Thursday, June 24, 2010

Dream or Nightmare

This was written by me in October of 2005 on Yahoo 360. I decided to change the title and add a few words and repost this because I think it can help somebody in 2010.
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Ever been in a dark club or in some other dimly lit public place and you see someone across the room that you think is phyne to death? You start making eye contact with that person across the way and decide to go over to see what’s up. As you get closer your heart flutters, your pulse starts racing, your breathing becomes shallow, you adjust your clothes to make sure you look your best and you put on a smile (or if you’re a wanna-be thug you put on grimace) as you make your way over. As you get closer you begin to see that this person is not as phyne as you thought. They may no longer look like “thunder” to you, but you still think maybe that person looks good enough to keep walking towards. However when you get up on them, you realize that they did not look as good as you thought. Your heart returns to normal, your breathing is restored, and you stop sucking in your stomach (yeah ... I know). What you thought was “thunder” turned out to be nothing but a gray cloud. When you saw them on the other side of the room they looked stunning and showed promise. But by the time you got close enough to really see what they look like they were less than what you expected. They looked good from afar but up close and personal they were a mess.


Guess what? Thanks to the Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, free long distance on cell phones, chat rooms, dating and hookup websites, social events and pride gatherings this happens all the time. It seems that a lot of us meet guys and gals who we think are perfect or are compatible but they live in another city. Some travel to meet them, some even move to be with them, only to be disappointed. From afar they looked like a treasure but when you get near them the treasure is more like fool’s gold. Sometimes we even think that since we met two or three people from a particular city that the city must be an oasis for folks looking for dates and mates.


Sometimes what we see is only a mirage.
I have friends living in bigger cities who complain about the dating pool where they live. Some of the cities are popular places where brothers talk about relocating in order to find a mate or to “live the life”. In most - not all cases - the grass is no greener than where you probably already are. The grass is not greener on the other side, its greener where you water it.


I don’t believe in blaming the victim, but I do believe in some honest self evaluation. If you can’t be honest with yourself then you can’t expect people to be honest with you. Maybe – just maybe – the issue is with you and not the people or the city you live in. If you don’t know what you want or who you are or are not comfortable with yourself or play more games than Xbox, meeting someone in another city or relocating to a place where there may be more prospects is not going to change you. Like Marvin Gaye sang, “you can’t run from yourself because everywhere you go there you are.”


That person across the room may still look good up close but then you start to talk and “feel them out” you realize that they are not what you are looking for. They may look better outwardly than they are intimately. You heard the adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Not only does that warn to not judge a good book by an ugly cover, it also means don’t equate a good looking cover with what’s inside. The best looking covers I have seen are coloring books – colorful and vibrant on the outside but bland and lifeless on the inside. You got to do all the work to fill in the empty spaces. Once you are done filling in the spaces it become pretty much useless.


Remember, anyone can be anything they want to be online or far away in another city. But living in the same city or being in a relationship with them is another matter. I’ve heard many stories about people claiming to be or look one way but face to face they are totally different. That goes not only for looks but for personality as well.


Look around your own vicinity. The person in your space may be walking by you trying to get your attention but you are so focused on the mirage across the way that you miss the real thing. I am not saying that all people that interest you and who live out of town are mirages. My last mate lived 250 miles away in St. Louis (part of the reason we disconnected was the distance.) So your ideal mate may be in another city. But before you get all excited and decide to ‘walk across the room’, buyer beware – the person could be an optical illusion. They may seem like a dream from across the way but up close they resemble a nightmare.

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