Mouthy
Posts: 35
Joined: 1/18/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Shayna "Dating" is complicated. It involves human beings and those slippery things called feelings. What might seem like dishonesty to one person could be the result of the other person changing their mind about continuing to see each other. ... The reality is that during a relationship one or both people may change their minds. They may or may not know why their feelings have changed, but they just have. There is nothing wrong with that, but it still hurts the other partner who feels like the rug was pulled out from under them with perhaps no explanation. SO TRUE, Shayna! Personal story time: Within this last year, I once fell into a mood of such horniness I left a very explicit ad on a kinky, local, match-making website. Got a DELUGE of responses which ran the gamut--explicit, vulgar, polite, enthusiastic--and everything in between. Unfortunately, and to my horror, I realized very quickly that although most of the men responding were genuinely interested in precisely what I'd advertised for, my feelings had changed, in part just because of the huge numbers of men coming at me all at the same time, every one seemingly with a rock-hard hardon right now and dying to use it right now, and in part because when I did actually have a scene of the kind I'd advertised for a couple times, it wasn't bad, really, but it wasn't the way I wanted to keep going, either. So, there I was: I'd realized I didn't really want to fuck the entire nation right when it seemed the entire nation was coming at me! So, over the course of the next couple weeks I had the unlovely chore of working very hard at being honest with all these men about my dismay at having brought this situation on myself, and consequently having to say no so much, and for having been so dim in failing to anticipate the reaction to my ad. I did eventually cool it all down, but there was this one guy ... he took my change of heart really hard. He'd really wanted to go where he thought he could go with me. He appreciated that I'd been honest and open with him, but he was hurt -- and he had a right to be, I think. From his perspective, I'd just engaged in the classic "now I'm here, now I'm not" sort of malicious tease that you hear so many men complain of and I HAD disappointed him and he HAD apparently been disappointed by women a lot in his time. So, he left a parting email in which he expressed all that and also said, "I don't need a response, I just want to say WHY DO WOMEN ***DO*** THAT?" Well, I don't know why the other women did what they did that disappointed him. I know what I'd have liked to say, except that he didn't want to hear it: If I had known BEFORE I left that ad, what I knew almost immediately AFTER I left that ad, I WOULDN'T HAVE LEFT THAT AD. I'm a human being on a learning curve. I like to think we're ALL learning from our experiences and not just idiots doomed to repeat the same idiotic, unexamined patterns over and over again, always obtaining the same idiotic results. I guess my point, if I even have one, is: I believe that if we're going to flirt we should do it carefully, with all the honor and fairness that we can because even when we mean WELL, and deal straight up, we can STILL hurt people we never intended to hurt and when we do that, the unintended impact and the regret can last a very long time. Take it from me!
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