Why You Don’t Like the People Who Like You

Edith Evans: You know what I wanted. I wanted to know where we were. Now I know.
Jack Linden: And?
Edith Evans: You love the person you're having the affair with.
(Source: We Don’t Live Here Anymore)

If a person tells you how to mend your heart but has never had his broken, don’t believe them. They will give you anecdotal evidence but it won’t work. You got to have money to make money, you got to have heartbreak to be able to fix hearts. You wouldn’t go to a surgeon who had never performed the procedure before, don’t take advice from someone who hasn’t done it before either.

I like to think we’re all in this rat race of romance and love. I’m guilty as charged, I didn’t have it in me to admit it at the time, but looking back I think I turned out okay so I can say this. I chased a couple girls who wanted somebody else. It wasn’t that what I was offering wasn’t good enough, it was that it wasn’t good enough for her. I realized years later what happened and why I couldn’t ever get those girls to like me the way that I liked them. A few years later, I’d be on the other side of the situation, I have a girl chasing me, and meanwhile, I was chasing something else. It’s amazing when a woman lays down and opens up to a man that she’s all his, 100%, but he ignores it and keeps it moving. There’s a few reasons why this happens, it actually all makes sense. I may be going too far to say it makes sense, it’s probably more accurately described as, it can be explained.

Men date down and women date up

Shhh… don’t tell women this, but they run the whole show. A man’s goal in life is to convince the woman that she has absolutely no power, and a woman’s goal in life should be to actually take her power and stop waiting for it to be given to her. Men want the baddest girl in the club, they will almost never get her. That girl doesn’t want a single man in the club, she wants the man who owns the club. That’s how men think and that’s how women think. There’s people in the NFL who are looking to be the highest paid player in the league, and then there’s a chick labeled as a groupie wants to marry the owner. When a man approaches a woman he does a quick analysis of whether he thinks he’s going to get anywhere with her, this is where most men bow out. Many men will bow out because they start to infer all types of things about a woman based on her looks, her clothes, and the people she’s surrounding herself with. The thing is that no man approaches a woman that he feels he’s has no chance with. Contrary, women will sit around and contemplate how they can get the guy they got their eye on to notice them. For those of us who went to college, think back to your freshman year, did it make sense that just about every girl had about six or seven guys in their sights? And just to drive this point home, most of those six or seven guys turned out the campus, and although the freshman male population idolized six or seven girls too, they ended up sleeping with everybody but those six or seven girls. Men date down, and women date up. Since they’re never on the same page it’s impossible to ever get with the one you actually want.

It’s Too Easy

To be perfectly honest, I realized that my approach in my younger years made it too easy for a woman. You can’t walk up to a woman, lay it all out in front of her and expect her to accept it. People want to work hard for what they get, they don’t want it given to them. When I offered to get my ish together, not move around too much, cuddle and spend time holding hands, take a chick out on a date and not sleep with her friends, she immediately slid me into the “friend” zone. Maybe they thought something was wrong with me, maybe they wanted a challenge, either way that shit ain’t work, so I stopped doing that. Now when I met a girl, went out on a few dates, and saw her homegirl out and tried to holler at her too – all of a sudden, both of these women are interested in me. That doesn’t make an ounce of sense. Jedi Mind Trick #386: Don’t call women, just text them. Only call them out of necessity. Why? If I don’t call you, you will ask me why I don’t call you because you want me to be the one who calls, but the guy who will call you, you don’t want to call you, so you never ask him to call. You’ve already admitted the interest, so stop trying to make a man jump through hoops. I can never call and it won’t even matter.

It’s not fun, there’s no glory

There’s a girl who has a good thing. She got a dude who brings home his check before he goes to the club, he has a dude who talk marriage and makes wise financial decisions, he treats her with respect, doesn’t mind that she won’t have sex with him but once or twice a week, and you know what she does? She f*cks his irresponsible best friend. There’s just something about having sex with that person you shouldn’t be having sex with that makes it worth it, or so they think. There’s something about that scene in Brown Sugar where she decides she’s going to try and sleep with him, despite knowing that she was about to get married the next day. Have you ever seen Indecent Proposal? There’s something about taking the woman away from another man’s kingdom and putting her in yours. That’s something you can look at later on in life and be proud of the chase. When I was in elementary school, it was cool to send notes to a girl that you liked and say, “I Like You, do you like me, check: yes or no.” All the chicks that checked “yes”, we went together for a couple weeks or days, but I spunt my whole 4th grade on Rena when she asked for a pencil, drew a box, checked it and wrote, “maybe.”

You can do better

Truth be told, you can always do better. The hardest is the first million dollars, but after that it’s easier to make two, three, 10 or 50. For a lot of us, that’s how we think about our love lives. Once you found that girl or guy that you never thought you’d be able to pull, your sights are set on, well what could I do now?! It’s never about being happy with what you have. Our love lives are the only parts of our lives where we are encouraged not to be progressive. We want more money, better jobs, better houses, better cars, but when it comes to a relationship, we are told that once you get something you should stop wanting something better. I don’t know if that’s fair or not, but what I will say is that when a guy pulls the baddest girl in the club, he doesn’t think to stop and enjoy the fruits of his labor, he thinks he can do it again. So that’s what a man does, he continues to keep trying to do it again and again, until finally he craps out. …Because in the end he will end up dating a level below than what he really wants.

It all comes down to this, “Quitting while you’re ahead is not the same thing as quitting.” The first time I heard that was in the movie American Gangster, but I’m sure its origin was well before that picture came out. But like every flaw in every gangster or hero, they just could never stop and smell the roses, they had to keep going. Tony Montana didn’t want to stop and it ended up costing him his life. Frank Lucas wouldn’t stop and it ended up costing him his life. I’m sure there was a guy who wanted to love and adore Halle for the rest of her life, but she didn’t want them and now she’s in the place she is today. I guess all I can do is explain to you that no one ever wants the people who want them, and hope that the next time you’re in this position you either have the strength to walk away or the strength to stay.