Friday, December 2, 2011

The Hard Part of Playing Hard To Get


Visiting the primates at the zoo for an anthropology course was a very humbling experience for many of the students, who stood gazing at their evolutionary counterparts.  I personally became fixated on a monkey playing with his toes.  Suddenly, our eyes met and he cocked his head to the side and moved closer to where I was standing.  Then he stood up, much like I was, and I was suddenly overwhelmed with this esoteric connection; an epiphany that perhaps we really were just one and the same, only a few strands of DNA apart, both driven by our primal evolutionary urges.
And then he peed at me. 

Everyone cracked up as the urine trickled down the window after hitting the glass directly in front of my face.

"I think he likes you!" joked my professor. 
But you know what?  I think he did like me. 

Some people (like my monkey) never really grow out of the "teasing the people you like" phase that we all went through in fourth grade.  I liked a boy named Tommy, so what did I do?  I chased him around the playground and when I caught him, I beat the crap out of him and left.  That's like third base to a fourth grader. 

Now I’m in college, it’s 3 a.m., and the trend continues. He's yelling, "YOU ARE SUCH A [profanity] SKANK!!!"  She's screaming, "WHAT DID I DOOO?!?!"

And that's love.  We get mad because we care. 

The scary thing about liking someone a lot is that they're way more likely to piss you off.  They matter too much.  So many of your emotions are in their hands, so much of your self esteem, and if they don't reciprocate your liking enough, you'll come up with reasons to get mad at them and hate them.  But only because you like them so much.  Funny how that works.  You like them SO much that you focus on all the terrible horrible things about them.

In life we learn through conditioning by rejection that it's not safe to love everyone, that we should be careful and selective with our love.  People grow skeptical of love that comes too easily. 

And a lot of the time it's just because of our own insecurities.  We can't see what's so great about ourselves, so we assume others can’t either. Then when someone does we just assume they're probably just imperceptive.  “It's not that they want to be with me because they like me, it's because they're too dumb to see how much I actually suck.  Well, if they can't see how much I really suck I must suck way less than they do.” And then we decide we are better than them and move on.

That's why people often fall into the trap of always catching the fish they don't actually want, and falling short on the ones they do.  People noticed this phenomenon and they came up with a solution:  If I keep attracting people when I don't actually like them, maybe I should just act like I don't like the people I actually like so that they'll fall for me!

And that's how we got this whole business of playing hard to get.  This puts us in an unfortunate circumstance, because now the people who don't like you are acting like they don't like you AND the people who do like you are acting like they don't like you. You just can't know who to text anymore. 

Apathy is the new rejection.  Rejection is the new acceptance.  Acceptance means you can probably do better.