The Math of Not Dating

My friend Eric is a funny guy. He's the kind of guy you would want to sit down and have a micro brew with. If you were stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire you'd want Eric there to keep you company and entertained. He's a good arguer, too. We have fairly opposing viewpoints on a plethora of topics; I am the flaming liberal to his mildly conservative. He's also a pretty decent writer. He has an easygoing style reminescent of Chuck Klosterman. His writing is often thought provoking and almost always laugh inducing. Naturally, I do not always agree with what he has to say, but I appreciate his point of view.

Eric recently wrote a blog entry taking a musical trip down the memory lane of his ex-girlfriends, and their numbers are many. It seems there would be enough musical nostalgia to make an anthology rather than a single album release. I can relate to this concept. I can hardly listen to Damian Rice's "O" without being transported to various London locales with a specific boy. My first (and only) boyfriend in high school introduced me to Coldplay and while I don't listen to them much these days, I do find myself thinking of him when I do (this is generally shorted lived though as I hated high school and rarely allow myself the time to be nostalgic about it). There are more songs than I can recount here that have meaning for me directly related to the various boys I've been involved with. But this is not the point of my diatribe.

My point it related to a brief statement Eric made at the end of his post, "dating is important". I could not disagree more and my reasons mostly boil down to simple mathematics.

Let's say my time is limited and I only have 24 hours per day. Straight away at least 7 hours of that day need to go to sleep if I'm going to be able to function like a normal human being. That leaves with me 17 hours, and 2 of those are usually dedicated to the gym/yoga/running/me keeping myself sane time. So for those of you following along at home, we're down to 15 hours. Now, on any given day I have any combination of internship, work and school taking anywhere from 5 to 10 hours of my day. This leaves me with a mere 5 to 10 hours for studying, reading, socializing and being a pet parent. That isn't much and if I have a minimum of 10 hours a week in reading/school work that means socializing gets a very small percentage of my time (I'm not real good with math so I can't give you exact numbers). So say I have a minimum of five friends in Portland that I try to see on a regular basis, a minimum of five friends I try to keep in touch with via phone or internet on a regular basis and two parents I call once a week. That, my friends, equals all of my time. Gone.

Now I know what you're going to say, "why don't you just take time away from one area in order to make time for dating?". I will tell you why, and it again relates to simple mathematics. In order to graduate from school and get a job to pay back all of my student loans I need to put 100% of the time I've alloted to school work to school work. Moreover, I need to give it 100%. To meet the requirements for graduation I need to spend 20 hours per week at my internship site. No wiggle room there. In order to live and afford a social life I need to work a minimum of 15 hours per week. So? Why not spend less times with friends? As it is, they are not exactly getting a ton of my time and at the most basic level if comes back down to percentages. If I am spending time with friends there is at a 75 -90% chance that I will have a good time. Sure, I could have just as good of a time on a date and maybe even meet the man of my dreams (probably not though since I don't even know what that means), but let's be honest, at best the odds are 50-50. And I am just not a gambler. I'll take the sure thing every time.