The Early Stages of Dating

When you first start seeing someone, everything is rosy and good and nothing is dark and bad, and there are no tears or drama or jealousy. It’s the lovely, simple time before you even have your own feelings figured out.

You don’t want to seem needy and clingy and overly-attached, but suddenly all your friends seem lackluster and your new beau is the zenith of all that is fun and amazing in the universe and you just want to non-creepily spend every spare second in their company. So you make plans. First it’s happy hour, then food, then maybe a movie. Then it becomes all these inane activities. Let’s go rock climbing, let’s try trapezing. Ever hiked in the Shenandoah’s? LET’S DO IT.

Because when a relationship is first getting off the ground, you’re hopelessly reliant on organized activities to give your time together some structure. The gist of the plan is essentially meaningless, but there’s an unwritten rule that you’ve got to have one. Both parties must at least pretend there's an underlying reason for meeting up besides possibly wanting to exchange DNA.

So the Big Date is scheduled and details confirmed but fro-yo becomes dinner which turns into drinks which leads to morning coffee and suddenly you’ve powered through all the classic date night activities in a single whirlwind evening and you find yourself sprawled on a couch watching re-runs of sitcoms wishing you’d spaced things out just a little bit better. It’s like speed dating except with one person instead of a roomful of singles.

And now things aren't rosy and good or dark and bad but some kind of murky pinkish middle ground.

Is this (just) real life?

Sometimes Even the Best Laid Plans Backfire...

My first plan in life was simple. When I grew up, I wanted to be an actress.

Ok...

So, I took some acting classes, did a ton of children's theater, got some head shots taken and then realized: I was not cut out to be an actress. In order to succeed in Hollywood, you need to be pushy, assertive, and ballsy. You need to act like a prima donna before you're really entitled to, and that was just never me. Even at age 7 I knew I couldn't stand up in front of a roomful of people without turning beet red. So, my next plan was to be a gymnast.

My parents signed me up for gymnastics classes and ballet classes and it turned out, I was pretty good. I was extremely flexible and actually had the perfect gymnast build (which came back to haunt me years later at Midway airport when a creepy guy looked me up and down and used the line "are you in the Olympics because you look like some sort of gymnast to me". Ick.) But the time comes in a young gymnast's life when she is forced to choose between the sport and her social life, and I just couldn't prioritize sweaty gym workouts over school and parties and being a teenager.

So, what was the next plan? Go to a great school, graduate with job offers left and right, and make enough money to get off my parent's cellphone plan.

I guess I got the first part right. Uchicago is currently somewhere in the top 10 colleges in the U.S. but somehow I failed to receive the dozens of job offers from companies begging for me to come "join their team!" and... my dad still pays my blackberry bill.

So does anybody get it right? Are there girls who say, "I'm going to be an actress" and they make it happen? My friends C and N knew as early as the first week of freshman year that they wanted to work in finance. They excelled in their majors and graduated with top honors. Both girls are currently employed by the largest investment bank in the world, making close to $100k starting salary, and living in luxury apartments in buildings equipped with doormen and fitness facilities. Were they somehow better at sticking to their plans? Were they more motivated than I was?

Or, did they just get lucky?

If you have a plan set in place early on, does it make any deviation feel like a mistake? Should I look at my inability to follow a plan as some kind of wonderful spontaneity on my part or as a result of my undiagnosed ADHD? How different would my life be today if I had just stuck with the original plan?