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!