ringonit
This won’t come as a surprise to any of the women reading this, but guys have three speeds: Stop, Go and Neutral. Stop is when they have absolutely no interest in you and make it clear from the start. Go is when you’ve had three dates but he’s already picked out the ring. Neutral is everything else. Men are in neutral 97 percent of the time.
“’What are we doing?’ That’s a question I ask my boyfriend whenever I feel like fighting,” says Angela, a 32-year-old teacher from Estero. “I’m serious. It all just boils over in me when we just live day to day without any real plan for the future.”
In case you’re curious, her boyfriend is 36 and also a teacher AND they are living together. They’ve been dating for five years and living together for two. “Part of me thinks ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t rock the boat,’” says Angela (who began mixing metaphors when she switched from wine to mixed drinks). “But shouldn’t we be moving towards something?”
Angela, your dude is in neutral. Something is keeping him from pulling that trigger. They say that women wait for Mr. Right and that men are just waiting for the music to stop, at which point they’ll grab the chair closest to them. (You are the chair in this scenario.) Wanting to be that chair won’t make the music stop any faster. Either keep dancing or cut bait (I can mix metaphors, too).
“So do I just keep waiting?” she asked from just above her Long Island iced tea. (Yep, someone still drinks those.) “Nah,” I replied. “Oh my god, really?” she said, stunned. “I don’t know you,” I shot back. “At all. I just explained that guys are in neutral most of the time, but most of them will eventually find ‘go.’ I have no idea if you should ‘go’ first.”
With that she seemed incredulous. “You’re of no help whatsoever,” she said.
I prefer to think of myself as neutral.
The Chronicles of Miss X
Breezes has kinda fallen by the wayside, I guess. I was really busy at work when he texted on Monday about getting together again. I gave him two days I could meet and we decided on this evening. He asked me if I had any suggestions on what to do and I said, “No, not at the moment.” I haven’t heard from him since. I did text yesterday asking if he had ideas and received no reply. I could do the whole “Maybe he lost his phone” or “Maybe he got run over by a truck and is now lying in a hospital with amnesia” thing, but I’m not going there. (I watched He’s Just Not That Into You over the weekend, can you tell?)