love out loud: every (wo)man’s land?

There was once a boy I thought was cute. I would see him traipsing about university and he looked vaguely familiar, but I just assumed I’d seen him at some point at one of the hovels I frequent.

On one fateful evening, I run into him at a bar. His name is Jimmy Page (sort of) and roughly the fourth thing he says to me is that he bets my writing is precocious and self-indulgent. Which, dear readers, as you may have noticed, it is.

I am smitten.

Setting aside my mildly alarming reasons for being attracted to him (like some bad rom com where two people are rude to each other initially), I end up in a taxi with this individual, realising too late why he’d looked familiar.

Some weeks earlier, my friend, Momo, had excitedly told me she’d spent the night with a guy who’d been in the year above us in high school and directed me to this babe’s facebook page. I had a quick look through his photos and agreed he was a good looking gentleman and then forgot about him, because there’s nowhere to really go with this information.

Do you see where this is going?

My initial thought is, shit. But then I rationalise that her account of the experienced hadn’t exactly been one that suggested she had any ongoing interest, whereas I was well on my way to obsessing over him for the next few months (or, until I went to America).

Momo thought differently.

When I tell her a few days later, she is rather unimpressed, even though I make mention of the fact that I only kissed him a few times and then fell asleep while he went to get a glass of water (the stuff real romance is made of).

Momo and I would talk about the situation several times more, and she ultimately wouldn’t care that I went home with him. But our individual views never changed.

Eventually, we just had to reconcile that she believed that you don’t go where your friends have been, whereas I didn’t think a one-night stand meant that a person was forever unavailable to your friends. I’d acted in accordance with my stance and Momo understood that I hadn’t known it was going to upset her. Now that I do know, however, I haven’t been near anyone she’s been near.

This is the kind of thing that it’s difficult to make absolute rules for. Some people don’t even want you to look at anyone they’ve ever found attractive, others don’t mind who you’re after as long as it’s not their current partner, and it’s hard to evaluate how every single person in your life feels about it. But if they’re someone you value, it’s worth finding out, and not doing so was my mistake.

It makes sense that people with similar interests who hang around a similar social circle are going to find similar people attractive, but how it’s handled and how everyone feels about it is going to be different for each situation. Usually it’s not about who is more ‘right’, but about communicating expectations so that no one gets hurt.

Just remember: bros before hos.

(Image credit: 1.)