While I don't think I caught a minute of it until tonight, I saw the end of The Bachelor pretty much to size up the looks of the lucky woman caught in the headlights of six weeks of dating in front of a national TV audience. She looked attractive enough, but I never saw anything else to know or care if the personality is there. Didn't really matter to me. What did matter is the somewhat comical talk about finding your soul mate after six weeks of taping this stuff. In this environment, it's practically impossible, but hey it makes for good entertainment, I suppose. (Hell, I watch Elimidate although that takes out a lot of the pretenses of shows like this, which may be why I like it.)

Back to the original point about The Bachelor is that the guy "dates" 25 women over the course of six weeks to find his future bride. I don't think I've gone out on 25 dates, never mind 25 different women, in my lifetime, so a lot of this just flies over my head.

But regarding dating, most of my single friends will complain about it at one point in time or another, and I suppose I do that a lot as well. However, I've kinda kept quiet lately because I think I'm having plenty of trouble distinguishing between friends hanging out and actual dating. I've never been really good at meeting someone and then just asking them out, it's not really how I operate. Instead, I've been good (or at least I think so) at cultivating friendships with women who I may or may not be interested in romantically. I suppose it proves Billy Crystal's statement in "When Harry Met Sally" that men and women can't be friends because the sex part gets in the way (well to an extent anyway).

I keep on wondering to myself where the friendship part ends and the "relationship" part begins with a couple of them. In one case, I think I've figured out that line, and I can proceed accordingly. However, in another case, I still keep on trying to figure out where each of us stands (and have been for quite a while), and I suppose I'm too much of a chicken to proceed further at this point (one major extenuating circumstance keeps on slapping me in the face and preventing me from doing so). I guess if I got a definitive answer, everything would be easy. But for now I'm not, and I have to wonder if either of us would call our time together a "date" or just a couple of friends hanging out.

Honestly, the answer should be much easier than this, and maybe I'm making too much of a production in my head about this, but oh well. Then again, I feel a lot more comfortable doing things together with someone if I know them reasonably well as opposed to the stiffness that comes about trying to meet new people in a traditional date setting. A sense of familiarity can do wonders for a social life even if that same sense of comfort actually hinders it.