Who knows the rules of this game, anyway?

Don’t hate the player, hate the game – right? Well… if someone could tell me the rules to the game – not the “rules” that they think are the rules, but the actual rules – that’d be great. Oh, and if we all played by the same rules, that'd be even better!

The other night I was out with one of my girlfriends who I hadn’t seen in a while. We were catching each other up on our lives and I mentioned the two guys in my periphery right now. She was astonished and gave me grief for testing out the waters in a couple of different pools – mind you, she is slightly older than I am and, in my opinion, I’m doing nothing wrong because I’m not kissing either one of them, let alone doing anything else.

As my friend was giving me grief I thought about it and I’m behaving no different from the standard set for men. To a man, especially in the Northeast, mentioning something like exclusivity is like poison to the start of any relationship. Either, they see you all of the time, call you, make plans, and own your “together” status in front of others and it’s assumed that you are exclusive,  or else they call you ever once in a while out of the blue, in which case, it’s not exclusive (and shouldn’t be) unless otherwise stated.

The truth is I don’t know where either interaction is going (one seems to be at a standstill, anyway). I don’t know if either of these guys are actually into me or if they are simply bored. I’ve always been a person who wants to be actively pursued and in these wishy-washy situations where the guy isn’t taking the lead or trying very hard to stay in contact with me, I don’t owe them anything the same way they demonstrate not wanting to owe anything to me. Our arrangement, at least by my "rules," is clear.

However, when it’s all said and done, it is a little bit of a blow when you find out the person on the other end is testing other waters – even if you, yourself, have chosen to continue chatting and making yourself available to others, too. That actually happened to me today. I decided to just check my online dating stuff since I hadn’t been on there in a while and attorney man had closed me, despite our impending date this weekend. Odd… but what was really odd was that I could still see that he was active yesterday, but hasn’t viewed my profile in a week, so he’s still shopping around, too! Just goes to show you, we never know what is happening on the other end of the keyboard and to limit ourselves to talking to only one person at a time is foolish, not to mention a waste of time if it doesn't work out.

Either one of these men will start to prove themselves to me and I’ll have to cut the other one free, or they won’t and I won’t have a set back because of it. When you focus all your time and energy into one person who you don’t know and clearly isn’t making you a priority, that’s a problem. Attorney man might have a couple dates this weekend which I’ll never know about. So, for now, I’m still a single girl and, damn it, I’m going to behave like one.