“Once in a while I act like a child to feel like a kid again
It gets like a prison in the body I’m living in
Cause everyone’s watching and quick to start talking, I’m losing my innocence
Wish I were a little girl without the weight of the world.”
Sometimes it seems like two people are ships passing in the night. Missed connections, misunderstandings and general bad timing have stopped more relationships before they have even got started. Sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot, often making bad decisions based on our own insecurities and fear, or giving in to peer pressure when it comes to deciding how we feel about someone. If you think about it, how many times have your friends or family affected how you see someone and whether or not a relationship is pursued?
With our increasingly small world, in a large part thanks to the internet and social media, we meet people outside of our circle more often. This double edged sword also insures that we also learn much more about a person in a short time than we normally would. You can fall in like/lust/love with someone online before you’ve ever seen if that chemistry translates in person. In some ways I miss highschool where you only had to contend with the hall and locker room gossip.
It should come as no surprise that I fell victim to a case of serious twit-crush, and just as awkwardly, massive falling out of said crush due to the same social medium.
“Remember the times we had soda for wine,
and we got by on gratitude?
The worst they could do to you was check your attitude
Yeah when fights were for fun, we had water in guns,
and a place we could call our own
How we lost hold of home I guess I’ll never know.”
He was one of those guys that I would never have gone for in a million years. Short, indie, a smoker and dozens of other things that I usually find unattractive. However it’s a funny and heady thing when you have the popularity contest that is Twitter some days. Someone gets built up for generally just being an engaging and nice person online, and we think that they must be the same way offline.
After seeing him “around” the social media hallway for awhile and interacting enough to find out we had many shared interests and several shared friends I began to give in to the fact that he might be a cool guy. We went on a date in the fall, and it went well. He was more interested than I was at the time, partly because I had met someone else the same week that was more my regular type. I told a mutual friend that, and she pushed me to give him more of a chance, that he was a great guy etc etc. After months of hearing his cheer team encourage me, and harmless online flirting I ended up developing a crush for him. It all came to a head on my birthday, there was some making out and some sleeping over but nothing crazy. Lots of words were said about making promises to live the life you deserved, going out on a limb and following some dreams that had been put aside for awhile and general comments about how I was “kinda perfect” for him.
Maybe it was the alcohol or the simple need to feel wanted on an important birthday, but I fell for it. I’m never the girl that buys in to that so it took me by surprise. Then I got blown off… a lot. Finally I broke down and sent an email to the tune of “I had fun, thought you did too what’s up?” and got a reply that at least gave closure. “I’m not into dating right now”. Fine. Not a problem at all, but why the pursuing simply for the sake of doing so? Why make it complicated for no reason?
“It’s not going to be long before we’re all gone with nothing to show for them
Stop taking lives, come on let’s all grow up again.”
The best part of the whole situation was that I felt like I had lost a friend. The nail in the coffin was a DM that said “I’m sorry I let you down, but it doesn’t change our friendship.” But it did, it was precisely as a friend he let me down. Initially that’s all I saw him as, but between the people we had in common pushing for me to see how wonderful he was, and his own attempts to show me the same it irrevocably changed our friendship and it became as a friend that he let me down. That was the day I unfollowed him. The day that I withdraw from the #yyc meetups and vowed never to give in to the silly and casual flirting on social media.
At the end of the day maybe it’s best to keep your online friends simply that, or maybe we just have to suck up the disappointments and hope that next time things are better.
Pretend is a song off of Canadian singer Lights’ first full length album “The Listening” . Born in Timmins, Ontario, she calls her music intergalactic-electro music. She produces, writes and styles herself. She plays guitar and keyboard as well as being a fantastic artist. She describes her inspiration as a science fiction nerd. She even made an appearance on MTV’s “The City” where she wore a piece of clothing from Whitney Port’s fashion line Whitney Eve. Lights also has an amazing Acoustic EP that is worth listening to as well.
