I think I should get my therapist to be a guest blogger here, because my best posts lately have just been me retelling his stories.

In my last appointment, we got on the subject of boys. I told him that one of my major problems is that I just don’t know when guys are hitting on me. If I do sense it, I think I must be wrong because my intuition has been wrong later in relationships and it’s lead me astray, so why should I listen to it in the beginning.

“How’s that working for you?” he asked, wryly.

I held up my left hand. “No ring on this finger, what?!?!” I said.

I told him about J.: that we’d been flirting, we went out one night, we finally talked about it, I told him I liked him. “What did he say?” my therapist asked.

“He said he thought I was hot,” I said.

“That’s good.”

“He said that I have the right ingredients.”

“Good. What else?”

“He said he wasn’t convinced it would work out,” I said, feeling like that was the clincher.

“Well, who is? When does anyone know it’s going to work out?” he said. “Then what happened?”

“Then we kissed.”

“Good.”

“But I couldn’t tell if he liked me or if he just wanted to kiss me,” I said.

“Guys generally don’t kiss girls they don’t like,” my therapist said. Which made sense. I guess. I still wasn’t convinced.

I told him that J. and I hadn’t really talked since that night. (I neglected to tell him that I accidentally sent him a completely inscrutable text when I was bombed last Friday. It was probably meant to be a booty call, but I reread it the next day, when I remembered that I had sent it, and I still couldn’t quite figure it out.)

He asked what would be my ideal outcome. Basically, I want to be able to tell him that I want to give it a chance. “So ask him out,” he said. “Call him up. Say you want to make out with him, ask  him out on a date, whatever. Ask him out. But don’t have any expectations. This is about you putting it out there. Once you do, it’s not about you anymore, it’s about him.”

He told me about a time when he was out with a friend whose husband had recently left her. She was really upset. Another friend of theirs, who “really sees things clearly,” was writing something down on a piece of paper as she was talking about it. During a pause in the conversation, the friend said, “Hey, I made a sign for you.” He flipped it around and it said, “NEXT!”

So that’s the idea I’m trying to cultivate. I ask for what I want, if the guy wants to respond, great. If not, on to the next one. Oddly enough, when I think of it that way, I see more possibilities. I’ve been thinking too much about scarcity of available guys. But when I think, “NEXT!” then I suddenly find more possibilities.

So I asked J. out on Monday. I left a message on his cell. He sent me a text a couple hours later saying he was out with friends. I texted him the next day: “Beers, shuffleboard, Doc’s Clock. Pick a time: tonight, Sunday, or next week.”

No response.

NEXT!

My current day job (as of 12/1) is at a brand-new experiential travel magazine. Someone sent this in as a response to our direct mail package, but it perfectly captures some thoughts and feelings I’ve had recently:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one… Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.” — C.S. Lewis

Sesame Street was the best.

BadOnlineDates recently posted something on the best dating books. I’ve been thinking of writing a similar post for a while now. First off, let me say that I think most self-help books are B.S. Many of them are 400-page versions of a Cosmo article: something that is allegedly empowering but is actually kind of insulting to your intelligence. I think one of the best things that people can learn — in dating or whatever — is to trust their own instincts and listen to themselves. And my picks for good dating books encourage that.

1. He’s Just Not That Into You. The good thing about women is that we talk to our women friends about our lives. More often than not, our friends help bring a healthy dose of reality or perspective to a situation. But one area in which we often fail our female friends is in relationship advice. We give each other false hope (“Oh, maybe he’s just busy, that’s why he hasn’t called!”). I love this book because it reinforces the idea that if a guy’s not putting forth a modicum of effort, then he’s not into you. And that’s perfectly OK. Why waste time, energy, and emotion on a guy who’s never going to call/commit to you/end his marriage? This book was a much-needed wake-up call for me and my two roommates at the time.

2. Mars and Venus on a Date. Total self-help cheese (and written in extremely simplistic language), but there’s a lot of good advice in here. Men and women are different. We have different basic needs, we respond to situations differently, and we can be better partners to each other if we understand that. In this book, John Gray shows how to apply the Mars/Venus principles to dating — when you don’t actually know the person yet. One of my favorite pieces of advice in here is to take a step back and think about how you’re really feeling. I often get caught up in the excitement of a new relationship and don’t really realize whether it’s working (or how to make it work better) until the patterns start to be established.

3. The Rules. My friend P. bought me this book because it describes, to a degree, her philosophy on dating: be fun and aloof and when he’s ready, he’ll come around. If he’s not, you didn’t get that emotionally involved anyway. I have to include the same disclaimers that Liz Funk did on BadOnlineDates.com. This book is insultingly written and contains a lot of contradictory advice. For example, it says that it doesn’t matter what you look like, you can find the right person for you. But, if you have an unattractive nose, for example, the authors wholeheartedly recommend getting plastic surgery. Gross. But the fundamental idea is a good one: Live your life the way you want. Don’t give up your life for a guy. If the guy is distant, be present but don’t chase after him (an idea that John Gray wholeheartedly endorses in the Mars/Venus books). Give what you get. I recommend skimming this one, though. You’ll get too angry if you read it too closely.