Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t notice you sitting next to me…

I was listening to my ipod at the gym the other day while I was on an elliptical trainer. I was carefully pretending not to notice the man flagging me down by peering deeply at the closed-captions of CNN as they scrolled along the bottom of the screen on the television up above my head. This guy has been a recurring admirer. He is very nice but doesn’t seem to take ‘no’ for an answer…and I’m not exactly in love with his knee-socks. I noticed that everyone in that place was pretty much doing their own thing. We love to ignore each other there. What a community of friendly people. The strange thing is that I can’t tell you how many conversations I get into with people who say that they don’t have the opportunity to meet people…um…of course we could possibly take our headphones off or put the magazines down and interact?…nah…

Is it possible that we so content to complain about the fact that there “isn’t anyone out there” that we are actually ignoring each other on purpose? I can’t imagine that anyone wants to dwell in loneliness. I suppose some of us are good at resolving ourselves to it though. The funny thing is that it seems that many of us aren’t really all that lonely until someone points out that we should be. How many people try set us up when they find out we’re single? If I had a dollar for every person who knew “the perfect guy” for me, I’d be a billionaire!…Of course, what they usually mean by “perfect” is that he is single too...um…ok…I have to admit that this is a little bit closer to “perfect” for me than married, separated or has a girlfriend, but in most cases these set-ups have been awkward and paled in comparison to sitting on my couch and eating cheese sticks! These “well-meaning fixer-uppers” are just trying to help but I have to admit that from the outside view of their relationships at times, sometimes I suspect that their motive is one of wanting everyone to be equally as miserable as they are. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-relationship! In fact, I reiterate from a previous entry that I have met a nice guy. He really is a good person who goes out of his way to make me happy!- and I am so good at being single and complaining about it, that I sometimes make his life miserable! He paid for my groceries the other night- and I cried…Um…Calia?…the words are, “Thank you! That was very nice of you!”…I’m going to do my best to be the kind of person he deserves because if my need to maintain my “act” that there isn’t anyone nice out there ruins my new possibility, I’m gonna look like a complete idiot!

So then…what are people looking for that they are so afraid to look up from their engrossing reading material and pounding music to notice?…It may be time to figure out what we really want for ourselves because I am pretty sure that we can have exactly that! If what we want is to complain that there is no one out there, we will be right. If what we want is to meet someone great and include that person in our life, possibly turning to the person next to us and saying “hello”, is a great place to start!