In one of my top five favorite books of all time--The Unbearable Lightness of Being--Kundera presents his reader base with two characters who find themselves taken by one another--as often characters in books are. What sets his description apart from others is his attraction to the idea of coincidence, and the idea that we only see coincidence as something more like fate--as something generally more profound--when...essentially, we want it to be more profound. Suddenly, a song isn't just a song, but the soundtrack to the first time you've met someone significant. Anyone else and it remains insignificant in meaning; we give it meaning only when it suddenly has meaning to us.

This is a concept I've carried with myself since reading this book at age seventeen.


I'm sitting in the library, feeling annoyed and tense to a high degree. R is next to me, and he's already confessed that he'd like to pick back up where we left off--basically, that he'd like to keep dating, like those two months we didn't talk never happened. In response, I've told him that this isn't going to happen, but that friendship is still on the table.

He says he's fine with this, but I don't think I'll be hearing from him much. His intentions, as he tells me, are clear.

(Ew. What the hell. Nevermind about the friendship.)

He proceeds to tell me that I came into his life out of nowhere, and runs with that for a few minutes, and that's when I absolutely know: He's given me a degree of significance that I haven't given him. This should have been obvious, right away: his conversation topics would, every once in a while, veer into what I was wearing, the night we met, or how weird it is that we share this or that in common...

Do I remember what he was wearing, the night we met? Man, not really. And I was the one who complimented his outfit! But to me, it just didn't stick; I lost interest in him, romantically, and those specific and "fate-filled" memories dropped off from my memory bank. Meanwhile, he essentially thinks of me as something sent down-stream to him in a bulrush basket.


Dating is wildly uncomfortable. Man, it is so uncomfortable. Everything about the conversation we had was uncomfortable in a way that made me very tense and defensive. I absolutely cannot stand when people just can't see me. He wasn't hearing what I was saying, or picking up on my cues--he was under this assumption that I'm vulnerable and small and needing of love and closeness...and while, sure, that's true in some circumstances (when I'm with a very select number of people with whom I feel safe), generally?

Generally, you don't see that side of me. Especially not after just three dates, come on.

Euughhh.


(He assumed I was too ladylike and polite to curse, and, from then on, it made me feel too uncomfortable to curse around him, and I CURSE A LOT, so I just felt wildly uncomfortable on our dates, from that point on, and the thought of going back to that just does not attract me at all because shit.)


Do not attach significance to strangers!

Maybe he's watched too many indie romance movies. Those things are always about fate.
» randomjunk on 2014-02-09 01:18:34

Wow such advice

It's crazy, that actually sort of applies to me right now.

...it must be fate...
» middaymoon on 2014-02-09 08:35:47

I've already been in 3 awkward conversations and a breakup just this weekend.
» middaymoon on 2014-02-09 10:57:56

lol middaymoon^^.

I do feel like if you [general "you"] stop attaching extremely heavy labels like "fate" and "destiny", and stop listening to songs on the radio and attributing them to all of your own situations, that your life ends up becoming way easier. Less poetic, less dramatic, less "struggling with the angst of the quintessential human experience", but way easier. It would be nice if you could find the love of your life and then reapply these pronouncements of "destiny" retroactively.
» Zanzibar on 2014-02-11 04:27:51

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