Why Does it Matter?

The significance of this whole series of incidents is not in what could have happened with W if things had gone differently.  I have no doubt that she was not the "the one" for me.  I remember knowing that in my brain at the time, but my rational mind was no match for emotions, hormones, and other new feelings in those individual moments.  The significance of what happened lies in how it continues to affect my thoughts and decisions related to relationship development and romantic pursuits.

Looking back I can see how that situation drilled two nearly mutually exclusive principles, deeply into my subconscious.  The first was "No matter what you do, its not going to make things any better" which led to long periods of passive acceptance of the situation.  But I was constantly confronted with situations that were made awkward by the fact that couldn't bring myself to interact with her in any relaxed way.  This brought me to the obvious conclusion that "It's better to try to do something, even if it doesn't work, than to do nothing at all, because that never works."  After a few misguided attempts to improve things, I would be frustrated enough to return to my earlier feeling, and the cycle would continue.

These two rational principles, still weigh to an irrational degree, into any serious relationship based decision that I am faced with.  I can always tell after the fact, which one I was over-valuing at the time, because hindsight is 20/20.  But even with that in mind, when confronted with a new situation, I never know which one I need to be better compensating for.  At this point, after years of time wasted in high school and college, passively waiting for ideal opportunities to present themselves, I am inclined to deliberately favor taking initiative.  But that can lead to its own series of challenges, and still must be balanced against discretion.

Although the situation with W was a serious distraction for a long time, there were other things going on in my life at the time.  For example I took the SAT on the morning of that first Homecoming dance I went to.  That is not a good time to take an important test, and while I did alright, I showed significant improvement when I took it again two months later.  When reviewing my records the next year, my Scoutmaster called to ask how I improved my score by 160 in two months, since he was trying to get his son into Harvard.  "Easy, just be distracted enough to totally botch the first one."  That’s probably not what he wanted to hear.  But taking all of those tests set me up for the next big decision, choosing where I wanted to go to college.