It’s a popular pacifier used by many to make us feel better about being single: “Relax! Don’t you realize how many people there are out there? You should have guys banging on your door!”

No one is banging on my door. No one is banging on my beautiful friends Lana* and Kate’s* doors. We each have some stand-by men with whom we are not sexually involved, who will be there in a jiffy to come to our aid so long as it means getting to be in our presence, and with whom perhaps we engage in just the amount of flirting necessary before we go over the edge.

But we don’t/can’t want these men who will stand by our doors. We each have a man on our minds with whom we want more, but he has, for his various reasons, distanced himself many doors away from our own.

These men have all, at one time, banged both our doors and us, with urgency and fervor.  It awakened us to feel a certain passion about them, but then they kind of stopped banging on the whole. If we wanted to communicate with them, we would have to approach their doors and gently knock, while faced with the dilemma: is contacting them a backward step into dangerous territory since the man is not showing true intention in us, or is it somehow fulfilling something we want?

The thing you want, wants you back.

Not liking the person is one thing, but what if you do know they like you. Are they simply as scared of contacting us as we are of contacting them? And since we have the insight to realize this, would we be better off as The Contactors? Would it serve us better if we accepted and ran with that? Are men just waiting for our instructions? On a larger scale, does everyone just want to be Contacted? And is it up to whoever feels the most courageous to Contact?

Kate hadn’t heard from her guy. She texted: “I miss you. I just want you to know I’m thinking about you.”

He wrote back: “I miss you too. I was wondering when I would hear from you…”

In a perfect relationship world, we wouldn’t need to worry about who’s contacting who. Maybe someday, we won’t even need to even pick up a phone or type; we will be relaying messages of intention to each other through our heads. But if, for now, we have to be The Contactors, then I can only see two outcomes: after enough contacting we will realize no amount of contact have the desired affect, or we will be the ones to trod on new territory because we have the courage to contact, and even if the relationships don’t pan out, we will have expressed ourselves.

*Names changed to protect the innocent.