opinion@dailylobo.com
Gay or straight, I don’t think that I will ever understand men. Things seem normal at first, and you cannot help but imagine your future with them, but the next thing you know they won’t respond to your texts or see you again.
After dating for years and being in numerous relationships, I have experienced and learned a lot about men. Even though I’m gay, there is still so much I do not understand about the men I date.
And having a lot of female friends has only made me more curious.
By now you’re probably thinking that this column is going to be like the television series “Sex and the City,” and you are correct. I think Candace Bushnell helped a lot of people with her column, but times have changed; now there are many new complications in dating.
Dating has gone digital.
Who has to be the first to text the other? What does it mean if he likes her Facebook status? Does texting someone else mean that he is emotionally cheating on you? What if he favorites her tweets? How long do you need to date before it is acceptable to call him? These are some of the questions that my friends and I have spent hours debating and trying to understand.
The answer to most of them may never be known for sure, but I think that we can all learn something from each other in this new age of dating and relationships. Helping me along the way are my five closest friends.
Ashley and Alice are sisters who I consider to be part of my own family. We share everything and only date people our “siblings” approve of. Alice has made some bad choices in past relationships even though we warned her; and Ashley is waiting until marriage to have sex. She and I are very close and want a lot of the same things from men: cookies, Disney movies and nights spent cuddling.
Collette is one of my closest friends. We both look for certain qualities in a man: success, attractiveness and motivation. Our biggest challenge is finding someone who meets all of those criteria.
Aurora is another one of my best friends. Neither of us sees a lot of guys, but when we do, we make sure they’re someone we genuinely like. We go out a lot together and are each other’s best wingmen.
Finally, my roommate Maggie guides me through dating. She hasn’t had very many boyfriends, but she has several close guy friends and knows a lot about them. Whenever I get caught up in any of my relationships, she always keeps me grounded.
There have been so many bizarre dates my friends and I have gone on that I couldn’t help but write about them. In the last year I ended a long-term relationship and joined the pool of single students at UNM.
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I used to think that my latest boyfriend — Bradford — and I were going to be together forever. The relationship only lasted a year and a half before I broke up with him, however. I realized that one of the main reasons I ended things was because he never made our relationship “Facebook official.”
Is this what dating has come to these days? Entire relationships end if our boyfriends don’t change their relationship statuses? Does social media really influence our relationships that much?
Since then I have gone through many different guys looking for the right one for a long-term relationship. I haven’t found what I am looking for yet, and neither have my friends, but we all help each other along the way.
So, like Carrie Bradshaw, I aim to write a weekly column for the Daily Lobo about dating, men, relationships and, of course, sex. Unlike Bradshaw, however, most of my columns are written on lonely nights with Taco Bell and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc nearby.
Regardless, I hope this column will not only provide advice, but will make some of you no longer feel alone. We all have felt rejected or confused, so now we can try to understand what dating is like in the face of modern technology.
I feel like I’m deserving of someone special, and aren’t we all?
In this world of seven billion people, will we all find our soul mates? Or are some of us destined to date for the rest of our lives? And when we do start dating, is it only real once we change our #RelationshipStatus?
