danny_g

No, seriously, we're talking rant here. There may be angst involved.

Look, you may think you want to--fine. Just don't say you weren't warned, yeah?

There is a cycle, amongst close friends of mine. An unfortunate pattern of disappointment and failure. This is how it goes.

Step one: one or several of my friends decides "Dan's a good guy. It's sad that he's lonely all the time. We should do something about that."

This is, thus far, a noble aspiration.

Step two: This is where our trouble begins. The friend(s) will make just the worst decision as to who to try and hook me up with. I appreciate the effort, in theory, but the choices they make are just god-awful. Typically the chosen woman will be A) already in a committed, long-term relationship, and B) not that attracted to me in the first place.

B is an easy mistake to make: typically the friend(s) in question will decide I need to pair up with this woman because they've observed some sort of connection between us that they mistake for attraction. Perhaps the woman has even made statements about my dateability. But here's the catch, folks: all the people who have ever claimed that lots of women would want me, every last person who has said I'm dateable has one trait in common: they would never do it themselves. But even if I was ever wrong about this lack of real attraction, and I'm not ruling it out, there's still A.

And ignoring A is just inexcusable.

I honestly don't know where people get the idea that I have either the willingness or the ability to steal a woman away from the man she lives with. It ain't so. So that's step 2.

Step 3: The lengths I must go to in order to convince the friend(s) of their folly are such that in addition to dropping their proposed fix-up, they lose interest in hooking me up in general. No further attempts are made. This is sad for me, for I did appreciate the thought behind the effort. It's just that me and that particular girl were never, ever, going to be the perfect couple you seemed to think we would, and it's unfortunate that the lesson you've taken from this is "It's just not worth it."

The latest effort, spearheaded by AC and Mr. B, has just about run its course. Unfortunately AC is refusing to admit his mistake: he's probably going to try and blame the failure of his little scheme on my unwillingness to act or some shit, and I feel that unwillingness to act in a doomed venture is hardly a vice. So the subject matter is not as dropped as it could be: he still brings it up now and again, only now I respond by encouraging him to man up and admit he was wrong.

I have yet to find a solution to the Cycle. The obvious one, yes, is to resolve this love issue myself. And I've tried: sadly my only encounter with the nigh-extinct Single Women ended in bitter failure. My day to day life is such that for a time I ceased to believe that single women even existed.

And let's not forget the summer of '05.

It's not that I want to be single. It's that I haven't been presented with a wide range of options.