Trying to Exit the Maze the Way Jackie Would

Forty-f*cking-nine years old and I still don't know where or how to meet a boyfriend. What is that elusive "magic" that turns a guy you've started dating into a boyfriend? Some women seem to have no trouble choosing a guy and then almost instantly turning him into their boyfriend. I don't know how to do that. I've never known how to do that.

Back when I was in high school lo these many years ago, I remember how apoplectic I was when I found out how a friend of a friend had turned her crush into her boyfriend in a single afternoon. Having recently broken up with a longtime boyfriend, "Jackie" had developed a crush on one of the cute guys on the football team. When he was injured during a game and had to go to the hospital, Jackie showed up at his hospital room the next day and by the time she left several hours later, he was her boyfriend. WTF?! The nerve. How did Jackie have the audacity to hopscotch over the self-imposed requirement of months of unrequited teenage yearning for her crush before he would even deign to think about being her boyfriend? How does an afternoon of stilted conversation between self-conscious teenagers in a hospital room become a big romantic boyfriend-making date? I have no idea, although I suppose it didn't hurt that, in addition to her chutzpah, Jackie also had quite a rack.

The online dating, which I've been doing only for the past five months, has become wearisome. Trying to meet a guy who is boyfriend material seems as frustrating as trying to find the way out of one of those formal garden mazes made of tall boxwood hedges. Except the joke seems to be that there *is* no exit, which means you spend all of your time encountering dead end after dead end, then painstakingly retracing your steps until you finally go out the way you came in, exhausted and still single. But not the Jackies of the world. Undoubtedly, Jackie would enter the maze newly single and come out only minutes later holding hands with her new gorgeous football-star boyfriend Aaron Rodgers.