3. Now for a Little Emotional Addiction

Facebook friends.  No normal person takes this in an emotional way, right?  Of course not, you are all sane, well-balanced people who realize these things mean nothing, especially when the other person is full across the nation, right?  Of course you are, you don't get emotionally attached to someone you have never, and may never meet.  Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail were a successful movies because their plots are so outrageous, not because people see themselves in that kind of situation, right?

Let me explain.

I recently friended a person on Facebook whom I knew to be gay.  As I saw it, it was perfectly acceptable.  There was a context for how I would have found him on Facebook, and I expected it to work like most Facebook friendship work.  You friend them, they accept you, you both look at each others profile a total of 1-2 times (if you look at all), and then you forget they exist for all intents and purposes.

Not so.

I friended him, and he wrote on my wall, so I wrote on his wall, to which he responded, thus I responded with a more extensive message and a question or two, which he answered and queried back, and you get the point.  Pretty soon we were having a fairly deep philosophical discussion on my Facebook wall with a few supplemental Facebook messages.

Then it stopped.

No reason.  In fact it stopped right after he asked for further contact information.  I was the last one to write him, and not really wanting to push the matter I have not made any subsequent contact until now.

My mind can take this down innumerable paths to propose an explanation.  Maybe I offended him, maybe he felt I was acting strangely for someone he does not really know, maybe he was just being kind to talk to me all this time and needed to bail before I took up too much more of his time, maybe this has been a joke with his friends all this time and he is tired of it.  Maybe he thinks all of the above is true in my case, and has withheld contact accordingly.

A friend once told me that I am not assertive as I let others push past me while we were waiting for grilled burgers at a school outing, but that is not a wholly accurate assessment.  When I feel I am right, I can be downright dogged about proving a point or affecting the course of activity.  What will stop me dead in my tracks is the impression that action on my part will cause the other person the remotest glimpse of undue discomfort.  In this case, being self-conscious and passive under such conditions, I am more apt to wait and let him decide.

Thus, I am still waiting.  Granted I have been working on not letting myself be distracted, but my pensive nature over being ignored is so wonderfully expressed in lyrics of Imogen Heap's “Halflife” – “My self-worth measured in text-back tempo./ It's been 2 days and 8 minutes too slow.”  A spiky little question gnaws on my chest and scratches my mind.

Often times I don't like being human.  I lead a life that is very separated from other humans (my education and work dominate my life to an extreme extent...not to say that I don't have fantastic friends and a loving family...I just ignore them to an indecent extent), and I think I instinctively scoff at some of the giggle-ridden love-crazy sex-driven foolishness I see in my generation and in the media.  This disdain is only heightened when I begin to see the evidence of that same folly in myself.

Romance is probably my greatest arena of social criticism.  This is probably because I am shouting from the bleachers; I have never dated, and had the option of dating with about 5 people.  Most of them where girls, and the other was a man 20 years older than myself.  Still, that does not bother me greatly, because I rarely know a person that I could consider dating, and it is even more rare that that person is gay and interested in me (so rare that it has not yet happened).  My parents have had a very poor relationship, so I take these matters seriously.  I could not date someone just to have fun.  I could only continually date someone if I felt that our relationship were moving toward the direction of marriage (or at the very least not revealing serious concerns about a future together).

So when I see my peers entering these fly-by-night, hot-and-heavy, must-kiss-in-the-checkout-line-because-we-are-so-in-love, joined-at-the-hip, traumatic-break-up, must-tell-my-random-gay-friend-everything relationships, I genuinely doubt the ability of my generation to form healthy couples.  Worse still, when I do crack, and meet someone who I start crushing on, I enter into this battle of logic versus emotion.  When that kind of feeling begins, I enter the same obsessed state where I begin to constantly cycle through the highs of: checking Facebook every 5 minutes; imagining scenes from shy beginnings to first kisses to marriage; reminding myself that I have to be open to surprises; crashing back into the lows of: imagining rejection; reminding myself what a waste it is to dwell in fantasy; and realizing that at the end of the day, I have nothing to really base all of my hopes on. It is as if I repress my emotions so much in general, that the after-first-flirting ecstasy completely overwhelms all of my better judgment.

This is not healthy, but I don't know how to fix it.  I know I am emotionally addictive.  I can turn a friendly smile into personal proof of a deep seated affection, and if we share a very engaging conversation, then the likely hood of me needing a good number number of weeks to get over you is about 95%.  On one hand, I can avoid everything and attempt to be numb until I enter a marriage of convenience, but that seems equally naive.  On the other hand, I can accept that I do not have a perfect choice.  I imagine that I should stop worrying about what I feel, that will soon change.  I must live for now with the decisions I have made, and the resulting decisions I will have to make.  There is always doubt and uncertainty when it comes to love, but love grows if one is willing to work for it, right?

I wish I didn't act like a silly school girl in a Disney television show...

I posted something on his wall today, 20 days since the last time he posted something.  I am not sure if that qualifies as trying to not let a potentially good friendship slip away, or if it more falls into the category of feeding addictions.