My recommendation in pursuing any long-term goal is to begin unpolished. A new audience is a blank slate and sparkling right away sets such a high standard that it often results in fizzling out. The key to lifelong prosperity is shinning brighter today than you did yesterday and that’s easier to accomplish when purposely dimming down your original luster. Say a student mispronounces a teacher’s name, a barber clips the ear of a customer or a boyfriend has flowers delivered to the wrong apartment, things can only get brighter.
To confirm my hypothesis, here’s an example of a gleaming flaw when making a dazzling first impression. I call it “Seeing the Butterfly before the Caterpillar.”
I used to be a huge proponent of meeting the woman of my dreams at a wedding, especially if it meant courting a bridesmaid. My plan of seduction has me strolling over during cocktail hour after she signals me with a smile. I offer to buy her a complimentary drink and that plants a seed of flirtation to blossom later.
After letting sufficient time pass to play hard to get, I return armed with the big guns. I capture her hand and escort her onto the dance floor. In the heat of the moment, we erupt into the tango. Amid our dancing, I sense the attention of the guests gravitating towards us and we thrive upon it. We swing over near the bride and groom and playfully bump into them. A heart warming awe sweeps over the onlookers and we become the darlings of the evening.
With the night moving perfectly, before I know it, we are back at the hotel bar tossing back shots of Jagermeister at closing call. As we depart arm in arm, I notice the dawn sunlight on her face and am inclined to rest a soft kiss on her cheek. This leads to us passionately exchanging email addresses and heading to our respective lodging quarters grasping onto seeing each other again before long.
On the subsequent morning I am forced to brag to friends, hotel maids and anyone else with ears about being the smoothest man on the planet. Of course as a gentleman, I refrain from sharing the explicit details of the lip locking. To keep the lustfulness of our affair confidential, I yield generic lines such as “Sally Q melted in my arms” and “Sally Q was the first one there and the last to leave. She just wanted me more.”
In a brief pause from my boasting, a common friend interjects with “That’s great, I am really happy for you. Sally Q looked stunning last night.”
That’s when my momentum crashes. Why did he mention she looked stunning last night? Does she normally look un-stunning? Have I already witness the peak of what she has to offer? Will the rest of our relationship be trapped in an unfulfilling valley? If I take her out bowling and she has knotty hair, faded jeans and I am sober, will I be bitterly disappointed?
Suddenly I’m unable to comprehend the mess I’m trapped in. Last night Sally Q was an enchanted angel mermaid princess but yet the following afternoon she transformed into a hideous snake haired Medusa.
No longer was I blueprinting a romantic horse carriage ride to a candlelit bowling alley. Instead, I’m debating a name change to Pedro, burning off my finger prints and speaking with an incoherent accent. That spirals into enlisting in the witness protection program and anonymously living the remainder of my life in an agricultural community tucked away in Northern Iowa. My entire world had spun off its axis. I am now on the verge of abandoning my family and harvesting wheat alone, all because I met a girl who looked her best, the first time I laid eyes on her.
Alright, let me stop this fabrication before I write myself leaping off a hotel balcony or overdosing on mini shampoo bottles. I admit the above dramatization loses merit sentence after sentence. Actually this whole composition promotes advice that should be swallowed with a grain of salt or maybe not at all. Besides, the moral of this tale wasn’t, take a modest approach to unveiling oneself or search for a soul mate at sleazy establishments like a Laundromat or crack house. The point was to dull the expectations of readers so it’s simple for my future essays to shine.
P.S. I only know how to tango in my visions.