasn't really interested in trying to keep a meaningful friendship together when we aren't even going to the same school anymore, and that further conversation would really just be more or less a frustrating tease to me....which is true. Every time she would text me out of the blue wondering what I was up to and how I was, I would wonder.

But so anyways, I sent her those texts and she was kinda understanding. I could tell she was surprised at it, overall it was probably a slightly negative reaction, but I feel good about it in that I was totally straight forward with my intentions. I don't think there's anything wrong with only wanting to keep in touch with someone for the possibility of dating them. I have lots of friends, I don't need more friends, what I would LIKE is to meet a girl worth dating that isn't already taken and who doesn't play games.

I had lots of friends in high school that I was great friends with. But truth be told, most friends are situational. Situational in that you think they're awesome and you have great fun hanging out with them in the environment you met them at (school, work, church) but you just never really make the leap to an outside setting. Thus, once you split paths (change schools, quit your job, move) trying to keep up just seems forced. Some friends you stick with regardless of the distance, but most are come and go. It's not all bad, when you change settings, you make new situational friends. I have tons of friends at Chili's that I hang out with outside of work, quite frequently. I'd like to think that if I or they quit, that we'll keep hanging out, but I wouldn't be surprised either if we just slowly stopped talking. Life's just like that.

So when you have a girl that you really enjoyed hanging out with in algebra class, that's totally datable but taken, and she's texting you about how you're doing and what you're up to, do you try to maintain a forced friendship or to you be straight forward and let her know that unless there's a possibility of something more, that it's best to just leave things be and enjoy the memories? If you answered #1, you're a tool. lol