Dopplebänger

It's not often that I'm the one being pursued, but every now and then there will appear in my life a woman so insanely taken with my charms that she just can't help but throw herself at me. This creates a kind of...dissonance for me, because, while I prefer to be the one being chased (and, really, who doesn't?), I can't bring myself to actually date anyone that would demean themselves the way that these women do while trying to court me. It's a matter of subtlety, I suppose, or maybe the women that find themselves attracted to me are just insane. Actually, the insanity would explain the attraction, so I think we've found our answer.

In high school, I flirted quite a bit with Ophelia. The two of us became good friends, and we had a lot in common, and it was clear to everyone around us that we were rather taken with one another. But, at least at first, things didn't take off as smoothly as Ophelia would have liked.

It's not that I wasn't interested in dating Ophelia, it's just that I had a lot of things to sort out for myself, like whether I was ready for a relationship, where I saw things going with her, et cetera. One of my main problems with women in high school, and, really, even today, is that I tend to over think things, and question whether or not I could see myself being with said woman in ten, twenty, thirty years, and whether I could see us being happy. This is ridiculous, because, when you haven't given yourself the chance to spend time with these women in romantic situations, there's really no way for you to know what you would be like in a relationship, let alone gauge how likely it would be for said relationship to last.

With Ophelia...well, I think she just came on too strongly for my liking, and had a tendency to tell me that she loved me despite the fact that we weren't dating. That would kind of grind the flirtation to an awkward halt, because I didn't want to lead her on, since I clearly didn't feel that strongly about her, and then we would just sort of...go off in our separate ways.

After a few months of trying to court me, us sitting together on the bus to and from school, eating lunch together, spending most of our out-of-school time together, I think she got really desperate for the attention that she was trying to get from me. This caused her to do a number of things at once.

While she would continue to flirt with me at every possible occasion, and continued telling me that she loved me whenever it was at its most awkward, she had also taken to pointing out other boys in our school that she thought looked like me. This usually meant that she'd make a point of moaning seductively anytime a skinny redhead would pass by, and didn't seem to understand why that was a turn-off for me. Though, I could surmise that she was trying to make me jealous.

Taking it one step further, she went ahead and started befriending each of my dopplegängers, and when I would ask her later who she had been talking to, she would just smile at me and ask "...jealous?" I would eventually steal that mannerism and use it to mock my friends in appropriate situations.

Since she was now spreading her loving across the school's entire population of ginger-men, I tended to see slightly less of her, and I think that she was kind of living vicariously through the fact that she could gain the attention of anyone that looked vaguely similar to me, and it kind of warped her perception of my friendship with her; she now had convinced herself that, since all of the other redheads had taken so suddenly to her advances, that it was only a matter of time before I did as well, and her flirtation with me became far more intense. When she would tell me that she loved me, and I would dismiss it, she would follow up with "you will," which she said as more of a threat than anything else.

Ophelia would eventually admit to our mutual friend Veronica that she was 'testing out [her] theories and methods' in an effort to figure out what would work best on me. And then...it kind of backfired on her.

You see, Ophelia had been flirting with a guy named Kenny, and Kenny had never encountered a girl so attentive to his needs. In a strange role-reversal, Kenny would become to Ophelia what Ophelia had made herself to me. So when I got on the bus in the afternoon, and found that Ophelia had chosen to sit at the front of the bus, alone, rather than at the back with me and the rest of our friends, I became a little suspicious.

When we got to our stop, I rushed through the crowd to see if anything was wrong, and Ophelia was wearing an insanely guilty expression, and she didn't look like she really wanted to talk to me, but sighed heavily and said "we need to talk."

For a second I thought she was breaking up with me, but then I remembered that I had yet to relent and date her, so that probably wasn't going to happen. "I'm not really sure how this happened," she started, and I was already kind of losing interest. I never understood why the women in my life just couldn't get to the point of the conversation if the issue was so pressingly urgent to them. "I'm dating Kenny."

I stared at her for a second, wondering what kind of reaction she was hoping to get from me. "Which one's Kenny?"

"The cute one. He kind of looks like you," she said. I shrugged, not sure which one she meant, since all of her friends were now photocopies of myself. "Has no glasses, a year older than us? Smokes a lot?" There was a pause where I was still trying to figure out who he was. "Veronica's friend," she said.

I'm really not sure why she didn't start with that, because that's really the only reason I would have known of him in the first place. "Oh, that's cool. When did this happen?"

I don't think this was the response she wanted from me, but she explained how everything had gone down, and told me that he was a really nice guy and I would really like him once I got to know him. She excluded the fact that, as Veronica would later tell me, she had only asked him out because he reminded her of me and had really just been trying to figure out how best to ask me out.

I'm not really sure what her plan was there, since falsely asking someone out can really only lead to heartbreak. Of course, the fact that he would tell her that he loved her before their first date would mean that breaking up would be a little bit harder than she had imagined.

Maybe she should have tested her theories on someone closer to my personality rather than my appearance.