The Queen of Social Awkwardness strikes ***yet*** again!

[Please note:  this post is currently so unedited that it is still in “stream of consciousness” mode, ie writing down all the thoughts that occurred to me, before trying to fashion them into a coherent essay.]

The Queen of Social Awkwardness strikes ***yet*** again!

Or – LORD, I REALLY need a husband!

Or – Huggie-Wuggie, I blame you for this (whoever you might eventually turn out to be!!!)

Sighs!  I’ve gone and done it again. That is, I’ve “socially-awkwarded-out” yet another guy.  Honestly, I feel like holding my head in my hands just now.

You know, up until this afternoon, I had thought my next post would be about tiny-house living/ living off grid.  Really!  I know that that is a drastic departure from what I usually talk about.  However, I am beyond fed up of the rat race, I have been watching lots of YouTube videos and my mind is all full of that just now!

But then this evening happened, and oh boy, all I can say is that I’ve gone and done it yet again!!!

So yeah, I was at this….place, and there was this guy, and I just could not bring myself to smile or be friendly to him. At one point he oh so casually looked at me, (that is, it was clearly deliberate on his part, nothing truly casual about it at all) and I pretended not to see him, and avoided his eyes, where with everyone else I would have given a quick friendly grin.

And then obviously I felt terrible, and then subsequently attempted to patch things up by inserting myself into a conversation that he was having with two women. But what happened is that that split up into two conversations, he with one of those women, I with the other. And it was so obvious the whole evening that he was also feeling the awkwardness because if anything, he was speaking with exaggerated animation (which is always a giveaway!  Man I have so much experience with this thing!)   And then I made a further attempt to talk with him – literally just say “Hi” – but all that we happened is that we exchanged awkward smiles.

And you know what?  Evaluating myself in real time, I was able to analyse just what was going on: In short, I am scared. On one hand, there is the emotional response to someone who looks as if he could be on my wavelength – handsome etc – and then there is the fearful response to aggressively shut down that emotional response.

The story with this guy did not actually start tonight.  It actually started a week ago. My eyes wandered over to this guy, made the briefest eye contact with him – if that? (I forget!) At any rate I had one of those split-second realisations: “Ooh, he’s handsome!”  And then shortly afterwards I saw the wedding band and I thought  “OK…”  And then I just could not bring myself to speak with him. But you know what, it was not even about the fact that he was married. It was more the hopefulness of that first response, and then aggressively shutting that down.  So it is as if my subconscious/wherever has recognised that this is someone I could naturally get on well with, and because of that, around him there is always the risk of “a leak of loneliness”, like an unguarded look revealing too much… So I reflexively, uncontrollably react by refusing to interact with him at all.  It is like the subconscious part of my mind which I have trained to strictly avoid the slightest hint of romantic danger just shuts everything down in terms of friendly interaction with any married man where there has been any initial spontaneous emotional reaction.

And then, oh drat, the last week did not do anything to dissipate the awkwardness, but exactly the same thing ensued tonight.

Or another way to look at it is this:  when interacting with other people, including other men, where there is not this emotional response, I feel completely in control of myself. So I can easily and effortlessly chat and talk with these people, that is most people without feeling the slightest fear, or indeed the slightest anything whatsoever.

When it comes to my loneliness however, I know that this thing can sometimes be bigger than me, and outside my conscious control.  I know that sometimes it can leak out and communicate with guys more than I’d like them to know, or in ways which are completely inappropriate.  Which is why my emotional reflexes aggressively shut down spontaneous interaction with these guys, and I end up acting in a way which is really forced and unnatural. And I genuinely can’t help it.  You know the worst thing, because I get on so well with other people, and behave so naturally towards other people, I can pinpoint the exact point at which the guy in question starts to blame himself, and adjust his behaviour, and in each case I am mentally groaning inside, and I really wish I could tell him:  Please do not blame yourself!  It really is not you, it’s me!  I always do this!

But seriously, how can you tell a guy:  “Please do not blame yourself!  There is just something about you that triggers my deep-seated loneliness.  By the way, I really like your [mention a piece of clothing]”  Clearly I am not going to be having that conversation with anyone!

My solution: Limit interaction with this guy. This is so annoying because that also means that I have to limit my interaction with the social setting where he was…And next time, I emphatically am going to speak with him – so there! So from just two days interaction I feel as if I have sown the seed of awkwardness between us. Man, I hate making other people feel awkward. But then I found myself asking:  well maybe the awkwardness does not reside in me alone.  Could it be that there is a little residing in him too? Perhaps the history of these things has been a case of my awkwardness finding the awkwardness in other people too.

[ The writing above is relatively coherent. The part below is the more “Stream of consciousness” part.

Dilemma:  On one hand I am thinking “Aargh!  Married man! Run away Tosin!”  On the other hand I am thinking: “I am determined to finally overcome this!”

Lord, when are You going to finally deliver me from this?!

Lord, why do I behave like this?!
Do other people act awkward like this too?  Does everyone have these slightly awkward exchanges with the opposite sex?!  I’ve always assumed it was only me, but then it occurred to me that actually, this might be common, or actually, perhaps everyone has these!

The jagged edges of my loneliness:  I manage to be totally smooth with almost everyone, but every so often there is someone whose attention catches and gets caught on the jagged edges of my loneliness.

Trust in my own boundaries:  ask a few questions, then cut it off:  part of the issue is that I have never learned to have boundaries in conversation with guys – I’ve never realised I needed them.  That is not to say I talk about anything and everything but with them I just use exactly the same natural ebbs and flows of conversation as I do with women.
But if I learned to apply certain boundaries, and trust those boundaries, then I need not be worried about a conversation getting too deep and too intimate, and then…perhaps a good boundary would be to only speak with this man/men in general in conversation with other people.

Really sincere in my interactions with everyone else – I’ve never learned how to apply a little bit of emotional distancing/whatever it might be called between what is in my heart and how I smile. The reason my smiles are so powerful is because I genuinely smile out the contents of my heart. If all my smiles are a sincere expression of what is in my heart, then sometimes anything else that might be in my heart comes out too – and sometimes loneliness seeps out too. What I am petrified of is looking at this person and making an instant emotional connection with him through the unavoidable seeping out of a little honest loneliness.

You know what dreadful thought hit me?  For likely the first time:  I have been hit by this thought:  what if marriage is not the solution to this that I have always assumed it would be?  Psychologically my reasoning has always been this:  this is all an expression of loneliness. So when HW turns up, hopefully he will fill up my emotional tank to the point where there are no more gaps…However, what if that turns out to not be true?  What if there are still emotional gaps or spaces in my heart even after I get married, and I still unconsciously go around trying to strike up emotional connections with people?  Gulp!

And you know something else too?  These things may be lurking, quietly processing in my subconscious, but they are not front of mind.  So I was happily minding my own business, not thinking about this at all, and then it struck, seemingly out of nowhere.

But seriously, I need a husband!  And I need to enjoy a deep, deep emotional (and sexual) connection with him. All that good Huggie-Wuggie stuff!  Dear Lord, please bring a man and create an interaction where he and I can just stare into one another’s eyes – perhaps years after getting married! I spend so much time happily living my own life, scarcely thinking about guys and marriage at all except for a few hormonal days every menstrual cycle.  Then I also spend so much time thinking about how much hard work marriage is, especially as a woman, and then I so much time laughing with angry resentment at the idea of a wife’s marital submission to her husband (Ephesians 5v24 – in everything). But then something like this strikes me out of the blue, and I realise that all that romantic yearning is still very much there, bubbling away under the surface, and it would be prudent to have a designated, official person to be the object of all these feelings and all this awkwardness!  More commonly known as “a husband”!  And that would be my very own, exclusive husband, not anyone else’s!

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