Too much, too little
Every Saturday night, the streets of Makati and Taguig get crowded with twentysomethings and college students looking for a night of good fun. Over diluted mixes of hip-hop and house, the same bouts of information will be exchanged: name, age, university, travel time, and something along the lines of “Are you having fun?” On this particular Saturday night, though, I did stay up until late, but talking about something else, with somebody else.
Half-buried under her thick duvet, I conversed with my best friend about different things: our taste in guys, how university was going, what we wanted in a relationship. Still, it ended with the same question, asked over laughter and serious introspection.
It seems like girls our age are tied to the inevitable conversation about our dream guy. It’s a trope as old as time, the one in romantic comedies or music videos: the sleepover with sheet masks and a bowl of popcorn and hours-long conversation about guys or crushes. What I observe constantly is that the conversation about the guy is often a segue to the conversation of what we want in a relationship.
In turn, I also observe that our tastes in guys and relationships lead all my girl friends to be wary of entertaining a guy — even if it’s just one minute detail of his personality or the possible relationship that doesn’t align with what they want. Girls can always seem to tell how a guy will act based on seconds-long conversation — so if they pick up on one sign of something they don’t particularly want, they’re out, if not in serious doubt.
Is that considered being perfectionists? Or are we literally forcing ourselves to be so meticulous over what we want even when it could be right under our noses? And if it’s the latter — why? When I ask (both friends and myself) why we’re so quick to stop and overthink the nature of the relationship, it’s because we don’t want to be tied to a bad relationship. We’re looking at the signs early and anticipating the doom of the fling, the terror of having one awry relationship under our belt or kiss list.
And while we all are generally adept at seeing the signs before suffering through what they predict, I do sometimes wonder if anything good was missed. I can’t help but think of the same question guys ask us in between beat drops and flashing lights—Are we having fun?
My good friend Ruth is a classic example of this: she follows a strict and self-imposed dating etiquette and will let it dictate her fling’s, or her night’s, flow. On a humid Saturday night in February, we joined the throng of city people and, with my heels aching just 40 minutes in, I traversed the club with her by my side.
Every so often we would, while dancing, exchange thoughts on the guys around us; if anybody came up to us, she would wave them off and turn to me: Too this—probably too “commitment-y.” Too that — probably immature. So I asked her who she considered perfect, if just for the moment, and she reminded me of her fling from a few months ago via a screenshot of his selfie on her phone, brightness turned way down low in case anyone recognized his smirking, frozen face.
I stared, baffled, at the screenshot. He looked exactly like the guy she said was too … something, just minutes earlier. I waited for her to get what I was picking up, but she just smiled at his face on the screen and made an offhand comment about missing him a bit. I hummed and thought. We didn’t seem to align there.I thought of my old fling. He looked exactly like the guy I once thought was not … something, enough. I thought of all my friends who allowed one guy to come into their lives and distanced another guy based on rules that, I realized, were actually completely arbitrary. And I realized even Amy couldn’t even follow her own austere rules, her own provisions of her own etiquette mindsets.
It isn’t because some guys are just so charming, or even because some guys are just so disgusting. It’s because when we girls feel ourselves having fun, types, and wants seem to not make much sense anymore. So if you’re on, on a Saturday, and you see a girl at the club, chances are if she’s dancing with her friends, you’ll have an answer to the question on the tip of your tongue.
Why even keep talking about it, then? The thing is, what we want is often modeled after what we currently have and thoroughly enjoy. When my girl friends say they want something fun and casual, they’re having a fun and casual night with us. When they say they’re in it for marriage, they compare it to the years of friendship we share together. When they say they want somebody who understands them, sees right through them, laughs with them and perhaps at them if the situation demands it, and really just loves them, they always tack onto the end of their sentence: “You know, like you guys?”
So even if our rules often come up short and odd and cherry-picked, the conversations will continue, because trust me—we have a hell of a lot of fun doing it.
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Belle, 18, is a university student who loves to write and writes of love — all kinds of it.
