Real and complex love needs time in order to develop

Nothing good ever happens after 2 a.m. For this particular story, confessions of love after 2 a.m. don’t always go reciprocated.

For the purpose of anonymity, her name in this column will be Sarah. Sarah, who I had recently met, was pretty cool on first impression. We had hung out with each other a couple of times before, but something seemed different that night.

We were hanging out on the bleachers, similar to what you would see in a cool, coming-of-age movie (super exciting for this foreign Aussie bloke). The air was cold and I was wondering why she called me to come see her so late at night.

Sarah was clearly very nervous. And so, nosy me went ahead and began the interrogation process. “What’s up?” “How have you been? ““Anything new? Is there something on your mind?”

She deflected and dodged my barrage of questions until I asked obliviously: “Any new boy drama in your life?”

The warm air from my question lingered longer than usual in the cold of the night. She looked at me in the eye and took a deep breath.

“Yeah. It’s you,” she relented.

My last semester at Carnegie Mellon University before I transferred to USC was interesting. I had four girls confess their feelings for me — all in the span of one semester. Using the business analysis skills and critical thinking that I had learned, I recognized that this was a particular spike when mapped against the usual frequency of females confessing their love to me (from zero ever to four over a few months). What a puzzling phenomenon, I thought to myself. Did that new haircut I got at SuperCuts from Jamie do the trick? Or was it romantic to some that I was about to leave Pittsburgh for good and long-distance relationships have an amazing track record. So yeah sure, let’s go for it with this weird Australian who I just met?

I was really perplexed why these girls that I had met during this final semester at Carnegie Mellon were telling me they were in love with me. I was pretty sure that I established some clear guidelines going into them. I told Sarah that I was not looking for a relationship, I was about to leave and I saw her as a friend. Why this anomaly of a spike in interest in me?

I always started with asking if I had led these girls on because I felt bad. These were good friends of mine that I didn’t want to see hurt. But each of them said no, I hadn’t led them on.

My ego kicked in for a bit when I wrongfully assumed I was just freakin’ awesome and the gym had finally paid dividends. But deep down, I knew that there had to be something different about this time of my life that had some of these girls telling me that they liked me.

Otherwise, I would have had that happen all the time (and that would be awesome!).

They thought that they liked me. But they didn’t. It seems that they liked a certain side of me, and they felt like they really knew me. But as I asked for reasons why they liked me, it became clear that they really didn’t know me, and had constructed an image of the dynamic of our relationship in their heads. One girl told me she had never felt “known” like this before and there was something different about the way we interacted, which was weird, because I only knew her for two weeks.

Looking back at that semester, I’ve concluded that I might be the one to blame. I created feelings that otherwise would not have been there if the circumstance was different. It’s not that I led them on with flirtatious comments or with hand drawn letters (my penmanship is hot), but we artificially created a sense of closeness that wasn’t real.

In my last semester at CMU, I really wanted to speed my new friendships up because I knew I was leaving. Let’s pack months into a few days, I thought to myself at the time. I would hang out with someone new and see them quite often and engage in pretty deep conversations from the get-go.

We felt like we really knew each other and the relationship was solid. But after a few weeks and changes in season (literal and metaphorical), these girls that confessed to me quite frankly were not attracted to me the way they thought they were in the face of frequent and deep hangouts.

It made me think about an idea: Perhaps people often mistake the speed of a relationship for the depth of one. We think that we can create genuine, strong relationships if we speed things up. That can be emotionally by opening up, or physically too by subscribing to Netflix.

What a weird place college is where we feel like we have known certain people forever but in actuality we have only known them for about a one month (looking at you college freshmen who think they have truly found “the one’” already. It’s only October!).

These girls didn’t really know me because they only saw me in a certain season of my life. We cannot instantly show someone who we truly are with all our depth and complexity and nuances, even if we want to.

A true understanding of someone’s character cannot be manufactured by deep conversations or a higher velocity of interaction. The only way to truly know someone and be deeply attracted to them is through time. It’s in the different seasons of life that we see people in different stanzas and different keys of their life.

The harmony might be nice for now because you both are in a certain place, but wait a little and recognize that true, deep relationships are about people who can transition with you through different verses and stanzas. You might find that the harmony you thought you had can become a beautifully placed dissonance that you would not have appreciated and been shocked by had you been lied to by the speed of your relationship.

My challenge today to all of you is not to necessarily become celibate and cold and look at that cute cat shelter in downtown, but rather to not get caught up in the speed of everything happening around USC. In our impatient, instant gratification world, where faster is better, perhaps it would be beneficial to us all in our dating relationships to take a breather and take it slow.

Samuel Sunito is a junior majoring in business administration.  His column, “Love and Other Things,” runs every other Friday.