I've Officially Treated a Schizophrenic Bitch Nice For The Last Time

It strikes me that, save for posts of writing samples, I haven't written anything legitimately interesting or worth reading on here in quite a while now. I'll try to think of something to fix this when I get home.

I'm going to tentatively title it, "I've Officially Treated a Schizophrenic Bitch Nice For The Last Time."

In my infinite wisdom I decide I should try to get back on the horse so to speak and get dating again to get the bad taste out of my mouth. Of the next (and I'm not kidding when I say this) 5 girls, 4 of them blow me off completely in one way or another, without even meeting. We talk briefly a few times and that's it, no first date or anything. Yay, online dating. The last girl seems pretty cool, at first. She had been checking out my profile like, a LOT, which should have been a warning sign but I have the self-esteem of an overweight 14 year old girl, so I just see that as "yay attention!", so we messaged back and forth a few times and then agreed to meet up. The day we were supposed to meet, she fell off her bike and broke her arm. So we didn't end up going out for about another week. Which was fine. We go out and we're just sorta walking around, talking. We get some food and end up sitting in my car just talking about everything. She seems really cool as I said, and I ended up giving her a ride home, which was basically an hour and a half out of my way (into and out of SF at night). I thought it was the nice thing to do and obviously a gesture of interest. We decide we are going to see each other again that Sunday, she wants me to see this theater in the Castro which is supposed to be really cool. I can't stress how...excited I am about this. It's like, wow, here's a girl I like who seems to like me, maybe this will work out.

I get on the BART train, and I'm running a little behind from traffic. I send her a text that basically says "Hey, running behind, sorry traffic." She says, "great now we are gonna be late for the movie." I say we should be fine, previews are long. My intent was to follow up in person as any normal human being might ("Hey, sorry about that, you know the trains, kinda slow. Let's go!"), so I didn't do the protracted apology. I text her that I am going into a tunnel so I won't get calls but I will see her soon.

I get off the train at the station and she is nowhere to be found. At this point, I am running about 7 or 8 minutes later than was planned.

Remember that number.

I spend probably 15 minutes doing a combination of just looking (it shouldn't be this hard) and calling (why is her phone off?) before I decide, maybe what she meant was she will meet me AT the theater. Nevermind that I have no idea how to get there! So I hop in a cab, only to find it's like halfway across town. I get there, she's nowhere to be found. This whole time I am intermittently texting her a combination of "this is how close I am" and "what's going on?"

Because I am the way I am, I don't want to assume the worst until there is literally no other option. So my assumption at this point is, she's already inside and she's one of those people who turns her phone off. That MUST be what's happening! I get inside and I spent probably half the movie trying to scan the audience to find her head during scenes of brightness (not a big deal, I had already seen the movie). I hit a point where I just said, fuck it, I'll enjoy the movie and we'll catch up after. Not even, "what the fuck, you left me on the other side of town." Remember, I was excited, and my excitement is really hard to kill, even with direct intent to.

I get a text about 15 minutes before the movie is over saying, "One of my biggest pet peeves is someone who is not only late but does not even apologize for it. Good luck with the opposite sex."

So at this point I run outside and let her have it, right?

Of course I don't. Of course I run outside and immediately call and not only apologize but way overapologize, not falling on the sword but throwing myself at it hard enough to (I hope) knock it out of her hands. Why did I do this? A couple reasons. Firstly, when you do something fucked up to me, you start a timer in my mind. If I go to sleep before resolving this, I will hate you with every fiber of my being in the morning. I completely believe the whole "don't go to bed mad" adage because for me that dries the cement of the unfairness. Would I be justified in this circumstance? Absolutely. But I don't like being pissed off, even when it's completely warranted.

Secondly, as I said, I really liked this girl, AND I really wanted something to work out in my favor. What I should have done is gone home when I saw she wasn't at the train station. But because of my own inability to let myself be outraged by mistreatment, I allowed myself to be strung along on a journey that cost me about 50 bucks (movie, cab, train) and stressed me way the fuck out. It ended up taking more emotional energy to swallow the Kool-aid of "surely she didn't stand me up for being 7 minutes late" and "surely she could not be this unreasonable when we met before and she seemed cool" than it would have to just go, "great, another psycho, I win again!"

This was the straw that broke the camel's back. I decided that it was time to take a break from trying with the opposite sex. Obviously there's something wrong in my own head that I need to work out first. I don't just magically have the worst luck on the face of the earth, if I meet literally 8 douches in a row, I am doing it wrong, right? There's a collection of neurons firing in my head that tells me girls are more interesting than me, and that I should ignore or rationalize all but their worst faults. This is a really stupid way of looking at things, and it's allowed lesser girls to mistreat me since I started this whole thing. Instead of putting my foot down and stepping away from these inadequate bitches, I am wasting my time with them while someone who is smart, at least mostly unfucked in the head, and considerate is out there. More accurately, there are hundreds of thousands of those girls, they are just mixed into the billions.

I've come to realize that I have not dated a single girl who was worth my time as a partner, save for probably one. I've only dated living, breathing life lessons of what to avoid in that kind of relationship. Which means that right now really sucks because I feel like I don't have anything going for me. But my hope is that all of this is good, it is good to have hit this point this early in my life, maybe it will push me to a place I need to go, so maybe in the end I will be thankful for every shitty thing I've endured at the hands of a girl I went out with. Because I'm only 22, I've got no illusions about it. I'm a young fucking man, with a shitload of time in front of me. I was cursed with an older set of desires, so I may as well spend the inbetween years figuring out how to make use of it.