What Chelseagirl said

Omg, I'm so there. I don't really write here in detail (not will I be) about my personal life, but suffice it to say, this year has been full of a few ups and many, many downs in the dating game, and I have no idea where it stands now, but I am so with Chelseagirl about the hell of dating:

I remember the frustrating game of dating. There are things I love about dating. I love the flirtation, the visceral thrill of will-he (or she)/won’t he (or she), the fresh fresh new freshness, the full-throttle excitation of the whole dating kit-and-caboodle. Then there are the things about dating I hate with a white-hot extra-flamey burning passion.

The uncertainty. The drooling stupid games. The ridiculous purgatory of indecision. The feeling as if I was consistently playing a game of pin-the-tail on the jackass, and often, blindfolded, spun unto dizziness, pinning on the tail only to find out that the jackass was me.

That would be yes, yes, yes, and yes to all of it. But read her whole post because it's about the good and the bad all swirled together like a chocolate and vanilla Tasti D-Lite.

I am getting to know myself a little better, but it's still hard, and I see good relationships and ones that are falling apart all around me, and I honestly a lot of the time just want to give up and hide away somewhere. And yet and yet and yet...I even though about putting up a personal ad recently but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Something seems too artificial and contrived about it to me - and I hesitate to say that because I know many people have dating very successfully through personal ads, and I have a few close friends who keep encouraging it, but I just need that personal connection. Not just for dating, for friendship too. As I told a new friend yesterday, "life is not an RSS feed." It's just not, end of story.

I didn't really mean this in a dating criteria way, but I've crafted and revised this tiny statement on MySpace about who I want to meet several times. Because just when I think I have enough people in my life, I meet new ones who really do open up my world and I live for that:

People who make me laugh, people who make me think, people who teach me things, creative, interesting, fun types who aren't drama queens and don't take themselves too seriously, people who make me want to be a better person. And, of course, people who love cupcakes (though that is optional).

I am learning so much and I realize that I need that, I need other people in my life to learn from, and that's not just a dating thing. I've always had these people I kindof looked up to and idolized, and as I've gotten older I've tried to tone that down and have more of an equitable relationship with people where I don't have to feel like I know nothing for them to teach me things. And lately I'm realizing that I do have certain bits of information or things I can offer to people, and those are often things that are so second nature to me I barely even realize I know them. It's surreal, I'm not gonna lie, to have someone say they took your column to an editorial board meeting; I sometimes don't want to know those things because it makes me more skittish and nervous about sitting back down to write. At the same time, I feel like I am learning from so many sources, many of them unexpected. To me that's the great thing about having an open mind and a big heart - there is room, perhaps infinite room, to grow, and that's what I'm trying to focus on. It's so so so easy for me to focus on the negatives, to look at what I haven't done or feel like I can't do or the problems, instead of just sitting down and tackling one thing at a time.