12.18.2002 - 12:18 p.m.

I have always wondered at the phrase "to tremble in fear." Trembling is soft and graceful and sweet, and it is relatively simple to soothe away. Fear doesn't tremble. Fear vibrates, rattles, debilitates. It's violent, almost as painful as the loneliness that hits you when you are trying to brush your teeth, but you can hear the roommate and her boyfriend--no, fiance now--kissing behind the other door.

So it turns out that my greatest fear about dating is not that I will have to hurt a perfectly good person for emotional reasons not under my control. Nor is it that I will have to give up the control I have over my own life, even though those are the things I had to pay with last time.

It's annoying to realize this kind of thing. Realization, as a general rule, makes me feel pretty stupid. I pay an inordinate amount of attention to what I am thinking and feeling at any given moment, so I feel that I should be better at coming to the proper conclusions.

Anyway. So my fears aren't what I thought they were.

Last night a guy called me, not Tony but the one I was seeing for the first half of Thanksgiving break. Theoretically, because this is what I decided in my infinite wisdom, I am casually dating both of them, as I want to be absolutely sure of everything first. But I haven't seen anyone but Tony since we started off, and last night I was talking to this guy and not really wanting to. I wouldn't commit to seeing him again, and when his cell phone died I was kind of glad. And then I went to bed, and realized that my brain was rehearsing ways to tell Tony I was done with keeping my options open.

What I really resent about my emotional brain is the way it keeps making decisions for me. That's not it's job. Rational brain is in charge of those, dammit, and rational brain has come to the repeated conclusion that I should get used to dating in general before I get into dating in specific.

Of course, rational brain has been making any number of decisions just because I'm scared of the alternatives, and not because they're necessarily the right decisions to make, so I don't really know what kind of credentials it has anymore. Which brings me back to the beginning of this entry.

What really scares me isn't that it will be like last time, that I will have to break another heart. Or, that does terrify me, but it's not only that, or even mostly that.

What really scares me is that I might miss something important because I am too frightened of things that won't even matter except under some very specific circumstances several years from now. What really scares me is that now that I have reached this place, he may not want to be here with me. He can hurt me, now. I'd forgotten to worry about that part of it all.

So I guess I lied last week, when I said I wouldn't write about dating anymore. Sorry about that; I really did mean to spare you.

-stonebridge

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