THAT'S NOT SO ELEMENTARY WATSON
What caused project WAGTOB (Woo A Girl TO
Bed) to fail? To me the culprit seems to be miscommunication.
I read too much into signs that suggested
that SB wanted to sleep with me (walks, meals, dates, sexual innuendos) and
ignored completely, the signs that suggested she wanted to keep her distance
(ignoring my calls and texts sometimes, keeping mum on suggestions about
spending time in my room). Psychologists call this 'self serving bias', I call
it 'fool's bubble.'
What she treated as friendship - walks,
meals, talks; I treated as dating. With my friends, I rarely eat out, have
telephone conversations lasting more than a minute, and walk only when we have
common destination.
My wrong assumptions led to wrong actions
that stretched too far. SB could have corrected my course at any time by
telling me to fuck off. I was practically drooling with lust when I was around
her, something that would have made any normal person sheepish. Rather than
telling this upfront, she seemed to manage me like a flame, fanning when I
became reticent, cooling when I got too desperate and finally snuffing me out
when I got confrontational. Politeness couldn't have been the reason as she
didn't stand to gain anything from me. Nor did she try to use me. So why at all
was she spending time with me?
A. She was secretly enjoying the fool I
had been making myself around her. Having me under her thumb, the power to
squish me by knitting her brows, gave her a high that no drug could. I was her
ego inflating dildo.
B. She took pity on my inexperience with
girls and thought that she could teach me a lesson or two when it came to
wooing girl.
C. She actually treated me as a friend, a
needy, damaged sort of friend, who must be tended to regularly, lest he commits
suicide and names her as the person responsible.
D. Finding myself as her mirror image
(remember similar to me bias I spoke of), I must have appealed to her
narcissistic senses. As we got to know each other better, cracks began to
appear in this mirror. I came across as a shallow gym monkey desperate to fuck,
and she an alcoholic Circe that leads men on, only to shatter their hopes of
getting some.
The answer is something that I'll never
know. Nor will SB ever answer it honestly. Most probably at different times,
these factors were acting with varying intensity. What I do know is that the
project was doomed right from the time SB told me about her previous failure in
love.
At this instant, a scene from Cowboy
Bebop's maiden episode comes to my mind
Old man bull: You take women too lightly,
my friend.
Spike: On the contrary, old pal...
Unlike Spike, I did take a woman too
lightly, and paid back in sleepless nights and significant emotional bruising.
To reminisce it all and putting it into words was like scrubbing old wounds
with a grater, just to check if they are healing. Now that I have the luxury to
be objective about the entire episode, I can see a few islands of sanity
emerging in my chaotic ocean (thanks to 'K' for Ocean theory).
To Risk or to regret: To me, the regret that follows from not
having done something is more thorny than the regret of failing at something.
All the dialogues I uttered to SB were out of character for me. More than half
my mind was screaming at me to shut the fuck up. But had I stayed mum, I
wouldn't have come as far as I did. And despite my failure, I am proud of the
distance I covered.
The view depends on where you sit: Earlier when my friends were
discussing their love troubles, I used to act as some sort of high priest,
dispensing same advice dispassionately - that the woman in their life is
nothing but an agent of dopamine high.
Been in the eye of the storm, I can vouch that hormones are the last thing on a
lover's (fucker's) mind.
Rise: Though I overlooked the fact that this experience was
a dopamine high, I enjoyed it anyway. Acting out of character (dressing up to
make myself presentable, cheesy dialogues and texts) was an uncharted territory
for me. All the goof-ups (and the earful I got from SB) were the testament that
I swayed too much from destination. This hardly means that I should give up on
the journey. It simply means that I should contemplate a serious course
correction.
Project WAGTOB, we'll settle our score
soon...
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