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Girl meets boy, girl likes boy, boy confused
Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl confused
(or boy- boy, girl - girl…  It all amounts to
the same when it comes to feelings)

Why the confusion? Is it the chemistry? Or the lack of it? Or is it the fear of commitment? Maybe the answer is that the object of your interest just finds you plain unattractive and, no matter how you try to rationalize it and no matter how clear it was from the very beginning, you just wouldn’t accept it!

Whether you want to deal with it as such or not it’s all a game! It actually reminds me of a board game we used to play as kids. It was called Frustration (in Croatian - Čovječe ne ljuti se - roughly - Don’t sweat it, man). This was a game where you would try to skip your opponents, kick them out of the game and make a home run before your opponent could get you.

So no matter how many times they threw you out of the game you were supposed to pick yourself up from the gutter and go back into the game like nothing happened. Then you could do the same to the others. Yes, you could be as ruthless as you wanted as you aimed to get to your goal first because when you least expected it, you could be forced out of it again! Was this game created to teach us how to deal with life’s little misfortunes or what?

But life’s little game is not always that vicious; there is a sort of thrill that keeps you going on, just like feeling butterflies in your stomach as you’re inches away from the person you care for, anticipating his (her) next move, the perfect first kiss… or, in my case, the perfect rejection.

Picture this. Miami Beach, just the two of us, pitch darkness, you can only hear the sound of the waves and the two of us sweet talking each other and just as we are on the verge of kissing he says: “You know, I have a girlfriend and I want to remain faithful to her”. Little did he know - his girlfriend was already two timing him. But, hey, that’s life.

Yes we’ve all been down that road, but it’s that anticipation and feeling of hope that keeps us moving forward and that eventually leads us into the arms of another willing person. Romance at its greatest, right?

But was it ever really supposed to be romantic? Or did TV and high production (or low production, mind you) Hollywood movies make it that way? Have we completely trivialized true feelings and made ourselves slaves to far fetched images of “the real thing”, I ask you?! It is like somewhere between childhood and adulthood we lost that real sense of what was going on and became these troubled individuals just waiting to get yet another chance to overanalyze what we did last night, or didn’t do.

Nowadays we can’t bring ourselves to answer simple questions without becoming evasive. And we do that all the time! Imagine if somebody asked you to give a one sentence response to one of the most intricate questions of all time: “What is love?”  What would you say? You would most likely come up with a complete blank.

However, children on the other hand seem to get it right straight off, maybe we should spend more time listening to what they have to say! You see just yesterday I received a forward with children's quotes on love, and I’d like to  point out that these are quotes of 4 to 8 year-olds, so feast your eyes on these little pearls of wisdom:

Love is:

When my grandma had arthritis and couldn’t do her nails, my grandpa did them for her even though he had arthritis too. Rebecca 8

When somebody hurts you and even if it hurts real bad you don’t cry because you know that it would hurt the person who hurt you.  Matthew 6

When somebody loves you, the way they say your name sounds different.  Billy 4

When you tell somebody something bad about yourself and you’re afraid that person won’t love you anymore, and then the person surprises you by loving you even more. Samantha 7

What can you in all honesty say to that except BRAVO!, and RIGHT ON! And then wonder if, in somehow in our process of growing up, we had all undergone a lobotomy without knowing it - because how else is it that we can no longer see the most obvious and most beautiful things around us? Are we so immersed in our state of unconsciousness that we have completely lost track of what really counts?
 

Take my real good friend V. She’s been dragging on this long distance relationship with P for the last few years. She breaks it off, then decides he’s the man of her life, then wonders about it all. In the meantime P goes back and forth to see her and is ready to leave everything for her! The worst part is that it’s as clear as day that when she and P are together the room just lights up. Even a blind man can feel the fire between them! Yet, for some reason, she has doubts.

What is it that makes us act this way? Is it the fact that we all seek the impossible? Why is it that when things are really, really good we start thinking there’s gotta be something wrong there? And then the fanatic in us creates an air of ambiguity which results in one of the partners just going out for cigarettes and never coming back. How do we put a stop to that?

Maybe Stephen Spielberg had a premonition when he came up with the movie Artificial Intelligence. Maybe a notion of attaining happiness by having our own robot is not so far fetched. Or is it? I mean, you get yourself a robot – the perfect guy (girl) who will learn your hidden desires and who would then do their best to satisfy them. There wouldn’t be any surprises, he (she) would adore you and cherish the path you walked on. What more could anyone ask for…?

Of course, in the end, being human that we are, we would get fed up with this “oh so perfect person” and would yearn for the newly improved model! Typical, isn’t it? It makes me wonder why is it that we act this way? Is it because someone in second grade didn’t give us enough attention so we became these spellbound crusaders out to get the world? Or is it because we got interrupted at that most crucial time of our lives when we never got to kiss that one person we were so crazy about?

You tell me! I’m still wondering…

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