I have bad luck with women. I know this is a complaint that a lot of guys have, but for me it's true. My brother will tell me I just don't try hard enough, but that's not it. I don't expect attention to fall on me out of the sky. I don't expect that girls that I'm interested in will magically come up and start talking to me just because I'm interested in them. I don't mind that I don't get a lot of action in any way from girls. What I do mind is that, seemingly every time I ask a girl to do something, she cancels. And I really don't mind a girl cancelling on me once. I don't mind several girls cancelling plans with me over the course of a year, or even a few months. But it's a pattern. And it's not like I'm expecting something big; I haven't asked them to go on a cruise with me, or anything like that. No, it's things like lunch, or showing up to a party I'm throwing, or even getting together at a bar. And you know, if they would even have enough respect for me to call me and cancel, that'd be better. But no... Not every time, certainly, but 90% of the time, if a girl is going to cancel plans with me, it happens when I'M CALLING HER, probably WHEN WE'RE SUPPOSE TO BE GETTING TOGETHER, and she gives me some bullshit excuse. I know, you probably think I'm getting needlessly upset over a couple isolated incidents. But that's not the case. Let's see... Just starting this semester, I can think of eleven separate incidents, including three where the girl never even answered her damn phone when I called her WHEN WE WERE ALREADY SUPPOSED TO HAVE GOTTEN TOGETHER, and never returned my call.
And of course, there's tonight's incident, that sparked this whole tirade: the friend who was supposed to come up for a party TONIGHT, and after I CALLED HER during the party, she told me she couldn't come. She tried to make conversation, and then gave me the entire explanation for why she couldn't come, saying "I know you understand." I don't understand. Take responsibility for your own actions, and show people a little bit of consideration. She knew she wasn't going to be coming hours before I called her. Why couldn't she have called me earlier? Say, before I was expecting her to be there?
Notice a trend? Am I just so fucking inconsequential that people don't think they need to have the common fucking decency to take the initiative and call me to let me know they're going to cancel on me? Why do I have to call THEM for them to cancel? It pisses me off, embarrasses me, and makes me feel about an inch tall.
Maybe people are just assholes, and I shouldn't be surprised. Or maybe I just take these things too seriously. But you know what? I am surprised, and I do take it seriously. When I alter my plans for the day to include someone, who just decides not to show up, it fucking pisses me off. But what am I going to do? Am I just going to blow up at the next person who does it to me, even though if she were the only person to do it, I wouldn't really be that upset? I can't do that, because it's not her fault, not entirely. And so I'm left venting my frustration in this passive-aggressive medium where there's always the chance that the people in question will run across this and be twice as pissed because at the time, I DID tell them it was alright, and that I understood... Geez, this sucks.
Maybe I should just blame the entire female gender and become a misogynist. Or maybe I should just stop being a nice guy about it. No more "hey, you gotta do what you gotta do," and "that's okay, really," and "I understand." Start changing my repertoire to include a little bit more of what I actually feel, instead of what I think will keep them from feeling bad. Fuck that. I do feel bad, and they should too. So maybe I should bite the bullet and just tell everyone exactly how I feel when it happens. Sure, it might make ME the asshole, but maybe I'd get points for honesty and sincerity.
Jessica Brewer, Jen Hassler, and Lacey Wells are the only girls I've scheduled anything with in the last month and a half that have actually kept the date. Kudoes to them. The rest of the female gender can kiss my ass. And Jennifer wondered why I still refer to them as "girls" instead of "women." Well, wonder no more.
4 Comments:
At 1:43 AM,
Jared Counts said…
Ooooo, so angry! I haven't really had that problem, but the one I seem to run into is the girl just not returning calls. I call, leave a message and then wait a couple of days to see if they call back. A couple of days will pass, then a couple more, and I'll call again. Maybe I just need to be more obnoxious and call a lot more. Eh, who the hell knows, right?
Part of me wants you to tell them how you really feel about it, but another part of me thinks its a bad idea. You could let them know how you feel but in terms that aren't quite so....stark. Don't blow up at them, but let them know that you're disappointed and all. Might be a good route, ya?
At 8:24 AM,
Dathan said…
Yeah, I have the same problem with girls not returning calls. And when I do finally talk to them, and comment about it, they say, "Oh, I never check my voicemail." Well then, hoe-bag, your voicemail message should be, "I never check this, so you're wasting your time, but if it makes you feel better, go ahead and leave a message at the beep," instead of, "This is Sally Mary Susie Bettie Lou. Leave me a message and I'll call you back." If people would just tell it like it is more often, there'd be a lot less frustration in the world. Probably more hurt feelings, but frequently I'd take the hurt feelings over the frustration. In my case, anyway, I get over having my feelings hurt a lot faster than I get over feeling really frustrated.
At 7:57 AM,
Anonymous said…
I'm tempted to just say you have an unfortunate attraction to flaky women, but that would be to cheapen the situation. In reality, I think this is symptomatic of a societal decrease in personal responsibility. I think that in general, people who do what they say and say what they mean are becoming increasingly rare beasts.
Nevertheless, I have to agree with you in that I too have seen this more on the female than on the male side. After some consideration, the best hypothesis I have come up with to explain this phenomenon is a sort of perversion of feminism: that some women have taken the idea that their feelings should be respected and that they don't have to be at some man's beck and call to the other extreme, failing to respect the man's feelings and expecting him to put up with whatever she feels like doing. Thoughts?
At 11:48 AM,
Dathan said…
I would tend to agree with the first assertion, rather than the second. If pressed about it, every girl who's stood me up or something similar would, I'm sure, admit that my feelings are just as important as hers. however, what she subconsciously feels may not jive with what she consciously knows... I don't think it's at all related to feminism, though. If I had to try to pinpoint a reason, I'd say that it's a lack of appreciation. It takes hardly any effort to make plans with someone: you can track down pretty much anyone at pretty much any hour of the day if you just their cell number. So the fact that someone has asked you to do something means less now than it used to, when they had to try multiple times to track you down, or had to meet you in person somewhere. And most girls don't really want to hurt anyone's feelings, so it's entirely possible that they agreed to meet up with me without ever really wanting to. And whether they actively disliked the idea of spending time with me, or it just didn't matter much, it wasn't important enough to them (at whatever level determines such things) for them to remember about it. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that they didn't PLAN on standing me up, but did it accidentally, which is in some ways worse, but at least doesn't make them bad people.
It actually makes me appreciate Jennifer Gilbert, because while she was equally frustrating in her own way, it was because she turned me down flat out upwards of twenty times. How'd I ever make it to twenty, you ask? Because she said yes three times, also. Oh, and the time she cancelled on me, she called me the day before to do so, and she never stood me up. Incidentally, though I finally gave up on her, I bear her no ill will whatsoever. It's amazing how that works...
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