Sunday, November 13, 2011

Hopeless romantic? Just hopeless

For almost 2 years now, I've been a real hopeless romantic. Why? Well, I made a deal with myself in high school - that I'll find the girl of my dreams in college and have a future with her. I know it sounds really, really stupid but hopelessly romantic people are stupid when it comes to this kind of thing. 

Maybe it was from watching too many romance movies. Maybe it was the crazy yet constant thought that a girl might somehow genuinely like me, which is total shit after two years in college because that's never gonna happen in this lifetime. But in some sick, twisted, and stupid form of desire, I wanted to look for that certain girl. Maybe I could’ve gotten lucky (No I didn’t).

I’ll admit that I was jealous whenever I saw a couple holding hands or sharing a moment. I wanted that. I wanted to have a girl I could do those kinds of lovely things with. But after a few months, I was asked if I actually wanted someone or just the idea of being in love. That was quite a question. It took me quite some time to figure that out. I wasn’t like Sam Rothstein from the movie Casino – I couldn’t buy the affection of some pretty girl. I wasn’t like John Cusack’s character from Say Anything – I couldn’t play a girl’s favorite song from a blaring boom box outside her window. But I wanted to do that but not with a certain girl. I wanted to do those kinds of things with any girl that I was infatuated with. That confirmed it – in love with love.

Include the envy-inducing stories that my godfather always tells me whenever he visits. His stories were about the times he hung out with my dad and my uncles and all the girls that they’ve dated. This was something that I didn’t have. I didn’t have a close group of male friends because I just didn’t mix with them. They were culturally different, let’s leave it at that. And I didn’t have wingmen or a group of friends to help me out with girls so I had to do my search on my own.

At one point, I tried to go overboard and exaggerate. Maybe that was what the girls wanted. I’ve read books “written” by Barney Stinson from the show How I Met Your Mother, namely “The Bro Code” and “The Playbook” to see if this could actually help me out with my luck. Turns out, what works in fiction only works in fiction. I tried the suits (or jackets, rather), the charm (I still have it, except I’ve just gone mellow and low key), and the confidence (I’ve stopped that because it got redundant, let’s leave it at that) but in the end, they all didn’t work. Of course I was disappointed but looking back, why, how, and in what way did I think anything from “The Playbook” would work? Maybe “The Fall in Love” after trying it out on a classmate from geography class last May but that didn’t work out so well. That was my problem. I tried whatever worked in fiction and it’s fiction for a reason – because those kinds of things would never work in reality unless you were crazy (I am) or desperate (I was).

Sometimes, I wanted the opposite to happen. I wanted to be the one to be pursued by some girl who’s probably just as crazy and desperate as I was, if not even crazier. I wanted to see what it was like to be pursued. I wanted some cute girl to get giddy whenever I passed by her. I wanted some cute girl to obsess over me and try to spend time with me. And perhaps eventually, some cute girl will go to all the trouble – maybe she’ll have her friends help her out – and confess her feelings to me in a grand romantic gesture like cherry blossoms in the air with a song playing in the background. Basically I wanted to be the main love interest in a high school anime. Obviously, none of that ever happened and would never even have a possibility of happening with those details but I mainly wanted to have some cute girl actually like me.

Do I regret everything? The constant longing or whatever it actually was? The sick need to see a certain girl just to make the day complete? Basically, being crazy about a certain girl? Do I regret all of that? Of course not. The thought of what could happen is not worth it and it may hurt but why not take a risk? For all you know, that's your love story and it's waiting for you to turn the pages.

But I've stopped believing in that. I've stopped believing that my love story will ever begin. Yet I'm happy for everyone else who's in their own romantic quest and I wish them all the best but for me, I’m through with anything romantic. And this is the last time you’ll be hearing from me about this kind of thing. Am I a hopeless romantic? No. Just hopeless.