Last night I stood waiting for my friend Michele at her dorm building when I saw a beautiful young man approach, take out his earbuds and, after racing up the steps, scoop his petite lady love into an embrace. I may or may not be making this up, but I'm pretty sure he twirled her. This sickeningly syrupy-sweet sweep of public affection landed with a thud on my poorly constructed house of lies.
This house of lies provides shelter from my aching loneliness. The lies are: "I'm beautiful," "I'll find someone," "even if I never found someone who loved me that much, it'd be OK" and the biggest lie of all: "I am/this is enough for me."
More like a house of cards than a house of lies -- or maybe not. In essence both of those things are faulty, unstable structures.
Every conversation I've had with my girlfriends in the past couple of days have been about how lonely we are and how much we want boyfriends. I think each and every one of these beautiful young women feel the same emptiness without someone to hold our hands and kiss our foreheads.
Some of us, especially me, spend too much time in our own heads and are convinced -- whether this is right or wrong -- that the right guy would be able to get us out of our heads and living in the moment.
We listen to love songs and cry because we feel so lonely.
Now that the weather has warmed up, we see couples canoodling all over campus and we know that even while some of us make the moves, guys are drawn elsewhere -- moths to candles not our own.
So we say "I love you" to each other in the hopes that the love of our friends is all we need, only we continue to cry at love songs and to want to claw at the throats of happy, boy-loved girls everywhere.
Still, we continue to wonder what makes some girls worthy of the "hey, beautiful" catcall and big, swooping hugs and forehead kisses and hand-holding? We wonder why some girls get all the attention when great girls -- ones who are beautiful, smart, funny, giving, loving and possibly even a little kinky -- stand by unnoticed?
We sit around, waiting for answers and hope that someday God will remind the male species that we're here, waiting to love and be loved.
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