Thursday, May 13, 2010

"Let's just call it my need to know."

So I've jumped back into the dating game.

Maybe I should rephrase that--I've jumped back into the dating game in a purely secondary sort of way. I'm not dating anyone except Indie Rocker. That said, I have become involved in some of my friends' love lives in some interesting ways. I'm attempting to set up friends, be their sounding boards, and encourage them to date online/in real life--sometimes all at the same time.

It's interesting now that I've been married for over a year and happily to boot, that I seem to have become something of a magnet for advice-seeking friends. It's almost like I appear to have answers, which is kind of amusing and amazing to me at the same time. Clearly, I have no innate knowledge that I didn't have when I was single, but apparently from an outside perspective, relationship success = good relationship advice. Or something like that.

Obviously the most fraught experiment has been setting friends up with each other. This little project has both the biggest potential for failure and the most disaster potential. It also has the biggest potential to make people totally happy, and take the scary unknowingness out of dating, especially for friends who are tired of online dating and the weirdos they've been subjected to. One of my friends told me perhaps the funniest story I've ever heard about being slapped during intimacy and realizing that he just wanted to go home and possibly never date again. Awesome.

I have realized pretty quickly that the only way two people are meant to meet is if they have something more in common than being single. I haven't been married so long that I've forgotten that. One of my friends asked me this week why I had introduced her to another friend of mine--coming up with valid reasons wasn't easy and they sounded better in my head, but I appreciated the exercise. I liked that she was challenging me to make sure that I had my priorities straight--that is, that the best interests of my friends were my best interests, and forcing them to make small talk with total strangers with spurious connections wasn't a winning strategy.

It's too early to say if I'm any good at this or not, but at least everyone appears to still be having fun. If I find myself down a few friends in the next few months, I'll know that I blew it somewhere.

Quote of the Day: "Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships." Sharon Stone.

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