As a Life columnist, I have a little more leeway with my language, my assumptions and my stories than I did as a News writer because all views are only mine. So take my opinions with a grain of salt — but only a grain, seeing as I’ve been at this University for more than three years now and am a social and involved person. In short, I know a lot of people, and a lot of what goes on.
I’m also a journalist — of sorts — which to me, means that I’m extremely nosy. I have quite the trained ear and have equipped it with an adept ability to listen to conversations around me while still focusing in on my own. Even in my periphery, I’m always watching those around me, their interactions and their expressions.
On top of all that, I am an English major. Conditioned to notice — and then analyze — every minute detail, break in speech, one-worded response and blank stare, I’m naturally an overthinker. That’s a consideration by your standards, mind you, because I believe that everything should be thought out to this extent.
I believe everything a person does can be traced back to some aspect of who they are. This mélange of the aforementioned traits leaves me in a constant whirlwind of interpretations, but as Freud would agree, we can consider sex the foundation of all these interactions, at least those between peers. Professors are out — hopefully.
Anyway, the point to my preface up there was nothing more than to establish credibility when I say that there is a double standard when it comes to dating. The way boys sometimes treat women at this University is deplorable and disrespectful, and frankly I can’t wait to enter the adult realm of dating, leaving my classless compadres in the dust for their older, more mature counterparts they can aspire to one day be.
I’ll back up a little.
Leave it up to your family to give you the real advice you don’t want to hear. Friends like to sugarcoat, hoping to alleviate your pain — or at least hoping to avoid your ire upon hearing more truth than you were equipped to hear. Family doesn’t give a damn.
My dad once told me, in a less euphemistic manner, that boys will have sex with anything that moves. Sex, he said, is all boys want.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my whole adolescence trying to defy this disdainfully assuming and inappropriate generalization by finding someone I actually like, and likes me back. It works for periods of time, but every time my love-life is at a low point I burrow back down to it, finding every way to use my father’s words as a shield.
He wants to go get pizza? He wants sex. He hasn’t texted me back? It’s because I didn’t give him sex. He asked my friend for my number? Yes, but he only wants sex. He texted me at Trinity? He wants sex. It’s like the puzzle piece that fits into every divot, bend, squiggle, arch and corner. Try it; it really works!
I’ve had relations with my fair share of people, sprinkled with a few boyfriends here and there, but as a realistic, single-yet-happy, smart girl, I’m convinced this cliche holds more than a little truth. To be honest, I can happily accept it. Call me pessimistic, but I have yet to meet a guy who’s ever argued against this conjecture. If there were, I’d be interested to speak with him.
A few weeks ago, I spoke to my sister bemoaning particular treatment I had been receiving from a guy I’d been eyeing. Her married, blasé-self, told me this with a blank stare, as if it were her indubitable, lifelong philosophy.
“Every guy is an asshole,” she said. “Every guy is an asshole until they meet that one girl that they suddenly don’t want to be an asshole to. And then they’re not an asshole anymore.”
Well, that doesn’t change the fact that all they want is sex. Now, they’ve just found someone they want to have sex with that they can put up with, connect personally with, and, biologically speaking, parent offspring with.
With family as my most-revered source of life’s deepest truths — after all, I am the baby — I think I’ll always be trying to find where love falls between those two pieces of advice. They’re both true, but like any generalization; they’re both sweeping and malleable. There’s no puzzle piece that fits into my rough edges, but someday.
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