Dating Don'ts: Don't Be Awesome

A few years back, I dated a model/entrepreneur named Danny. Though I'd known Danny for a while through friends (and realized he was obviously cute because tons of girls swooned every time we were at a show together), he just wasn't my type. He had long hair, personified surfer cool, and was most definitely a thigh bruiser. Then one night out I caught him giving me the eye, so out of a mix of boredom and curiosity, I let him kiss me. And it was pretty damn good.

On our one attempted formal date, we actually missed an entire Lucero show because we were too busy making out—at points, horizontally—at the bar next door. Needless to say, we didn't really have a lot in common except music, but we had a whole lot of fun, and continued seeing each other for a couple of months—completely bonding over the few Operation Ivy songs Rancid treated us to during their 2006 BB King's show. I certainly had no plans to declare him my boyfriend (he personified model ditz pretty well, too), there were no plans of taking him home to Mom's. He was gorgeous, sweet, easy to be around. Like a puppy. A very sexy puppy.

Then one day, Danny started getting weird, distant, twitchy. A few days later, he broke it down: I was awesome. I was "the one." He had to break up with me. It just wasn't the right time.

"OK. That's cool if that's how you feel," I said, secretly thinking, "Yeah, I'm the one—the one that dodged the bullet."

Danny was pretty surprised by my cavalier attitude (really, did he expect crying?), but ultimately relieved to let me know. Right after that, we held hands all the way to the bar and pretty much carried on the same way we had before our "talk"—until he moved 1,000 miles from NYC soon before I left for Atlanta.

The cool part? Danny and I are still pretty friendly, communicating electronically and whatnot with some degree of frequency. He still maintains I rule. So when an echoing experience coincided with one of our online chats, I felt comfortable enough to ask him why he felt the need to break up with me when he did. His answer wasn't surprising: "I thought you were so awesome, but it scared me to think that I met you when I did. I just wasn't ready to commit."

This information overlapped well with a girlfriend's long-standing theory about confirmed bachelors and players: It's never really about the woman. For them, it's a matter of feeling their own biological need to settle down—and it's likely that whoever happens to be on his arm at that point will become wifey. They'll only be ready when—or if—they grow up.

So I guess this is turning out to be a cautionary tale for the ladies. Don't be awesome (or at least TOO awesome) because it scares boys away. Instead, focus your energies on other things—work (if you still have a job), art, learn a new language... then travel to that foreign country and fuck a native. Just don't be awesome.

Is this why a book called Why Men Marry Bitches exists to haunt me every time I pass by the bookstore at Newark airport?