100 Emails, 20 Dates An SF girl's systematic quest to end her singlehood

Dealing with disappointment

One tipsy evening, one of my bros kept saying, "N., you're so awesome," and giving me hugs. Repeatedly. My friend R., knowing that I had a friend crush on this particular bro, observed all this, and the next day, she IM'd me. "He totally likes you," she said. "You have to make your move." No way, I insisted. He was just drunk and lovey. Plus, he likes Asian girls. She held firm. "He definitely is interested. You just have to move out of the friend zone."

I didn't know how to do that, but it got me thinking: "Maybe he is interested." He and I became super fast friends, and we had just had this great conversation where we basically told each other how glad we were that we had gotten to know each other. He has pretty much all the qualities I want in a guy: smart, funny, goofball sometimes, serious other times, really fun, moral compass, good to his friends and family. Why did I think that someone like him wouldn't like me? Besides the fact that I'm not Asian, of course. And that, in every "deep" conversation, we both kept reiterating that we were glad to be friends. I got my hopes up.

He wasn't interested in me. He was just drunk and lovey, a fact I realized when he told me later that he didn't really remember much of that evening. And if that wasn't clear enough, when a bunch of us went out a few days later, he hung out with a friend of ours (who is a great person who happens to be really cute and sweet and Asian), then he stopped responding to my IMs, emails, and texts entirely for the next, well, ever since, because now they're dating (or nearly dating).

I was a little heartbroken. I had been perfectly fine with my friend crush. It made me really look forward to hanging out with him, yet there was zero pressure because I knew it wasn't going to go anywhere. Perfect, right?

So although I had actively tried to avoid it, I had gotten my hopes up. And then I had gotten them dashed. I was mad at myself for ignoring the evidence. I was also mad at myself for thinking that maybe he had liked me and I had missed my chance. I was mad at myself for taking someone else's advice when I knew (I knew!) that I was right.

After a while, I realized that A) I was being bratty and B) the problem wasn't that I had let myself hope. The problem was that I wasn't dealing well with disappointment. Actually, the problem was that I was taking it as disappointment. It felt like rejection when I realized he wasn't interested in me. But it wasn't rejection. It was nothing. A non-response that I was expecting, after all. Why be disappointed? NEXT!

So my next assignment is to open myself to possibilities, not take a lack of positive response as rejection, and move on when it doesn't work out. This whole dating thing felt much easier when it was just marks on a scoreboard.