Cowardly Men

I guess I've always known that guys are total cowards, but it still manages to surprise me every time.

A few months ago, I was out with L and a bunch of his friends from college when I met Georgia Boy. He was cute, tall, nice, and I struck up a conversation with him. He made a point of asking me if L was my boyfriend, which I of course shut down, and apparently went around asking everyone else what they knew about me. At the end of the night, he asked for my phone number, asked if he could take me out to dinner, and told me I was "stunningly pretty." He texted me within the next five minutes that it had been great to meet me.

I was feeling pretty confident that he would call, which is always a mistake, because he never did. I even went so far as to call him myself and leave a message that I'd like to see him again, never to hear back.

So after all this, I just wrote him off and figured I'd never find out what happened there.

Well lo and behold last weekend while I was watching Epic Fail make out with his ex-girlfriend, L attended a birthday party for one of his friends from college and Georgia Boy walked in. Being the loyal friend he is, L asked Georgia Boy why he had never followed up with me and what the deal was, to which Georgia Boy replied, "Well I just don't really want to date anyone right now, so I never called her."

Aside from the fact that this reeks of some horrible excuse, it was the lamest thing I've ever heard. If he wasn't interested in dating anyone, then what was the point of asking me out on a date and taking my phone number at all? And since he had taken the effort to do that, would it really have been that difficult to call me and tell me he didn't want to date anyone? Seriously...

Look, no one likes to have awkward conversations. They are, almost always, intensely awful. But once you suck it up and just have the conversation, it usually makes things better. It probably would've been pretty easy for me to just stop calling Old Fart, and let it go that way, but instead I told him that I didn't want to date him anymore because I wasn't really feeling it. Was it uncomfortable? Yes, of course. Am I glad I did it? Um yes, absolutely.

This is probably pretty naiive of me, but I do believe that the truth makes everything better, and will inevitably come out eventually. I found out six months after the fact that my ex-boyfriend had been cheating on me for at least a month before we broke up. If he had told me this up-front back then, yes, I probably would've kicked him in the nuts, but it would've spared me a great deal of suffering. I guess it's the fear of the kick-in-the-nuts that prompts guys to lie and shy away from uncomfortable situations.

To which I predictably say, man up and grow some balls.