Be nice to someone else...

Something I struggle with is accepting advice from people who I don’t feel like should be giving it. I should be willing to take any criticism I can get—and actually consider whether or not it’s any good regardless of the source. This is especially true in dating. I don’t feel like anybody should be giving me advice or offering me help (which is obviously not true). Take the following conversation I had a church last week with an acquaintance:

Him: “So, you dating anyone right now?”

Me (immediately peeved): “Nope.”

Him: “There are a lot of pretty girls in this ward.”

Me (cringing): “Yup.”

Him: “Sometimes it can be kind of intimidating to approach some of them, if you ever want me to, like, introduce you to some of them just let me know.”

Me (trying to act nice and end the conversation ASAP): “Ummmm. Yeah, sure. Okay.”

I wanted to remind him that he was also single and that he should probably just worry about approaching girls for himself and not for me, but I figured I’d better not. I guess what it boils down to is that acquaintances should never offer advice or set-ups. Or help with dating. Or with talking to girls. And now that I come to it, as far as set-ups go, they should probably only be done by family and very close friends.

This reminds me of my best set up ever (and by best I mean worst, but makes for the best story). A mission friend set me up with his fiancée’s roommate down in Orem. Right from the start I could tell that she either judged me before I actually spoke to her or she had some other dude that she thought was better than me because I was only getting one-word answers, no laughs, and the occasional condescending smile. That’s not to say that I didn’t judge her too—she looked like Madonna with a unibrow—and she wasn’t cute enough to be as mean as she was being*. I guess she felt guilty because twenty minutes into the date she offered to pay, to which I responded, “You’re used to Orem guys, huh? Where I come from we don’t let girls pay.” I realize how absurd my comment was—as if Salt Lake and Orem were different countries—but at that point she hit a nerve and I had to get back at her. In hindsight I should have shut my mouth and let her pay. It wasn’t worth the $8 it took to show her that she wasn’t better than me and to insult her people. And my pride would have recovered eventually anyway, it always does.

*The word should probably be hot, not cute, because cute girls are never mean by definition. And it's not that hot girls are justified in being mean--nobody has an excuse. The point is that I expect hot girls to be mean and condescnding. They aren't always, but often.