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But in
spite of all this, she wasn’t interested in me, and at
the time she was all that mattered to me. She frankly
informed my close friend: “Tom’s a really nice guy…but he’s
not my type!”
Upon
hearing this unsolicited news, I was crushed! How could this
be? What had I ever done to deserve such a fate? The true
soul mate I had waited my whole 16 years of existence to come
into my life had just summarily up and rejected me!
I had
never even asked her out, but it was still a most bitter
blow. Somehow I staggered through it, though. Still, my ego
was crushed and my self-confidence took awhile to recover.
The worst
part of it, though, was not knowing at the time what it was
about me that was so unacceptable. What’s wrong with being “a
nice guy”, for Pete’s Sake?
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The
Jerks
Meanwhile,
I began to notice something. Around school most of the guys
who seemed to be doing quite well, thank you, with all the
girls they wanted were…well, to put it bluntly…jerks!
The jerks
were not nice guys, for the most part. They were
selfish. They were self-centered. They were quite often rude
and sarcastic and mean, and yet…they seemed to have the girls
absolutely mesmerized.
I couldn’t
understand it. Here I was, someone who believed in treating
people nice, who believed in the Golden Rule (“Do unto others
as you would have them do unto you”), who tried to always be
considerate of others, and I was…unappealing to the girl of my
dreams!
TOP
For the
next few years, as I finished up High School and started
College, I noticed that the same patterns persisted. It was a
riddle to me, and as I encountered a series of rejections from
girls I developed crushes on I began to wonder if it might not
be hopeless.
The
Learning Curve
Eventually
I came to learn, though, that all was not lost after all.
There really is a God, and there really is justice in this
universe. But you’ve got to understand the rules and you’ve
got to play by them.
The
turning point in my understanding came finally, I think, with
Jeri. I had come to like her a lot, but though she never
turned me down for a date, I felt the same old familiar
frustration as I did everything I could to get her to fall in
love with me and nothing seemed to be working.
To be
honest, back in those early days a short time seemed like
forever. We’d probably only been out on 4 or 5 dates total
over a period of a couple months, but I thought if there was
any hope at all she should have fallen for me by now!
And she wasn’t falling! In fact, I knew there was another guy
she was interested in.
TOP
So I did
the typical idiotic human thing most people do in a
relationship when things aren’t going the way they want them
to: I committed romantic suicide and dumped her before she
had a chance to dump me. I took her out one night (knowing
full well my plan for the evening), had the most wonderful
time I could muster. Then took her home and wished her well in
her future with all the obvious implications that entails!
Then I
went home and licked my wounds.
What
happened next, though, was a pivotal experience in my learning
how relationships really develop. It changed my thinking
completely.
A close
friend of mine who knew I’d been dating Jeri ran into her one
night when he was out on the town and started talking with
her. Curious to know for himself what had really gone on
between the two of us, he prodded her a little bit.
TOP
Later, he
confessed to me that she suddenly got this far away look in
her eye and said, “Tom is truly a really nice guy!”
Teasingly, he said to her, “Oh, yeah…well if he’s such a nice
guy how come things didn’t work out between you two?”
I was
shocked when he told me her response. She looked him right in
the eye and with great solemnity said, “Well, maybe he just
doesn’t try hard enough!”
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