Just One of the Guys (Part 1)

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been a tomboy. I did sports, cut my hair short, and preferred talking to guys over girls. Girls seemed catty and weird to me, and for a long time I was convinced I should have been born the opposite sex.

Puberty was a rough time for me. I developed everywhere I didn’t want to, and lost my guy friends because now I was obviously a girl. And it’s awkward playing touch football when you’re afraid of hurting the girl, or touching her girl parts. At least, that’s what it seemed like. Most of the guy’s had seen me as an equal for so long, it was weird when I was no longer just ‘one of the guys’.

So I lost the vast majority of my friends. What I had left was the few girls I spent time with. They also proceeded to get weirder as we aged. All of a sudden it was all about boys, dating, and makeup. Making hot guys like you was all that seemed to float around in their vapid heads, and as a result, I didn’t like spending time with them. But as any outcast can tell you, that gets lonely and awkward.

Fast forward many years. In my 20s, I noticed that things slowly began to balance out, and guys were willing to be my friends again with out all of the sexual weirdness. Or maybe it was still there, I just didn’t see it. At any rate, I had also made some decent female friends, provided we had some things in common. Things were looking up. Well, sort of.

You know that whole “teenage period of figuring out how to talk to the opposite sex, show you’re interested, date and have functioning relationships” thing? Well I never really learned that. I am still quite out of the loop. When everyone else was getting hot and heavy I was, for the most part, asexual. I didn’t care about dating, I just was pissed off my buddies were chasing tail instead of sports. And the girls were learning their way through all those mind game things that to this day I have no understanding of. Part of me hates that those seem to be tools in everyone else’s dating arsenal, but then another part of me regrets never having learned it.

Last weekend I went to a theme party a friend threw in a local pub. We had a private room with our own bartender. Pretty snazzy, yes. I was dressed quite nicely, with makeup and hair done. And apparently the bartender was hitting on me.

Apparently the bartender was hitting on me to the extent that every one of my friend’s at the party was trying to inform me of such. One did the cartoonish “gesturing towards him with her eyes” that I blatantly remarked, “What’s up with your eyes?” Not obvious enough? Another friend of mine tried walking me over to the bartender while saying loudly, “He. Likes. You.”

I waved it off somehow babbling about how that was not the case, he was just a good bartender. I think I said something else about how he must have sensed I was once a bartender, and there was a “Bartender’s Code”. I can’t quite remember what I said because I was rather drunk of the free wine the bartender was giving me all night. Yep.

*sigh*

So now I am reflecting, because I wonder a lot about how come no one wants to date me, and then things like that happen. I excel at realizing much later that something could have happened, but from the safety of my apartment, much later. That night, I waved away the general consensus of my friend’s because, quite honestly, I was afraid. See, I don’t know what to do when a guy shows interest in me. I don’t have the experience to draw on. I’ve never been asked out, and that was part of what I was thinking when talking to the bartender. Sure, he may seem interested, but unless he pulls me aside, and asks me out, I disagree that he was interested.

Does that sound like too much to ask for? My friend’s argue that his flirting was a way to see how interested *I* was, and since I didn’t flirt back he figured I was not interested. Then I get frustrated because I really have no clue how to flirt. I panic. I don’t look guys in the eye when I like them. I hide. I wind up not going back to that bar in case I run into that guy again. I wish I knew why I was so paralyzed by it, but I am.