He's just not that into you.

I'm going to share a secret with you and I'm pretty sure I'm breaking some sort of girl code by doing this but what the hell I'm feeling pretty reckless tonight. There is this unspoken rule among women about how we don't discuss the crazy that women try so hard to keep all bottled up until they are sure the guy they are with isn't going to run far far away but here I am all ready to divulge, well perhaps not everything but certainly some of it.

Ever since I got a mobile phone I have been ruled by those minutes or hours or sometimes days after you have sent a guy a text message and you wait, not at all patiently, wondering if your message (which took hours to write but you settled on hey, how are you) sounded too desperate, too keen and you try not to shout at random strangers, arggh why isn't he texting me back. The depressing fact is despite reaching my thirties without too much drama I'm still suffering my way through this like some sort of hormonal teenager. 

 I recently relapsed and texted a guy I hadn't really been dating as such but still managed to break up with just after christmas (it's complicated, in the way that there are many grey areas between dating someone and not). Now I'm not sure quite what made me do it or what precisely I was hoping to achieve but I think the real question should have been what his number was still doing in my phone, Surely I should have deleted it to prevent such a calamity occurring and I wasn't even drunk when I committed the offence so really I have no excuse.
Anyway the short version is he replied and we were sort of talking until I sent a message and got no reply. Which made me feel very silly indeed while I contemplated the fact that perhaps just because I had no bad feelings about things when I last decided not to see him again perhaps he didn't quite share the same level of goodwill towards me. After all he did get dumped by a girl he wasn't actually dating as such  ( I told you this was complicated.) Now, I have healthy reactions to these sort of situations so my first thought was definitely not...get me some cake (mostly because I can't eat cake anymore unless it's made from air or a variety of difficult to source ingredients like coconut flour and coconut sugar ) and I most definitely not eat more almond butter than I'm comfortable publicly telling people about ( there's been a spate of almond butter robberies in the area lately where the thief breaks in and eats half a jar of almond butter and leaves everything else, true story) It's wrong that just writing that made me think mmmmm almond butter (sorry, I  got side -tracked) but I did do the rational thing and delete his phone number to prevent this from happening again.

 Now a good friend of mine used to have a theory about texting guys. She would talk about a thing called the power and in case you are not familiar with this concept here's how it works.
Whoever is the last person to text has the power so If a guy texts you and you don't reply then you have the power and you can keep this power by holding off on replying. There's only one problem with this game and that is that men never know they are playing it. It hardly seems fair to be playing a game when only one of you knows the rules but many women I have been friends with over the years will still do this consistently. I myself have said If he doesn't text by this day or this time that's it he's missed his chance and that's it. Shame no one thinks to tell the men about this. I've also been a bit hasty with deleting a guys number and there's nothing worse than when you get rid of someones number from your phone and you get a text a few days later from a number that may or may not be the guy you were waiting to hear from but you don't really want to admit you got rid of his number (lest he think you're crazy) 

 So yes it's a complicated business being a woman and its a little upsetting how little seems to have changed for me in the last fifteen years. Social networking hasn't exactly helped things along because you don't only have texts to wait on but you also have the joys of waiting on reply on facebook chat and honestly the worst part of that is you can see if somebody's online and it also tells you if they've read your message. It might as well send you a message saying yes he's read it and he's not replying now move on. Too harsh? Sometimes he's not that into you and sometimes he just might even know that you're into him. Which is an easy trap to fall into when you're anything like me. So keen to play it cool that I almost fool myself into thinking I don't really care.  But deep down I know that I do which is why I'm giving my phone the evil eye. It seems unnaturally quiet so much so at times I check my tones are on because I haven't heard any messages coming through in a while. 
I can't say this is quite the air of sophistication I had been hoping I'd be giving off at this point in my life but I guess there's still a smidgen of hope that I wont always feel like an insecure 15 year old playing at being a grown up. It's not much but it's enough

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