No Games Allowed, Man
In my opinion, most of the dating advice floating around out on the World Wide Web fails to factor in how some men out there suffer from emotional wounds caused by traumas far more severe than breakups, being cheated on, and all that petty stuff.
What sort of wounds? Well, let me put it to you this way:
If any Hooters girl working at the Mall of America location had the time to look towards the vicinity of the escalators leading up to the fourth floor one Saturday night in December, 2001, they would have seen a tall, gangling dude wearing a weathered jeans jacket over an smaller coat standing there just … frozen in place, with a dull, sheepish look on his face as he finally beheld a place he knew employed some of the prettiest girls in town after seeing a commercial when it first opened … but did not come up for even so much as a walk past it until he did not even have a pot to spit in, much less call home, and wore those two coats because some bastard had claimed to his family they would be only homeless a month when they got evicted back in May!
That guy was me. The bastard in question: a man I used to call “dad” but whom I now refer to over at a couple other blogs I write as “Clyde Krebbs.”* That night at the mega mall, my family had been granted by Clyde to make a pit stop there and to stretch our legs, and something came over me at one point that said: you know, I’ve never seen a Hooters girl before. So up over to the southeast side of the mall I went.
All I remember is the din pouring out of it from the crowded tables and bar, and how one of the Hooters girls near the door cheerfully said “Ho! Ho! Ho!” to patrons as they arrived.
Then I left, unnoticed by that girl or any of the others there that night, slipping away like a thief in the night after grasping a small shard of sanity, a scarce commodity during the worst time of my life; one that now forms the dividing line between all that came before it, and all that came after, starting with that night over in Edina in January, 2002, when he pushed to get his way one more time … and got pushed back so hard he couldn’t think of anything else to do but flee not only our Chevy Suburban but the city and state.
Alas, with our lives in ruins around us, things did not automatically turn into a bed of roses. While things are looking up by and large ten years later, all I’ve got to show in my private life are a couple crushes that faded out naturally as well as dozens of women who played games with me, gave me the cold shoulder, etc. **
Men are supposed to be confident with women, and by George I am trying to catch up to the ranks of “confident” men, but damn is it tough when you are limping from old emotional wounds that stunted your emotional growth! In fact, these days I remind myself of Burt Lancaster in the rip-roaring black-and-white 1964 action film The Train: hobbling along shot in the leg but still full of determination to succeed at what he’s doing. In Burt’s case, it’s stopping a train load of French art from being stolen by a greedy German army colonel as the German army flees France in August of 1944 as the Allies drop-kick them out; in my case, it’s achieving my goals at last after seeing so many of them destroyed by things beyond my control.
What is more, Clyde was a champion mind game player which in turn made him a master manipulator of the worst sort, which is why I refuse to play mind games with women (or anybody else for that matter) and ask that any and all women I meet whom I find attractive for their inner and outer beauty not play them with me either.
Yes, I know women play them as a “test” of a man’s attraction, or for some other reason related to their self-esteem, but I would not think less of, say, a Hooters girl because of where she works, or if she instantly agrees to hang out over, say, coffee after only knowing me thirty minutes, and if she kissed me first at the end of that or another date? I wouldn’t think any less of her even then. In fact, she would be like an angel to me, because, for one thing, I am 31 years-old and still never been kissed thanks to all that hell I went through as a young man and the resulting social inexperience with the agony prolonged by bad luck and petty games.
I am writing a short story touching on my time spent homeless whose male narrator has a girlfriend who embodies what I seek in a potential lover: beauty inside and out, smarts, and above all, a kind, sympathetic heart. I already have a mom, female best friend, and female Terrier who have those qualities; finding a woman who becomes my lover who has that quality would be the best thing for me romance-wise. In fact, it would be downright healing for me to have such a relationship with that kind of girl.
Date a girl who loves to play mind games with people? Not me, man. Those games are wastes of time that get people nowhere in the end.
*http://feo.us/ & http://anomalies.us/ I am happy to say writing things for these two blogs is helping boost up my emotional health to no end.
**For one particularly nasty instance, see my article “Incident at MIAC 2005”: http://minneapolis-single.com/news/incident-miac-2005 It took a formal apology and writing that article to finally heal up after six years of intense inner pain.