I have recently been trying to date people, mostly because, counter to public opinion, my sex drive has been going up and not down. Also, I have gotten over certain people and I want to try again. I may talk about my experiences later here and in other posts. Part of dating has to do with how you view yourself and this is as much a self discovery process as expectations. First, it will come to no one who reads this regularly, I am a guy and most men view themselves differently than women. Actually that is an assumption, because I have no clue, so perhaps I should just stick to the facts.
When I wake up, a seventeen or eighteen year old boy is waking up, not me. I don't have a good perception of what I look like. In my mind I do not see who I am. I see a tall person with a little extra weight around the middle with a full head of hair none of which is grey. I see myself as muscular and I think if I got on my bicycle, if there was no snow on the ground, I could cycle ninety kilometers in two and a half hours. Sexually I think I could go for hours non-stop. That is how I think I look. Those people who know me and are reading this, please stop laughing; I assure you one day, if not today, you will suffer similar delusions.
How I actually am. Warning, I am about to hurt my ego. Currently there is a pain in my left knee, it is very slight, my lower back is ever so slightly sore. So I am clearly not seventeen. A few years ago I felt better than I had at seventeen, but that had mostly to do with my mood. Mood improves everything. I do not have grey hair, I am supremely lucky that I have hair that will never go grey, but one day it will go white, but not yet. On they other hand, when you are carrying and extra fifty or so pounds of fat, is not a few extra pounds. I am muscular, those muscles are hard muscles too, but that might be more due to a genetic gift, because I don't work out. My ideal weight is 220 pounds, which doesn't make me muscular either. I am strong, very strong, in high school I could squeeze 70 kg on the squeeze calipers, either hand. I have gotten bigger since then and a bit stronger. At work I can life small trees by myself, still being strong does not make you muscular. I am going bald. My dad says I am going bald faster than he did, but I have contrary photographic evidence. Thin spot for sure…. If I cycle everywhere this spring and summer and do extra cycling after work, I might be able to cycle the distance mentioned and the time. The last time I did so was thirty months ago, so I can probably do it again. That said, it shows I am vain too. Sexually, I still want a lot, but the last couple times nearly killed me, not my heart, but I was sore for a day afterwards, what am I bragging again?
What this does prove, is that I do not look like I think I do and so I should scrap the photo that I put up and get a new one. I also have a higher opinion of myself than I should, which is funny in a way, because I tend to have a poorer opinion of myself generally. Other perceptions that I have had recently shattered is my wittiness factor. I have deluded myself recently is that I am not really a guys guy. I thought that I was not, but it turns out that I am. Part of the problem is that I feel that I have to be aggressive to date online. Aggressive messaging means that I am contacting new people every day and when I don't hear from people, I re-message them again. Part of it was I was not sure that that they were not interested, see above and my poor self perceptions, but also is that women tend to date passively; they respond to the ones they are interested in and not the ones they are not, not even a note to say, "not interested." All the men are messaging aggressively and the women have already in there first day online received one hundred messages, most of whom sport a picture flexing their chest muscles or holding their cock. Most of them are from out of area are not what they are looking for. What I am saying is that I had it thrown back at me by some people and I had toe reassess. That is a difficult thing. It is more difficult to then realize that they are correct.
So my perceptions of myself had to change.
People I know perceive me, but I perceive them too. I am not going to tell you how I perceive them but to tell you how I perceive myself towards them. So if you see your name and don't want to know, skip to the next paragraph.
WaifGirl. She is almost twenty years my junior, but in my head I see her as a peer and around the same age, but I think she sees me as the same age as her parents and that means there is a cognitive dissonance between us, I am not sure who is wrong. Everytime I see a Facebook update I feel it. Maybe her head is screwed on correctly; I have already proven in this post that my perceptions are off.
GardenerGuru. She sees me as a long lost younger brother, I know this, but I see her as my peer and even though she is nearly twenty years my senior, I am attracted to her. I do not tell her this and I have accepted that it will never be, so instead I am her best friend and in many ways she is mine. She sees me as someone who will soon feel old. She sees me as older than I am. I see her as younger than she is.
MPTR. She views me as a friend. I am still angry most of the time when I think about her, but I am her friend. I understand her and I can make her happy, but because of certain things that I can divulge here, she won't let me. But still she keeps me on. I have stopped loving her and I can be cold towards her, but I know that will pass in time.
MagicEyes. I am a jerk. She could have been something extra special but I am not only a jerk, I entered her life at the wrong time. She saw me as an ally, but I am not a part of her life and I will never be a part of her life again, so I don't try. I could be her greatest friend, but I can't because I am still strongly attracted to her and she is not interested at all; I can't get past that.
Seventh. I understand her at the deepest level, she is a younger female me. She sees me as a friend and a danger. She is afraid to be around me alone, not because I will do anything to her, but because she will do something to me. I won't let her, but she thinks I am weak willed. She would be right normally, except I love her so much that I would not risk a premature end of our friendship. I am afraid for her; we are both self destructive, but she can do more damage because she is a girl.
People have funny perceptions. My parents see me as who I was when I left them for school and stopped living with them., even though that was over twenty years ago. My sister doubly so. I told Seventh how old I was when I first met her years ago, but she still thinks of me as that age, I guess one day she will think I am her age. She is not the only one, many people thing that way. I know how old people are if I ever knew how old they are. I am conscious of it. While I lie to myself about how old I am when I wake up, I know how old I am and birthdays mean nothing to me. I have never been concerned that the world was ending when I hit thirty or forty even.
Perceptions of maturity are funny and constantly change as you age, but you never notice the change. I think of people having their puppy years. Puppies look like puppies, there heads are bigger than their body, paws are too big and they have softer curves on tier head. People also have their puppy features. I am not sure what they are but I can point to someone and say "Puppy!"
I never saw it as a puppy. Growing up with other puppies I never saw the change. Being slightly older I never noticed. Then one day, poof!, I saw puppies. The first time I met WaifGirl, she was a puppy. When I first go to know her, she was not. Looking at Facebook photos is an easy way to see it.
Well I learned. I have updated my profile with a more recent photo. But I am not the only one. I see many profiles that have a half dozen photos half of them much younger than one, all minus that piercings and the tattoos, thinner, matching their inner perceptions of self.
I just received a text for m MagicEyes about want I wrote. She was criticizing me that I never wrote about my perceptions of her, that I wrote about my feelings for her. She is correct, because she is an intelligent woman with a keen a discerning eye. And I am still caught up in her, even though we said our good byes half a year or more ago. The trouble is that perceptions are based on emotions and divorcing your emotions from your analysis is difficult. Always difficult. She is, as I stated above an intelligent discerning individual, who when I met her was just embarking on a journey of self discovery that by its nature is mostly a solitary one. And I am on a journey to try to discover other people, self discovery is about the only think I am good at. And I am not used to thinking of other people first, never had to. She was only used to thinking of other people and did not know herself.
ReplyDeleteStrangely I am still in love with her, or still in love with the thought of her, which may be more precise and truthful, because unless we take the time to lash hold of someone tightly, everyone is just an image that we saw coming and not who they are now. I have wanted to head back to her blog to read it for sometime, but it is intimidating to do so and the benefit would only be that I might learn about who she is now and then. But it makes me sad too because I would have liked to know her more and better, but would that change my ability to listen to what she says?
She continued that I could not perceive her without being caught on who I was. Emotions are self centered, you can feel sad about an event, but the closer the personal connection the deeper the feeling. The stronger the feeling the more I am involved. I wish that I could be cold, I could be cold, but I know a few things about MagicEyes and I know her past and I knew he present. I knew her almost as well as MPTR. So I can't be cold. There is too much possibility wrapped up in my perceptions, not even possibility of relationship, but raw possibility of choice and reaction. I seem to alway digress.
I am slowly dissipating my love for you. I will never be unpassionate concerning you, though. You are intelligent, discerning, discriminating (science definition not social/racial) and passionate. My perceptions are alway mixed with emotion so they are always skewed.