Even Though I Shouldn't

Deep down inside, there must be a rule-breaker hiding someplace in my soul.

I was never the girl to break the rules. It wasn’t that I was severely punished for breaking them if I ever did as a child; there has just been a deeper part of me that always understood from a very young age, that rules are generally put there for a good reason. Whether it be there for safety or for learning or whatever other purpose, there generally is one.

So here I am almost 26 years into life. I’ve snuck into a Sean Paul concert and I’ve tried pot. The only two non-traffic related rules I’ve ever broken law-wise (that I am aware of). But where the rule-breaker starts to bare her claws is when it comes to the the game.

I’m not, of course, speaking of a board game or a card game. I am most definitely talking about the Dating Game. And for me, I may know the rules but that naughty girl comes to the surface of me as soon as I see someone who might be interesting and she makes me itch ‘til I just have to scratch. I break the rules.

A man likes to hunt, and thus a woman should not hunt man, but he should pursue her as his prey. This is a major rule of the game. I have adapted my own rule and have told myself that I should not message a man on OKCupid. If he is interested, he will message me. And yet on a rare occasion I break not only the major rule of the game, but my own adaptation: The man, the hunter, has found me in a field of several other deer grazing, and he has passed me by for one reason or another. I am not his prey. And yet I see that he has been looking, and like a silly doe, I occasionally approach. I can’t go into the number of reasons that this goes against a single-girl’s survival in the dating world. Yet I break it.

Perhaps if I look at it in the technological sense, there is a chip missing. Perhaps that is it. We as humans, are computers and problem solvers, and I am missing the chip that simply knows that it should not call the male over. Rather, I have a faulty chip that consistently re-computes the formula. It can get the same answer repeatedly, but the chip just re-calculates and re-calculates until she –oops—makes a teensy error in the computation which tells her that it is okay to call the man rather than simply send a signal through that electric pulse to ignite a spark that should exist between the two potential lovers.

Yea, that’s it. I’m a mechanical deer with a faulty chip! (In reality, this comes down to the fact that I lack self-discipline).

But alas, the first step to recovery is admitting there is a problem. And therefore, I will simply stop my re-calculations and, in order to survive, will also not approach a hunter who is not hunting me.

So to all the online-dating men: Happy hunting; and to all my fellow women, happy being hunted!