The Wrong Lens of Love

For years, the story I told, and the story I believed, was that as an adolescent and young adult, my social life pretty much sucked, and that except for a few rare strokes of luck, I couldn’t get the girl to save my life. But in looking back, I realize that it really wasn’t that bad, and that my social life was relatively average.

I mean seven “real girlfriends” and dates with at least seven others over the course of 13 years is nothing to sneeze at...even if some of the relationships lasted as little as five weeks.

So where was the problem?

Two of my dear friends from grade school will tell you that I’ve been an incurable romantic since at least first grade. It’s true. I’ve liked girls ever since I knew what they were, and obsessed about having a girlfriend probably since age four.

And I mean obsessed about it. It wasn’t just that life was so much better if you had someone special to share it with, but I also believed that, as Dean Martin so famously sang, “You’re nobody till somebody loves you.”

But I know now that it’s not true, and that all those years that I was desperately trying to get a girlfriend...and annoying the crap out of every girl I came into contact with...I was missing the point. I was missing the point of enjoying life in general. I was missing just being friends with girls (not that there was a whole lot of modeling of that going on back then). I didn’t realize that I was practically the only one stuck on this romantic ideal, and that most people in high school or college (and definitely not in grade school) weren’t paired up with someone. I didn’t get the fact that the “sexual revolution” that I heard and read so much about wasn’t happening for everyone but me.

Well...OK...when you wake up on several different occasions in the middle of the night to your freshman roommate and his girlfriend going at it, it definitely seems like the sexual revolution is rudely thumbing its nose at you. But still, I didn’t get that he was one of the exceptions, and not the rule; and while maybe five people on my floor were sleeping with someone, the other 50 weren’t even seeing anyone.

But now, looking back, I get it. And I wish I had known that then. I would’ve been a lot happier. And a lot less depressed about being lonely.

My social life was pretty good. I just had unrealistic expectations from popular music, TV, and movies.

I know that now. But I wonder how many other adolescent and young adult males there are out there now who are just like I was then. How many guys are there out there right now, willing to do themselves, and others, harm, because they’ve gotten the wrong message about romance and being loved. I wonder how many lives might be saved if we could reach them and tell them to chill, and that their social lives are decidedly average.

And…and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough…if you haven’t been there yourself, if you have never been in that dark pit of loneliness and depression yourself, do not minimize this as someone being sad “just because they couldn’t get a date.” When you’re in that pit, it is so much more than that. It is so much worse than that.

This unrealistic expectation, and this obsession with having someone, anyone, also explains why many people stay too long in relationships that are not good for them...and why I did so myself.

And the moment I finally realized once and for all that I didn’t need someone else to make me happy; the moment I saw in someone else what I must’ve looked like to all the girls I’d thrown myself at, and said “eew”; the moment I decided to just give up on this romantic obsession...was when I met my wife.

Well...two weeks later, to be precise.

But it took me 30 years after that to realize that I'd been looking at my social life through the wrong lens.

How many of the rest of us still are?