Jane came over for supper last night. Kiff cooked this amazing recipe from the Food and Wine (summer 2005) with chicken and ratatouille and all these fresh herbs...yum.
Anyhow, Jane is hilarious - she is an amazing storyteller and she is always has a plethora of stories of Men Behaving Badly (complete with funny voices). Sometimes her summations of men sound like composite cosmo titles "Men Who Are Afraid to Commit and the Women Who Love Them: How to Spot a Commitment-Phobe".
Jane says that a sign that man is a commitment-phobe is when he is perennially single but his friends say: "he has dated a lot of great girls, but the trouble is they get so serious that within a week they want to marry the guy." She has a friend who bought a book all about men like that.
I said: "Well, if I had actually researched kiff before we dated, I probably would have thought that was true about him, too. And it certainly was not the case."
"But you played hard to get. I mean, you went to India, and then you didn't move in with him right away."
It was pretty funny. Because looking back, Kiff was the one time I had no agenda. We knew we really liked each other. We were just trying to make some funny timing work out.
So my advice, cosmo-style. If you are spending a lot of time wondering "what does he/she thinking of me?" it is probably not going to "take".
Commitment-phobe, workaholic, mama's boy, whatever label that might apply....If you are breathless with self-doubt, calculating your next phone call, you are probably going to be disappointed by the outcome.
But once the suspense and doubt are cleared and you are still excited about seeing them again, well, then, go to India for a few months and see if you still feel the same. Then travel through a developing country together, come home, wait a few months before moving in (but still spend every night together) and finally remind yourself that you can't schedule for joy.
