Dating ourselves

I woke up Friday morning to call from a potential employer, asking if I could do a phone interview early this week.

Doest the lady require a list of my references? (Source: The Yorck Project)

I was confused at first because I thought the call was from my dentist’s office. Then I was excited. And then… the crushing dread.

Getting this far always leaves me in a worse mental spot than just having my resume ignored or rejected outright.

It feels so much more personal. My skills looked good on paper, but we met and we talked and they just weren’t all that into me.

It reminds me of a few separate conversations I’ve had since graduation about how the job search is like the dating scene.

You feel each other out, you flirt with thank you cards and follow-up phone calls, you try to strike a balance between coy and over-enthusiastic.

(Though I’ve never actually kept a spreadsheet of my romantic failures…)

Sure, the analogy works. But it’s a little too obvious, even for a bunch of twenty-something ladies who count boys and careers among their frequent anxieties.

Dating and interviewing are more like life itself than they are like each other. They’re just more evident, more painful, more rewarding examples of what happens when you take risks.

I think that most everything you do nudges the wheel one way or the other– how hard you decided to work today, the kind of sandwich you ate for lunch. They’re not big moves, but they either keep you on course or start you on another one, whether you realize it or not.

It’s just that career changes and relationships are the big intersections. They require us to venture something, to move decisively, all with the understanding that we might get off track and wind up in a ditch somewhere.

What could be more intimidating than knowing you could screw it all up for yourself? What could be more exciting than getting to start something new and wonderful?

But there are some lessons for the job search that I could learn from dating. Like how I decided one morning in college, after a particularly disastrous liaison, that I wasn’t going to let boys hurt my feelings anymore. It’s been mostly successful.

I think I’m going to try not letting jobs hurt my feelings. That doesn’t mean I’m going to slum it with the first job that whistles at me out a car window…

It just means being willing to take the risk because nothing can possibly ever work out until something does.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 3:44 pm and is filed under wealth and tagged with dating, interview, job search, Unemployment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.