There are two ways a relationship can begin: attraction first, followed by some sort of relationship, or friendship first, followed by some sort of attraction.
(Of course, there is a rare third way, wherein the guy kidnaps and holds you hostage at gunpoint for a month. As an unconscious survival tactic, you end up falling in love, get married, have two beautiful daughters and escape the law together for many years to come. Oh dad, thank you so much – if it weren’t for your gambling addiction that forced you to hold mom ransom, our family would have never been created!)
Anyway, many of my friends are in relationships that have started out either as a physical attraction toward a stranger or a growing affection between good friends. This got me thinking about how the nature of a relationship is really influenced by how it begins.
Yours truly has also had a crack at these two types of situations. Obviously, none of them ever went anywhere, but since I’mpretty ignorant about relationships, I’ll just use the tiny-ass amount of experience I’ve gained to tell you my take on it.
Back when I was in high school, everyone got with people who were in their own clique. It wasn’t like how it is now, when you get to meet people at bars, clubs, nude beaches, etc. So imagine my surprise when this random guy who worked at our local Starbucks who I thought was cute, called one of our mutual friends and asked for my number.
I thought it was kind of neat having accomplished that. I was a senior and he was a few years older than me and that’s all we knew about each other. It was the first time that I, or any of my friends, met some guy from out of nowhere and ran with it. It was attraction first, and then the getting-to-know-you part later. It was odd but exciting. After all, why did I feel like we already liked each other, but then we knew nothing of each other?
The night before our first and only outing, I prayed that he didn’t have a case of the crazies. Sure he was cute, but I liked all my limbs – I wanted them to still be attached to me when the night was over.
There was also this other minor thing about him. While we got to know each other via a little magic device called the telephone, he nonchalantly mentioned that he was bisexual.
Now I have no hidden qualms with bisexuality, it’s just that he related a little too much about his experiences with both sexes. He wasn’t promiscuous (all the sex he had was with guys and girls he was in serious relationships with), but he was very explicit about it. And besides, straight or LGBT, you just never talk about your exes!
He didn’t hesitate to talk about his favorite positions, whether he was a top or bottom, or what kind of virginity he lost first. On our date, he’d point out guys and girls he found cute. (Again, even if he were straight, why would you check out other people on a date?!)
If you haven’t gathered from my past columns, I’m pretty naïve about relationships, so imagine my breadth of knowledge back in high school. I was über-n00b status back then, and yet I somehow managed to challenge myself to take on all the complexities that come with dating a bisexual. It’s slightly more complicated. Kind of like never learning your ABCs and then deciding to enroll in English Honors.
What’s more is that we didn’t have much in common, which isn’t exactly ideal when forming a relationship. Well, we did have one thing – our taste in guys. During our date, I started to notice that every time he said, “Man that guy’s cute,” I thought to myself, “Dude he’s right, that guy is cute.”
I was also not secure enough with myself to date him. (Me? Insecure? Go figure). My friends and I figured that the only reason he thought me cute was because I looked like a boy. They had no problems with him or anything; they just loved teasing me about how I had the short hair and flat chest and everything. They said that because he swung both ways, it made sense that he found me attractive since I looked “both ways.” Besides me crying, it was pretty funny actually.
Anyway, the night ended with…
LYNN LA will continue her story later; right now she has to go to class. She’d also like to note the massive turnout for Picnic Day, unlike her Friday shindig, in which she got to meet all zero of you guys. To help keep her state-of-denial going, e-mail her at ldla@ucdavis.edu and tell her it was simply because “she was hard to find.”
