I’m from a generation of great boy-bands: dreamy 20 something year old’s who danced and sang in the rain with their shirts accidentally open all the way! As a 10 year old who was used to watching religious clergies on TV, my life changed when my dad installed an illegal satellite dish on our balcony. WE. GOT. MTV! My ass was glued to the TV, and my mind? Simply blown.
My friends and I were boy-band fanatics! We sang along to their hit songs without having a clue what the words meant, and followed their lives religiously. The day that Kevin from the Backstreet Boys got married was a sad, sad day in our little elementary school in Northern Tehran. After school that day, my two best friends and I ran to the back of the school bus as we loosened up our headscarves and unbuttoned our uniforms – three, badass 11 year old girls defying the mandatory hijab rules as soon as we were out of sight, talking about American pop culture, celebrities, and music that we listened to illegally!
One of my friends burst into tears as she told us Kevin was to be wed soon.
“Which one was Kevin again?” I thought to myself- I’ve always been so bad at these things…
“Well at least the rest of the Backstreet Boys are still single!” I tried to comfort her.
A few short months later as I took my last ride in our school bus before moving to North America, my friends gave me big hugs and asked me to let Kevin know how much they love him if I ever got to see him in person!
Personally, I was a Lance Bass girl. The frosted tips and the baby blues just pierced through my heart and I couldn’t get enough.
If you think about it, picking the only non-heterosexual guy in a sea of boy-bands and cute celebrities, is sorta like picking out your lottery numbers from the alphabet bin instead (cool simile right? Cause I love to write and stuff? A really good friend of mine told me to stop pointing out metaphors in my writing… so this one’s for you Eric!)
As if our age difference, the language barriers, and the fact that we lived on different continents weren’t enough, I had to pick the only guy who wouldn’t fall in love with me even if I was LITERALLY the last girl in the entire world.
I’ll let you in on little a secret: this is actually an unhealthy pattern of mine!!! Let’s unpack, shall we?
Talking to a friend recently about my real life Lance Bass situation, he asked: “Why do you always fall for emotionally unavailable guys?”
That’s kind of a harsh/serious conversation to have when you’re 5 drinks deep and at your work’s Christmas party’s after-party.
“I don’t know, you tell me!”
“It’s because you’re afraid of rejection! When you fall for someone knowing there’s absolutely no way to be with them, you take the risk of getting hurt and rejected out of the equation. It’s doomed from the beginning so you don’t have to worry about giving it your all and losing it all.”
Damn… this is the slap in the face that I needed! I felt like I was woken up from a slumber filled with illusions, fantasies, and make belief emotions. Thinking back, I’ve fallen in love with so many Lance’s – whether they were simply not interested, involved with other people, or at a point in their lives where being in a relationship wasn’t a priority- there I was, longing, daydreaming, and writing about the pain of love – the more forbidden it felt, the more it made me want to be with them.
Thankfully (?) this isn’t news to me. I’ve always known that I WANT what I can’t have. But I thought it was just human nature – working with kids taught me that we instinctively want things that aren’t ours – and I thought I had it all figured out: that the value of things lie in how much other people want that thing too. Mix that in with an unhealthy dose of jealousy that comes built-in in a standard Persian girl model, and you’ve got some serious soul searching to do.
Rejection sucks! It stings and bruises our egos that we work so hard to protect. In a world where we are constantly seeking validation, rejection becomes the devil that the clergies warned us against. It makes us doubt our worth as a human being. It creates psychological hell. It makes us subconsciously fall in love with the Lance’s that are around us, and closes the door of opportunities to those who might actually be able to provide us with emotional stability. So it’s time to hit pause on the Adele songs and to stop #relating to “the most bitter joke that the universe can play on you is meeting the right person at the wrong time” meme. I think the key is to be confident and vulnerable at the same time – to welcome new opportunities and to stop daydreaming. The real world is waiting – pick your numbers and gamble your heart away – It’ll be worth it!
The Married Girl On Bumble 