I had been hanging around with a group of guys who were in their late 20s, living at home and working the jobs they had started in high school. And they all had the maturity level of it, too. In my head, the logic looked something like this: If a 27yrold acts like a 19yrold, maybe there’s no difference and dating someone 6 years younger won’t be an issue.
It should come as no surprise to pretty much anyone I’ve ever met or who has ever read PoBaL that my head-logic kinda sucks.
20yrold, like most of his fellow townspeople, also assumed that any single childless girl over 20 is looking for a big serious relationship and got scared and kept doing that stupid boy not calling thing. And, finally, I lost the last little bit of patience with that.
We’re still friends, though. A couple months ago, we both got new phones with much easier texting capabilities, and we became texting buddies through that. And for the last couple months in the last town, we lived only 3 blocks apart. We went out for Indian food one night, and as I dropped him off, I could hear his neighbors (a couple of those aforementioned 20somethings who act like 19yrolds) harass him about his “date” and then refer to me as “Myspace Jessy”.
The thing that really got me about 20yrold was that, while he was really the only boy I met in that town who seemed to have true real friendships with girls, the girls he’s friends with seemed kind of…um, toxic.
And I’m not just saying that because I heard high school stories. I rely pretty heavily on my instincts, and I’ve learned at this point to differentiate between “This girl doesn’t seem like someone I can trust completely, who would have my back almost without question” and “Damn those are some ugly shoes.” A lot of these girls, like a lot of girls I met in that town, just aren’t the kind of girl posse I’m looking for. I need to know, for example, that a girl isn’t going to flake out on hanging out with her female friends because a boy suddenly has the night off. I need to know my friends aren’t talking shit behind my back. Aside from Melissa, I really don’t think that kind of girl is in that last town.*
But anyway, early on in the hanging out with 20yrold, we went to his friend’s house to hang out with friend and friend’s girlfriend. I immediately got a weird vibe from friend’s girlfriend. No reason, really; just instinct putting my guard up. She was playing around on a computer, showing us all pictures. Zombie Comics was in a couple of the pictures, and she asked me if I knew him. I played it down and didn’t think anything else of it that night.
But then later it occurred to me that if they were really as good friends as this girl had intimated, she already would have known that I knew him, and how. Whether or not this is a petty, silly thing to do to another girl is kind of a moot point to me.
What bothered me about this encounter, and still kind of gets my goat, is that she did this to 20yrold, supposedly a great friend of hers. It kind of blows my mind that any girl would meet the potential new girl of a shy boy friend and decide to, however subtlely, bring up some other boy who had hooked up with that girl.
So, lessons learned:
- 26/20 is too different.
- Sometimes you need to have a State of the Relationship talk to discuss how all you want is a makeout buddy.
- I really need to buy some Echo cds to replace those tapes.
- I have absolutely no patience for stupid boy not calling.
- As hard as it can be to find a suitable boy, it’s a million times harder to find girl posse members.
*Not, of course, that we don’t talk shit. What I always go back to when I think of friends talking behind each other’s backs was the casual way Tom the xRoommate would describe his friends in unflattering lights, to people who may have only known them through Tom.
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