Girls and feelings
I don't think that we fundamentally change, emotionally, as we grow up. I think that we maybe get better with dealing with our emotions, learn how to take the edges off them (so to speak), and learn how to express them in more constructive ways. I'm not saying that we all do, but I think we can.
Infatuation is one that still manages to get me though.
Or, to be more accurate, the loss of infatuation. Infatuation really seems to me to a projection of a feeling onto a person that one doesn't really know. One makes inferences about that person largely based on what we want them to be like.
As time passes, and we learn more about their true character, we try to ignore the conflicting evidence. No matter how rational we may claim we are, we are still subject to those damnable heuristics, and biases, that screw up so many things.
And it's so easy (and natural?) to watch that infatuation slip away and feel a sense of loss, although nothing has been lost but our projections. A future denied. Our (only mine?) natural inclination is to blame the object of our infatuation for causing that loss. For not being who we projected them to be. For failing to meet a standard that they had no hand in setting.
It's ridiculously unfair. I can see how it could be considered adaptive, but in my own case as I realise what's happening, I tend to get annoyed/angry/upset with myself for these unjust inclinations.
This doesn't happen to me often. Maybe once every two years or so, someone appears in my life that is 'perfect' in every way. I'm aware of the nonsense of that concept, yet I am elated to be in their presence every time. Inevitably (so far), they don't return my feelings, and I start to get a better sense of them as a person. My presumptions about their personality get undermined. My beliefs about their intelligence get a brutal reality check. But it takes a lot of evidence for this, for the projection to be accepted as false. It's shown to be false pretty quickly, but rationalisations are easy to concoct.
And so it goes with the latest girl. I'm (/was) crazy about her, but the realisation that she's not interested in me (it first happened several months ago) is finally sinking in... I'm not upset by this, more annoyed that I've done this to myself again. I find it difficult to restrain that initial elation. Hell, I can't even figure out where it comes from. I'll be really irked if it's nothing more than "she's pretty and she's talking to me". That would be nothing less than embarrassing.
Life goes on. Class in the morning. Just needed to think out loud.