Sitting in a booth

Last few times I've gone out with my girlfriends and met up with a couple of guys, I've noticed the tendency men have of squishing me and my girlfriends on the inside of booths. I had gotten pretty frustrated. To me it seemed like a type of control. They were between us and the rest of the restaurant, bar, or world. They could determine who we did or didn't talk to just because they were blocking access to us. I felt significantly trapped, at times, and definitely felt like it wasn't an ideal situation. But then I went out to dinner last night with a few of my girlfriends. Instead of sitting on the inside of the booth, I sat on the aisle side. I expected to feel more freedom and, in some ways, I did, but I also noticed an enormous downside to sitting on the outside.

Particularly, depending on what type of atmosphere you are in, sitting on the outside of the booth can be limiting. As you sit and talk to the other people at your table, you have to turn in towards the wall to be able to address everyone. As you do this, you shut out the outside world and are left only with the option of looking at the other people at your table. On the other hand, the person sitting on the inside of the booth can turn their back to the wall and look at at everything happening in the rest of the room. Certainly there is a person between them and everything else going on, but at least the inside person has visual access to everything. In some ways, this ability to see what else is out there is empowering because if the person on the outside of the booth isn't being interesting enough, you don't have to pay attention.

Relationships

I just realized last night that I might have been too busy idolizing the past to enjoy the present. I'm relating this to my independent study because I think that relationships and dating are a women's issue. A central one. And they have a lot to do with body image and sexuality because so much of how our ideas about these things are shaped have to do with our past experiences with men and women in dating situations. I realized that I talk about one of my exes an awful lot. Like all the time. Granted, he was a good friend and I dated him for two years, so that's a pretty significant amount of time I shared with him. And I talk about past relationships because we learn a lot from the things we did during them and mistakes we made. But I also am becoming aware that in remembering the relationship as a whole and in looking for similar qualities in someone new, I'm not allowing myself to be happy with the beginning phases of new relationships because I am so eager for them to become something else. I am not content just to date someone occasionally or to run into them around campus and have something happen after a few weeks or months, I am much more interested in making it all happen at once, and I think that is a false hope. I definitely believe in the power of being present in the moment, so I'm going to try to revise the way I'm handling things, and I would tell anyone else who has hit some relationship bumps to do the same. You can't look for your old partners positive qualities without ultimately ignoring all of the good things in your new interests. Sure, you can have certain things you know you like in a person, but you need to separate them from being possessed by any one person and instead let them become simply adjectives and character traits.

I'll let you know how it goes for me. You let me know how it goes for you.