Pride (in the name of love)

I'm not using that phrase the way U2 coined it, but it's the best way I can find to peg something I've been discussing with friends lately. The question is: just what is it that holds us back, at times, from letting a person we might be interested in know about that?

Even for the most liberal, independent women, sometimes traditional ideas come into play, getting us daydreaming of not ever having to be the one to make the first move. Some of us are light-hearted about that feeling: it would just be more fun if the guys would do the asking. For others, underneath, we think we deserve it—we expect to be courted. I tend to be in the former camp, but as a romantic at heart, I do understand the latter sentiment more than those who know me might expect.

On the one hand, I've done my share of initiating—for years, I was undaunted in this regard, mostly because I couldn't help but say everything on my mind at some point. (This blog has its name for a reason.) My first experience with sharing strong feelings with a guy whose intentions I wasn't sure of was fairly comical—if painful in the aftermath. It was freshman year; he'd become my best guy friend. He was a lover of wordplay and spent hours getting in my face with good humor, conjuring up nicknames for me, hugging trees whenever he saw me coming after one fateful email that I sent out to describe quite the weekend in the woods and that he felt the need to dub "Walden II." He was a jokester and a sweetheart mixed into one, and I had trouble reading that and reading my own feelings about it; but I knew that at times our friendship verged on a different kind of playfulness. One night, wandering out of a party together and sitting atop a wall dangling our legs, I got up my nerve and said to him, sucking in a breath for strength, "Sometimes I like you." His cheeks went red and he huffed, "And what? The rest of the time you hate me?" And now I was turning purple, and fumbling with the words—"No, I meant, you know, sometimes I like you." (Such a stupid word, like, when used that way—but what other word is there?) The rest of the story isn't much worth repeating; his response is illustrative of the way things would soon be going, which is to say, quite directly down the tubes.

I took a long break from telling it all after that, but a couple of years later, I fell for my latest best guy friend, and when I let him in on my interest the first time (the first time! you say, wishing I would not be pushed to drive myself toward repeating the past), he gave me a legitimate timing-related negative response followed by a 200% increase in the intensity with which we hung out. Within a year, we had a friendship that everyone around us thought was slowly developing toward one of those movie-esque loves that come along only rarely in the real world. But this one was not to be either. When he finally told me he loved me it was in closing, after we finished discussing that he was elated to be single and feeling no wish for a girlfriend—and I commented that I dreamed of couplehood only because of him. He let me down easy, telling me he cared about me, was attracted to me, wanted everything we already had but wasn't ready for anything more. He closed with "I love you," ever so softly as we hung up the phone, and I curled into the cold flannel of my attic bedroom and wept.

It was a tough year after that. A tough couple of years. My feelings for him only grew; his for me deepened and solidified until I was like a sister to him—a crucial, beloved facet of his world but like a sister. As I struggled to get over him, I went on some of the funniest bad dates known to womankind, and I used to recount them for entertainment, even writing some of them up under the title "Manhunt." True to my nature, I was at once nursing a miserable sorrow inside me and forcing myself outward, onward. I went out with anyone someone suggested I meet; I even considered asking out random nice guys I encountered, like my pharmacist (thankfully, I pondered that one just long enough to not get my nerve up until his return from a few-week vacation—at the end of which he wore a shiny gold band.) Determined to get myself over my friend (which proved tricky since he remained one of my closest for years), I even decided to act on a lustful crush I had developed on an unlikely candidate: the guy who fixed the heating and air system at work. Not my usual hunting ground, for sure, but this guy was HOT, he was charming, and according to every woman in the office, he was into me. (I sat by the thermostat, and this gave him a chance to get to know me.) One day, when he'd spent a remarkable 30 minutes sitting on my desk chatting after making a minor repair, I excused myself from the room, accepted a double dog dare from a group of my female co-workers down the hall, and returned holding a post-it note. It read Give me a call if you want to get a beer sometime and included my phone number. Facing him, wanting him, wanting even more than that to move the hell on, I smiled, held up the yellow sticky note, and wordlessly placed it in his pocket. His front jeans pocket, mind you—a detail that had about every woman peering around the door frame falling on the floor, as it meant I stuck my hand into his front pocket—yes, the one right by his goods—to slip my note in. Needless to say, he called me that night to make a date. Needless to say again, the one date was the only date, as he had even more recently entered rejection recovery than I, and we were a friendly but emotionally distracted pair all night.

The point of these recountings is to make that point I started with, which is that I'm not shy about my intentions; I will never be afraid to let someone know that I care. I value that too much. And I've gotten one thick skin out of my experiences, even with some damage done to it in the last year or two. (My first year in San Francisco, I got spoiled with guys showing interest left and right. That year ended with a one-two punch that knocked me off the dating circuit for some time and softened my skin up a bit—but just a bit.) When you've been rejected from "I'm in love with you," you realize how small a deal it is to get turned down from anything less. You stop worrying about what you do; you just put it out there and see where you get.

But I've noticed lately that that's now how I'm operating. Friends have noticed too. So what's holding me back? Here's the other hand in the balance: the thing is that no matter how strong your will can be, how steady your sense of self, sometimes your pride steps in, and if one thing has taught me to get a grip on my chattiness, that's it. I find pride a much tougher thing to combat than a little rejection or not getting what I want.

I'm thirty years old. By now, I've experienced a lot. I am passionately engaged with my life and the people in it. I know what I want, and it's got to be as good as what I've already got; as far as dating, I find that I only want someone who sees that he has some kind of interest in me and goes after it. Pride has stepped into my mindset, and it tells me to leave alone anyone who doesn't do that. I know that sounds like a double-standard—to expect him to do all the risk-taking even when I know full well I could do it myself. I'm not saying I'll do nothing. I'll drop hints and flirtations; in some cases, I may even break down and ask some of these hims out. When it comes down to it, I will always let people know just how great I think they are. But I can’t help but want, at least for a while, to leave room for someone else to beat me to it. Because that thing called pride tells me that I, too, deserve the joy of experiencing that.