I've, on a few occasions, alluded to a point in my life where I just got fed up with not being able to understand what girls were about (mind you this was midway through high school, so I should have figured that rationale was kind of a lost cause on either sex).
You know it's funny, but I've never actually told this story to anyone before. Not because I'm ashamed of it (clearly, seeing as I'm telling it to a bunch of random people), I just never really felt a need. So yeah, you should feel privileged.
I was sixteen. I wasn't shy so to speak, but I was really ignorant. I was the type that broke things down into facts, and thus formed syllogisms based on said facts.
Fact: My friends, most especially my best friend, were getting girls.
Fact: I was (and still am) a big guy, and other big guys I knew were also getting girls.
Fact: I was much more intelligent than most of my friends (I can mark this down as fact, because most of them at some point attempted to pay me to do their homework).
Fact: I was not getting ANY girls, nor had I ever kissed, or even held hands with a female that wasn't a family member.
Based on all these facts, I felt it was reasonable to assume that there was some X-factor that I wasn't aware of, that allowed guys to attract girls.
I relayed all of this to my best friend, who was, and pretty much still is, kind of my living antithesis. He was very much a jock, and I was very much an academic (mind you I was very social. I have always been good with people, which is why I could make friends with a Zach Morris clone). He was fit, and cut, with abs of which I was incredibly envious. I was not fit...at all. He was what you'd expect out of an Ambercrombie and Fitch model, I couldn't make the cut for a JCPenney Big and Tall section. And he was, again, getting girls by the truckload. I told him of my woes and he offered to help me out.
He started calling up girls when we'd hang out, and he told me to observe what he did as best I could, and try to replicate. So I watched him. Suffice to say, he's never been much a witty chap, but it seemed to be his lack of subtlety that was working for him. He'd drop the most thinly veiled sexual innuendos, and these girls would eat it up. I just didn't get it. But again, who was I to argue with results?
I went to school the very next day, and found a girl that I knew of, but we'd never really talked, and I dropped this bomb: "I know we've never really talked before, but how about you come over to my place tonight, and we can shake things up?" I can remember very few conversations in my life word for word. I can remember very few sentences that I've used with such clarity, but this one. I don't know that it will ever leave me. It's the very definition of a turning point.
You know how when you get those awkward silences, those seconds feel like hours? Well I felt like I was standing there for a few days, when the silence was interrupted by roaring laughter. I thought she was having a seizure. She had to sit down to keep balance. This was in our school foyer, full of people. Almost nobody heard me talk to her, but by the time she was done laughing, I'm pretty sure there wasn't a person in my school who couldn't guess.
My best friend, who was well incredibly popular, lived up to his role, and did a fair amount of damage control for my reputation. It was at that point though, that I had one of those "Batman-esque" epiphanies. I vowed that THAT was never going to happen again. I was going to learn the in's and out's of the male and female romantic psyches and I wasn't going to get caught off guard again.
I spent the better part of a decade figuring the whole "love" thing out. It turned me into an asshole for a while, but I'm finally to the point where I've found a nice balance. And it all happened thanks to one sentence, and a lot of humiliation.
lolz
