21 December 2010
Looking Back on 2010: Kim
Posted by Roland under: Personal .
A testament to the insanity one can endure when they like someone, Kim encompassed a large part of this year. By the end of it all, I came out with a good deal of insight into myself and also how the game of relationships is always there, despite your best efforts.
Chances are if you’re reading this, you’ve already heard what I had to say about the period of time I was actively chasing Kim. For those who didn’t know the fun, I can easily summarize it by some of the worst advice I recieved in 2009:
“She’s totally into you, she’s just waiting for you to make a move.”
So yes, I tried, failed, but for some idiotic reason, still kept going for it. Most girls, after a rejection, would like to place some distance between them and the rejected party. God knows that’s how it has played for me in the past. Get rejected, avoid communication for a few awkward weeks/months, then somehow readjust and realize all is well and you can continue being friends (for the most part…that doesn’t always happen but has happened 90% of time).
But with Kim, somehow, things continued the way they always did after she told me “no”. Part of it was me being stubborn and taking her indirect “no” more as a “there’s still a chance”. That’s my bad. But there was no awkward weeks/months of no communication. I kid you not, just hours after, it was back to life as normal, talking online about random whatever. In my mind, there was no adjustment from failed attempt to “okay, she just wants to be friends”. Therefore, my mind never made the adjustment to give up. The continued communication (like nothing was wrong) coupled with a indirect “no” which I took more as “maybe”, kept me chasing for a few more months.
Anyway, more insanity ahead from there. The early part of 2010 would be peppered with everyday chats with Kim, where I pretty much made obvious my interest in her still remained. For her part, she would politely keep telling me it wouldn’t work, but never really outright told me to stop. So I would let myself be dragged along, clinging to hope that was never really there.
At some point, Kim had enough of me. I don’t really blame her. I’m sure a mixture of me hounding her with my interest plus my continued comments at her lifestyle choices (no one really wants to be lectured, let’s be honest, and she wasn’t in the mood to change) led her to shut everything down when I got back from Japan.
And I mean everything. We had spoke almost everyday online, even sometimes texting, about the stupidest things. But I got back from Japan to an e-mail pretty much saying that she did not want to speak to me anymore, because it would “hurt our friendship”.
You tell me where not talking to someone would actually “help” your friendship.
So there it was, in one fell swoop, Kim decided she was done talking to me. I had actually seen it coming, because in the few times I tried talking to her in Japan, she was very curt in her replies, a sign that something was up. I figured I would be able to get in touch fully back in the States, but that would not be the case. She had blocked me on Google Chat, wasn’t responding to my phone call or text.
We went from talking everyday, to almost expecting hearing from her, to being treated like a complete stranger. I knew Kim hated conflict and if faced with a difficult situation, if she had an easy way out, she would take it. So I didn’t expect her to actually reply to my request to at least talk to me about her decision. But I figured, if we were really friends and she really wanted to save the friendship, she would actually talk it out?
We weren’t really friends it seems. I eventually realized that the e-mail she gave me was actually copy and pasted from other e-mails (the fonts being different sizes). She wouldn’t even give me the effort of at least writing an original e-mail. A follow up e-mail from her a few days later would say she was disappointed in my attempts to contact her further. She questioned if I really wanted to save the friendship, but honestly, she was pretty much putting the final touches on the end of it with that message.
And so, whatever we had, friendship, relationship, or something in between, was over. She was able to get a free meal out of it, while some gift she promised me from Singapore, I’m sure will never be delivered.
My immediate mood towards her went from friendly to angry. It was a sudden move, to go from talking to someone everyday to immediate silence, under the pretense of “saving a friendship”. She said she didn’t feel comfortable talking anymore, which I could understand, but there was no buildup. If she was weirded out about my feelings towards her, she had plenty of other opportunities to back out. Like I said, when I made my feelings first known, that would be an appropriate time. But for some reason, months later would be the right time to do so.
In any case, I would get used to the no contact from her. I kept my distaste hidden, but I would later find out that she would tell someone else in my company that I used to like her. This was quite the slap to my face as her e-mail specifically said she wanted to keep whatever was going on between us secret. I honored her words, but she could not honor her own.
Fate was a bit more hilarious when they made it so I had to work with her as part of the Stanford recruiting team. But I’m professional, she was too, I like recruiting a lot and if I had to work with her, so be it. How did she react? Like nothing really happened. We weren’t going to talk everyday, that’s for sure, but she was the first one to text me before our first face to face meeting. I’ll give it to her, she may not like talking to me, but she hates awkward situations even more.
And so the recruiting season went, we worked well enough. Again, I knew that I had a job to do, and I was willing to work with her to get it done. But she gave me one last hiccup for me to deal with. As I was planning out Stanford recruiting tasks, Kim would tell me one day out of the blue, she was leaving the company. Of course, that’s why she asked for all those Fridays off from our recruiting meetings.
What did I come out of the experience from? Just beware of the girl. But really, just beware of others. You may think one thing about them and then they can surprise you, in the wrong way. Kim was a good friend. But in the end, I let myself be dragged along by an image of her that probably never existed. Instead, I would be more hurt by her selfishness and hypocrisy.
As far as I know, she’s with a new boyfriend, a fun new job, and still living it up. It was a sudden and messy end to whatever it was with had, but in the end, I just needed to write all this out to move on finally. I don’t expect a Christmas card from her this year.
Kim, I apologize for making you uncomfortable and my sometimes constant comments about your lifestyle. It’s not my place to judge, I guess. But I’m still hurt by your continued running away from conflict (which killed, rather than saved a friendship) and your hypocrisy behind my back.
Well, I’ll always have the lines and lines of chat logs. And an e-mail with suspiciously different text formatting.