It’s Okay To Admit That He’s Just Not That Into You

It was my dad who introduced me to the world of movies and the land of make believe. Just like any toddler, I would dream of becoming a princess (actually no, my biggest dream was to become a doctor or an actress, or both), but unlike every other child on the planet, I never quite outgrew it.

My dad’s love for movies fueled the flame already robust and turned me into a full-fledged daydreamer. And just like any teenager, days of pretending to be a Duck (as in Mighty Ducks) turned into days of falling in love with Nathan and Lucas Scott (did you actually expect me to choose!). My love for writing rooted from the scenarios I made up for myself during Trig class in high school.

And just like in any story, I was always the princess, the girl the valiant knight chose (or just Joseph Gordon Levitt) over all the rest. What makes my story interesting (prepare to laugh now) was that I was a real, true blue dork. And not the kind who just wears prescription-less glasses, makes a duck face, and labels it #dork on Instagram. I was the girl who would trip over herself constantly and stay at home instead of you know “getting my game on” because it’s scientifically proven that oozing over Danny Castellano on The Mindy Project while working on my loom bands is a better use of my time as compared to you know asking someone to buy me a drink or something.

However, at 25, even if you do stay indoors most of the time, you can’t help but meet guys and think, hey this could be my A Cinderella Story unraveling. Or I finally get to be Samantha Baker and have Jake confess his love for me.

But, as of this writing, I am still very much single (like no one to text with single) and for the first time in my life, I realized that it’s okay. I’ve poured over books that told me directly when a guy wasn’t interested but because of my love for romance, and all those meet cute stories, I tried dropping hints, and gave myself pep talks (he likes you he’s just shy and so on, I never ran out of idiotic things to say to fuel my hallucination).

At 25, you come to realize that maybe I’ve set my expectations too high and it’s okay to text someone who can’t for the life of him spell or even text a decent “thanks”. Sometimes, you hold on to a simple gesture simply because you know at the back of your mind that this was another one of those things that were not going to work. You also go as far as blaming yourself, thinking that just because you’re not movie star hot, you don’t deserve those stories.

You do everything you can except admit that hey this guy is not into me. We analyze, we pour our hearts out when in fact we should have just admitted from the beginning that this was nothing more than something that started out great but ran its course.

I realized it doesn’t make me less of a person to admit that maybe my real life Nathan Scott doesn’t see me that way. It doesn’t make me less attractive or less of a person. In fact, it made me more. It made me, for the lack of a less cliché term, better. Since I know what it feels like to not be wanted (sometimes rather rudely), I have learned to treat other people better. But most importantly, I have learned to treat me better, because if I don’t, in this reckless world, who will?

And also freeing myself from all the expectations has given me a peace unlike no other and for the first time in a really long time, it made me hope that maybe someday, I will do get that meet cute story, but for now, I’m okay with me.