flights

My friend MiLo called me yesterday during a trans-desert road trip to fill me in on his plan to confess his crush to a girl he’s been hanging with for a while. His manifesto of feeling.

In more than six months of fast friendship, the two of them had never wandered near the strange sea of romance, and he wondered whether he should deliver his manifesto as a prelude to a kiss, or whether he should kiss first and park his manifesto in the footnotes.

My advice wavered, so I told him I’d consult with my friend Bee, whom I was meeting for brunch that day, to get the chick’s point of view on the subject. Bee unequivocally said kiss first, talk later.

I called MiLo back later that afternoon, and the two of us hashed out a battle plan for his evening. He said the extent of the physical contact he’d had with her to date was when he “rubbed her arm” and when they exchanged hello/goodbye hugs. We talked through various ways to make the leap from talking and arm rubbing to kissing, always with some hand holding as a midway step. All very sweet.

The next day he called me back to report success. He’d softened the battle plan a bit, but it didn’t matter. It worked.

At brunch with my friend Bee, we talked quite a bit about crushes in general, and how at our age, the brain has to play a much bigger role in the whole game than it did when we were younger. Used to be that you would get a crush on someone, and you’d just follow it for a while. Now, that’s not enough. A while is not what we’re looking for. The next person has to be the person, and that requires a level of calculation and analysis. It’s not all about the heart anymore. Somewhat sad, but that’s the real deal.

Bee spent several years with a much younger man, and it ultimately didn’t work because she’s at a point where she wants to start a family, and he’s still jumping from thing to thing to thing. Recently she met another guy – same age as her ex – and they hit it off right away. They had a lot of fun for a couple of weeks, but in the end his age was the showstopper for her. Not because of the way things felt, but purely because when she took a cold hard look at the facts, she couldn’t feel sure enough that he was ready for the same kind of relationship she wants.

Sad.

I have my own dilemma to be sure, but I don’t know how much I want to confess here. Another time perhaps.

You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can’t win
And so it goes
Till the day you die
This thing they call love
It’s gonna make you cry
I’ve had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure…
Love stinks