A Lovely Milestone in Not-Dating

Fueled by Kate Bolick’s Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own and Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I’ve been inspired to embrace this post-divorce bubble of time as a well-earned luxury, not a middle-aged curse. I’ve been proudly embracing the American spinster’s contributions to cultural and civic life, photographing Saturday morning cats without shame, and generally reveling in hearing my own thoughts. This perspective seems to have changed my approach to dating for the (MUCH) better.

Last fall, after J. turned out to be such a disaster, I didn’t really trust myself to date. My ignoring of red flags and self-gaslighting seemed compulsive and difficult to overcome. So many times upon meeting a semi-viable guy, I’d convinced myself that whatever didn’t work about him was something wrong with me. Once I liked a guy, I could so much more easily see his point of view than my own.

But as soon as spring worked its magic, I went back to OKC and found a seemingly datable guy—he was smart, had a house and kids, and was interested enough in politics to hold an elected local seat. He asked me out and we made plans to meet in the neighborhood for a drink, but after a little while, I started to not like his texting style. He didn’t do anything really wrong, but had a way of angrily confiding about bad days that felt over-familiar, as though I were already placed in a helpmeet role that I know I’ll never want.

So guess what! Instead of pushing myself to be more flexible, to take care of him, to ignore my instincts,  I told him I didn’t think we were a match and that was that. Although I’m at an age (and a size!) where women are generally expected to compromise, to respond to the pressures of the dating economy and settle for less than we deserve, I have higher expectations than ever. I have no idea what the future holds for my heart, but I know that I’m happy to be alone until/unless the right person comes along. Gold star for me!

In Which I Realize I Am Really Lucky to Have Had My Adventure Years, Part Eight

After dinner, we took a walk in the woods, during which we fell into several more conversational rabbit holes of incompatibility. The first draft listed them, but it felt nitpicky and boring. I don’t want to be any more like his million-paragraph blog post about the girl at Coldstone Creamery who accidentally put nuts in his sundae than I already am. Plus, the shaky conversations didn’t stop us from falling back into bed, where the real crux of things happened.

J, in times when he could get beyond his self-doubt, felt like a present and thorough lover. It’s hard to discard the times when he took my hand and placed it on his heart afterwards, and there were times when I certainly (thought I) felt our whole beings being celebrated, where pleasure ran the show and overcame everything. But he also needed an incredible amount of praise, and that’s coming from me. Even when I was smiling and wailing and near-crying with pleasure, he constantly made this “Mmmm?” sound that I figured out meant “Am I doing a good job?” which I thought was already apparent. As I rolled though orgasm after, he asked over and over for confirmation that I’d arrived. He chimed on the phrase “my partner’s pleasure” to an almost Rain Man degree, but after a while it could feel like I wasn’t a partner at all, but a flushed and naked approval machine, a sweaty mirror. It was a kind-of-terrifying glimpse into what it must be like to fuck, well, myself.

Anyway, so after our walk we were back in bed, snuggling and making out and trying a few new things. He sat on top of me and put his dick between my happy boobs, played with my nipples, and, intermittently, my clit. I’d told him I like having guys come on my chest, and I loved having him up there, pinning me down, doing this good-kind-of-humiliating thing. I liked looking up at him the most, at his soft brown animal eyes, and I liked his hard dick in my hands and thrusting against me. He didn’t come, but I didn’t really think about that, just moved on to the next cuddly position, stroking him lazily while he petted my arm and kissed my forehead.

But then his entire energy just…froze. He got up to go downstairs a second, and when he came back up, he was almost like a ghost. He lay down rigidly next to me on the outside of the bed and said, in an impatient voice, “I feel like I’m doing you a disservice by not letting you do blow jobs.”

“What? No. I told you, I only want to do things that you feel enthusiastic about.”

“But you were disappointed that I didn’t come on you. I have trouble coming sometimes and (ex-wife) used to get mad about it.”

“But we were just playing. I thought we were just having fun together.” I’d known he was obsessed with my orgasms, but it hadn’t occurred to me that he was worried about his own.

“It’s just, I can’t do my favorite thing.” Meaning, in case you forgot FOR LIKE A SECOND, sex without a condom.

I just started to cry. “I was having so much fun, and you feel so good to me. I thought we were in this together, but somehow it’s not enough for you. We’re not on the same page.” I knew in that moment that just as he blamed his ex for their entire failed marriage, he’d ask me to shoulder the blame for anything that went wrong between is. It was what I predicted would happen when he went off on her after our flower date. I was that girl who couldn’t do anything right.

I felt so sad and hurt and little. I wish I could say I told him to put his pants on right then and go, but there were four torturous hours after that, trying to talk and fuck ourselves back into a connection. (Still with a condom, of course.) Though they were sad hours, I’m glad we tried everything, and I’m glad that we were the kind of honest you can be with someone who is no longer a prospect. When he told me he never wanted to get married again, I told him I could only be in a relationship that had hope. I admitted how lucky he was to have already had his children, how difficult and sad it can be to long for a family at this age.

Just before we finally admitted that he had to go, he lay there on the bed and sang the most awful Harry Chapin song (Pause to Google Harry Chapin and see if he’s still alive so that I might hope to someday punch him in the face…drat.) about a broken barfly and a fat, ugly waitress who decide to make their empty, broken lives better by settling for each other. I am both fascinated and livid that this is a thing that happened to me, but it really helped me to understand that he and I lived in such different worlds.

When I met him, my life was anything but empty—it was full (it is full) of poetry and friends and flowers and art. That’s more and more what it looks like, the further away from the bitterness and grief of divorce that I get, and I can hope that he’ll end up someday in a similarly more lavish landscape.

To him, sex narrowed down to such a tiny seconds-long pinpoint of pleasure, and it made me feel so grateful for all of the confident and generous lovers and players who showed up at my face with condoms and lube and gloves and everything they needed to help keep us safe, who took their penises’ ups and downs with adult aplomb and fucked my whole body with their whole bodies. I remembered Mr. Sweetheart, who tried to be my first anal at ten minutes to midnight at Nude Years Eve, couldn’t, and then spent the evening dancing and fucking and cuddling like the best and happiest of souls.

While lately I’d been dismissing this project as a source of pain and loss, that night as I tossed and turned and mourned J’s departure, I was filled with a bright, golden love for all of the characters who came to me with such generosity, care, and abandon. I knew I could no longer try to divorce myself from all I’ve learned, that painful as they sometimes were, my adventures made me strong and part of the world in a way that’s important to share.

I was proud, too, that I’d been willing to give him everything, to put on the special underpants and trust despite my misgivings and fear. Because I was having these epiphanies on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, I got curious about the holiday and in my cursory research, I read somewhere that this is a time when god is particularly accessible. I had the crazypants thought that the way I was feeling, with the special underpants and the flowers by the door and him still finding fault, might be the way a benevolent creator would feel sometimes about all humans. Not that I’m saying that I in particular AM god (though Spinoza sais there’s nothing that isn’t) (also I think everybody is) but that it might be helpful to look for the ways in which the universe welcomes us, lavishes us with gifts, the ways in which god is always wearing the special underpants for us. (It should be noted, also, that J. wore special underpants that night for me, too—they were silver boxers and I’m sorry I left then out of the story so far.)

So that’s how a guy with an upsetting fetish for not wearing condoms made me want to take down the deeper barriers that separate me from god, and myself, and others. It doesn’t make the heartbreak any less, but I could not be more grateful.

In Which I Realize I Am Really Lucky to Have Had My Adventure Years, Part Six

Before I do all of the analyzing and narrating, I want to stop and say I miss him. I liked him so much. He was soft and warm and sweet and strong, and he gave me so much pleasure and inspiration. Whatever else was true during those weeks, there was a deep happiness that rang in me like a bell.

After the pool afternoon, my smittenness with J. had both good and bad effects. First and foremost, I was dizzy with joy because A. He was driving an hour each way that Thursday to have a campus on the pretty, Hogwarts-like campus where I work and. B. Our next date was going to include him not only going to my Unitarian church with me, but bringing water from his pool to add to our beginning-of-season water ceremony.

The joy I felt at the idea of him joining me at church cannot be overstated—I kinda lost my mind. Having been married to an atheist all those years, I longed for a partner I could go to church with, and even though none of the women in my family attend church, I knew it was part of my big, almost-too-scary-to-wish-for dream. Granted, he was also an atheist (Unitarians have those) who refused to call it church, but that did nothing to dim my enthusiasm.

Last Christmas Eve, I was sitting in the pew with The Cute Church Couple (on our friendaversary!)  and their beautiful baby girl. I joked that I was saving a spot for my boyfriend, in case this was actually a Hallmark movie. Later, when church started to fill up, I started to move over, but the Cute Church Husband said “No. Save that spot.” I was touched at his belief in my not-that-crazy church boyfriend dream, and I still take a lot of comfort in that story.

The bad part was, though, the more I liked J, the more I thought women would be lining up any minute to care for him and the boys. I felt like I had to be more grateful, to spoil him more so he wouldn’t go away. (And that I had to be creative about that, since he purported to not like blow jobs…) I also felt (I can’t believe I’m saying this!) slightly guilty for insisting on condoms when he clearly disliked them so much. To quell my anxiety on the whole question of them, I offered to provide them for our next date, since I was hosting. I had him send me a picture of the package we’d gotten together, since he said they were okay.

Also, I felt a great deal of worry wrapped up in making him a picnic—he mentioned food and health several times and was quite a lot more fit than I am, so I started to have a little trouble with food. (Sample comment: Me: “I always have a treat after therapy, and you’re better than a macaroon.” He: “And healthier for you.”)  (Um, no.)  I made salads with chicken breast and brought little teeeeensy slices of birthday cake. I worried that he would end up controlling my eating, and also that I was too fat for someone as fit as he. He’d only mentioned it in tiny ways, but it grew a furrow of anxiety in my mind.

Nonetheless, when the work day of the picnic came, I felt like a romance millionaire. It was raining when I got in, so I parked in an off-to-the-side spot and cleared my backseat in case we had to have a car picnic. I spent the morning packing up boxes of books for returns and gazing dreamily out the windows at the rain and the starlings in the tall trees. I didn’t want him to see me behind a register, but we’ll get to why in a later post.

Sweetie/the boss even said I could take a long lunch and promised to be on her best ex-wife/best-friend behavior. That made me a little nostalgic for the poly days, and I wondered if seeing her there with me would make him bolt the way some of my other not-poly suitors had. I wished I was further along in the moving-on process, so I guess I’m working on that now for the next guy.

When he got to the store, it wasn’t raining but it was still wet. I suggested my backseat but he said no, he wanted to walk across campus and get his family picnic basket; he had a present in there for me. The present was this: a glow stick. From the line in my poem that accidentally said I wanted kids. And I wish I could say that I didn’t let myself wish what I wished, which was: That he would be the one. That he would change his not-wanting-more-kids mind someday and give those boys a baby sister. I have a name picked out, it arrived in my consciousness one evening over the summer, as if from nowhere.

“I asked for a glow stick and got one!” I exclaimed with glee, “Should’ve wished for a million dollars.” (That’s what Sweetie always says to me whenever synchronicity brings me surprisingly apt gifts.)

The campus has these red, green and yellow Adirondack chairs strewn around and we tried sitting in those under a pine tree, at first. I felt princessy and cared for as he napkined the rain off of our chairs. As we settled in, though, it started to rain harder, so we made for the porch of the most castle-like building on campus.

“We were too far apart in the chairs anyway.” I said.

“We’re too far apart even when we’re on top of each other, so…” So romantic, but also…not.

There happened to be a table with two chairs on the porch, and he wondered aloud whether we should sit on opposite side or together. Judge John Hodgman disapproves of sitting on the same side of the table, but Judge John Hodgman was not there.

Lunch chat was mostly pleasant and sweet. We took a lovey-dovey my-head-on-his shoulder selfie that makes my heart ache just think about it. We kissed and cuddled a campus-appropriate amount. The STI testing conversation that I had kind of skipped over last date had been hanging over my head, but it was without trouble except that he sounded kind of naïve. I mentioned the possibility of someday going on birth control, which is a huge deal for me. (Just, I’m a delicate machine. And the side effects sound scary. I wish I were more easygoing about it, but not yet.)

He set off alarm bells, though, when he offered some very creepy Svengali-like help to my creative coachees, about whom he knew virtually nothing. It made me wonder again what I might be getting manipulated into.

Still, the rain and magic won out. He said he wished we’d seen a rainbow, and I said we were the rainbow. The rain stopped exactly when I had to walk back to the store, take that, Mr. Atheist. (I don’t really think that’s what god is, but also I felt like god wanted us to cuddle.) On my commute home was download-This-Is-Water miserable, but glances at our selfie gave me almost as much comfort as the 90210 recap podcast that is currently my favorite.

Coming up: Special underpants, hello/goodbye.

In Which I Realize I Am Really Lucky to Have Had My Adventure Years, Part Three

That week, while my creative coaching client was collaging through her blocks, I made this. Both a staircase and a trapped butterfly, seems about right.

It should be said, friends, that my almost-year-and-a-half dry spell was a literal dry spell as well—I’ve always been the squishiest, but there was a while when I was so dry that I thought I might be starting menopause. I could just have stocked up on lube, but the idea of always having to was something I wasn’t ready to face, so I got by on spit and determination. From the moment I met J, the dry spell was over. I came home with soaked underpants every time, wetter than in all my adventures. It felt like a reunion, like a second chance at being alive, to be coursing with so much life, to be opening up like a flower. That’s why, no matter how it ended up, I’m glad I let my hoo-ha make the decisions for a while—that part of me (literally and figuratively) has been neglected for so long, I’m glad I didn’t begrudge myself a perilous treat.

When I met him, I was in a delicate but thriving state. It was the first time in my adult life that I could say I was truly happy to be single. I was teaching poetry in my pretty apartment, spending lots of time with my friends and at church, and starting to have faith about where I was going. However, back in February I had to resign from the school district due to acute stress disorder, and I’m still pretty jumpy and prone to panics about once a month. The fact that J. was triggering space issues seemed like it was partly due to my own recent and distant past, but typing the story to you makes it seem less likely that that was so. I am still brokeny, but I think I was scared of him because he was (unintentionally, I’m almost sure) scary—sometimes it’s not that deep.

Anyway, the day after our beautiful but ill-ended flower date, he sent a text apologizing and citing grief. I conceded that not everyone can be besties with their exes the way I (somewhat unhealthily) am with Sweetie. (Currently she and I work at the same three-employee store, she’s my boss, and we spend about an hour each morning processing my feelings about various things. All this with a person I once jumped out of a car to get away from. I know.) I told him to give me some time,  that I’d have to do some soul-searching, so we went to radio silence and a love poem proceeded to pour out of me in a way that hadn’t happened in a long time. I felt jangled but fired up. I made art all day that day.

(When I second-drafted the poem with my friends in poetry class, I noticed that it accidentally implied that I wanted to have babies, including feeling the vibration of his Apple watch as “Another little heartbeat.” and, seeing the children in the flower garden wearing glow bracelets, responding with “I want one” meaning but not really meaning the glow bracelets. I hid it pretty well before I posted it, but still, I was like, nicely done, subconscious! Got it.)

Anyway, maybe latent baby-wishes were what inspired me to give him a chance, or his prowess at planning dates, or the cuteness of his texting style. (It was the first time I’ve dated with emoji involved, and I can’t overstate the adorableness of a good morning sunflower rainbow kissy face…) Maybe (probably) it was just plain lust and curiosity. That Sunday, I took a beach trip by myself, to clear my head and make the right decision, and I knew (I always know things best in the ocean, even if it is with a bathing suit on these days.) that if I let him go, I would always wonder if there could have been something real between us. Also I have to admit there was the stupid “What if this is my last chance?” feeling that comes from being socialized to think of myself as ancient at almost-forty-one.

When he asked me a couple days before the date what I was in the mood for, I very brazenly and honestly said red meat. He sent me a couple of menus for fancy places I could dress up for, with very grown-up prices, and I thought, “Is this what regular dating women get all the time? I should start expecting more from life.” That was the central lesson of him, and I hope I can see it through.

The day before our third date, I had an enormous panic attack. The first week of classes is pretty much the only busy time our college bookstore job is stressful, just because of all the extroversion and sometimes-getting-trapped-behind-the-register it requires. The one rude kid on our super-adorable campus found me and I found myself with a pounding headache, unable to work or get myself home. A kind coworker brought me to the campus infirmary, where the nice nurse asked me why I had neither a therapist nor meds. Reasonable question. I got some good rest before the date, but I carried a residue of fear under my pretty black polka-dot dress. (Hello again, red satin heels!)

As I followed my GPS to the suburbs, everything started to look familiar, especially when I turned onto J’s block. Remember way back whenSteampunk Guy pulled over on a quiet suburban street for car sex? THIS RANDOM OKC GUY’S HOUSE WAS THE HOUSE WE PULLED OVER IN FRONT OF. J was one of the nice people I was trying not to wake with my sex yowls three summers ago. I didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one, but I’ve never been more sure that my love life is a labyrinth. So where had I returned to?

I can’t overstate my delight at being properly dated, to be out in the world being shown off in a fancy outfit, being treated like someone who’s someone instead of a dance card afterthought. I ate rare filet mignon and felt like an animal, like a sexy lion, like a woman who’s thoroughly alive. He ordered a good pinot with the inauspicious name “Writer’s Block” but I seem to be overflowing with paragraphs nonetheless.

The conversation turned again to his writing, which was a tricky subject. He’d told me before that he wrote erotic novels, and I (somewhat hypocritically) was scared to read them—I had a feeling we wouldn’t be able to go on if I read his stories, and probably I was right. He confirmed that “Well, let’s just say it’s not all consensual.” I didn’t ask him who in the stories was not consenting to what, only told him I was now A. Scared and B. Too tipsy to flee.

“But sometimes someone just needs a little…push…”

Okay, so this blog wouldn’t exist if that weren’t a little bit true, but I didn’t like hearing it from him. “That’s not up to you. It’s not up to you to decide what someone else needs.”

He rightly pointed out that he’d written it, not done it, but still, I felt so let down and sad. “I just want there to be one guy, one guy, who wants a real person next to him in bed.” Yes, there have been plenty, but I was having tunnel vision, heavy with the burden of trying to keep myself not-raped. In the do-over version, this is where I have the waitress split the check, wait around a bit to sober up, and grouse about it to my friends at brunch the next day. But as he paid the bill, the conversation simmered back to happy somehow and I admitted that what I wanted most in the world was just to tear. Him. Apart. I was getting in that pool, and no stupid thing he said was going to stop me.

Next time: Big moon, hot sex, more stupid things.