so & so has sent you a message on facebook!

Rewind three years, I was going to weekly meetings of the campus club Women In Film. One afternoon the meeting was a measly four of us: Courtney, two boys, and me. The two boys remained fairly silent as Courtney and I debated and conversed the finer points of Nora Ephron's works (When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, Gilmore Girls–this list might explain the silence of the males). The next day one of those boys, whom I'll call Fred, sent me a facebook message saying something about how I sounded interesting and he'd like to get to know me more.

A message through an impersonal social networking site? What?

This has happened to me quite a few times. I have to admit that my first reaction is feeling a bit annoyed that it seems to be impossible to find me after class and say, "Hey, that was an interesting thought, do you want to grab a shake? I'd like to talk about it some more." Apparently that's a really scary thing to do. I can appreciate this but it isn't actually that enjoyable to have people afraid of you unless you're trying to go for the evil dictator thing. Generally that's not my goal.

But it's not always just shyness. The last boy I dated I'd been pen pals with on and off for four or five years. He was visiting a friend, we met on his last night in town. (If you're wondering how we eventually dated, he lived here this summer. He's since moved and quickly dropped out of my life entirely.)

Or the boy before that who lived two hours away. How did we meet? He's a musician, I ordered an album from him. He added me on facebook then asked if he could call me. Then started texting me. Then talked me into an actual date.

What this really does is act as a great prelude to the fact that I'm actually the problem here. I'm the reason boys don't approach me. When my pen pal was here this summer I pretended we were just friends and nothing was happening for a long time. I agreed to talk to B, the phone calling musician, but I almost didn't answer the phone. And after our (enjoyable) long talk he asked if he could call me again. I said, "Sure, you can in a week."

Yeah, I push people away.

 I am promising myself I will not do this anymore. So when Fred of the original facebook message (who also lives far away–I might be more attractive from a distance) sent me this valentine's today:

I actually responded. I still assume this just means he wants to be friends or got me confused with someone else or knew I would think hot pink zombies are funny. I do love morbidity. If nothing else it's fun to make friends and get notes from people every once in a while.