Wow--Excited and Nervous

I have a date with the eharmony guy tomorrow night, and I'm nervous! I really like this man. He is bright, engaging, optimistic, and seems to actually see some of me. He really likes my writing (and that is just on eharmony, and some emails) and he writes really well too. I think we'd have a lot in common (we are in complementary professions), and we could support each other.

And the whole 'how-the-hell-do-you-talk-about-sex' thing looms large. Very large. First of all, I'm not sure if I know how to fall in crush with a gentleman off the dance floor. If said gentleman is strong, turns me the way he wants me to go, lifts up my chin when I look down, brushes some hair out of my face, then, perhaps. But if said gentleman lets me control the situation, I will lose interest. And the thing is, I will try to control the situation. I really will. I wish I wouldn't, but I will. I will test him to get a sense of how strong he is. (And if he is strong, I will test him to get a sense of whether or not he would take good care of me.) I wish I didn't work that way, but it is like having a pint of Ben & Jerry's in the freezer--I'd eat it, even if I'd wish I wouldn't. That is just how I work.

I've sort of tried to figure out how I might drop hints. So far, he has had two. The first is my eharmony profile, which says:

• What I'm looking for includes: it wouldn't hurt if you had an evil streak and wanted to do unspeakable things to me, if we were serious about each other.
• 5 things I can't live without includes: Fabulous, frequent, faithful sex, vanilla +++
  
• And most private thing I'm willing to admit says: I want a true partnership of equals in the world, even as I yearn for someone to sweep me off my feet and take charge on the dance floor and in our erotic lives. Working out that balance of power--when is it appropriate to lead, when to follow and when to row together is a tough one, and one I think our society is scared to talk honestly about. I welcome that honest dialog, not because I know the answers, but because it is darn important.

So, really. That kind of says it all, right? Then, at one point, I said "I'm really blunt! We've already talked about religion and politics, so I guess we should move on to money and sex!" I was joking, but, I was also trying to reinforce that last point. He says he has re-read my profile on several occasions, and that it what the best-written profile he's read. If he has really, really read it, he has to kind of know, right? I mean, that isn't exactly written in Esperanza or something. Do vanilla people talk about 'working out that balance of power," and hoping someone had an 'evil streak' wanting to do 'unspeakable things' to me? What else would that mean?

Anyway, if we have chemistry (or maybe even if we don't tomorrow), I want to try to let this work. But, I think the way that I'll introduce it, if he doesn't by the third or forth date would be if he asks about my ex and why we broke up. Sooner or later, that seems to get asked. I will say that honestly, we each failed each other in a specific way. I was unable to support my ex as he pursued his dream. (And I honestly feel partially justified and partially bad about that.) And he was unable to fulfill my erotic core. I really don't like the idea of waiting until 3 or 6 month anniversary to bring up the whole kinky thing. That seems to be dissembling to the point of dishonesty.

The next question is this blog. I think that if we worked, I might delete it. I'm trying to figure it out. I did mention that I blogged occasionally. But I also left the impression that I blog on political matters, which I do at least a few times a year! I tried to say it so that it wasn't a lie, but you can't say "I blog about how I feel about sex and dating, but I'm not going to tell you where--nee ner, nee ner, nee ner." That is just too mean.

On the kinky websites, I'm comfortable saying "yeah, I blog about this stuff. No one who knows me gets to see it" and leaving it at that. But this feels differently. If I couldn't say that, I couldn't keep the blog. And frankly, I feel like I might need to delete it before we got serious about each other. I wouldn't want to sleep with someone and not know he was publishing a blog about it, nor that the entire world knew what made him tick, but I didn't get to. It is really, really important to me to not lie. I dissemble about little things, mostly about trying to give the impression that I'm not as smitten with a man as I might be. I may act a little more nonchalant than I actually feel at a given time and attempt to pretend I haven't checked my e-mail 48 times before the 12:00 noon cutoff in my head that will tell me whether he wants to see me again. But that isn't lying. But having a blog about sex and dating and never mentioning it, that seems like lying to me.

Overall, though, I'm clearly excited about him, or else I wouldn't be up this late on a Sunday night. And I'm excited to be excited about a vanilla man who clearly cherishes me already. I think it would be easier to teach him to dominate me than teach a dominate man to cherish me.

How do you make a DQ (tm) blizzard?

So I have a vanilla date tomorrow night. (This is from PerfectMatch.com, which I can definitively say isn't worth the money--$100 for 4 months and the only man worth e-mailing isn't listed as a 'perfect match' and lives 100 miles away, but he's willing to drive in, so we'll do coffee. There are 4 men listed as a 'perfect match' for me after 2 weeks, and 2 of them are over 50! And one looked like he sent his picture for American Gladiator--I'm not much into pictures generally, but pictures where men are nakes or look angry seem like major warning signs to me.)

And the question becomes--how the hell do you make a blizzard? I love Blizzards (although I don't allow myself to have them more than once a year). You start with vanilla icecream, and then you add snickers (it has to be snickers--all the chocolate and caramel and peanuts, and the caramel freezes and gets a little crunchy and sticks to your teeth--yummy!).

DQ's vanilla ice-cream is just bland. Boring! And it would be too sweet by itself. It needs something to set off all that vanilla sticky, sweetness, boring. But do you ask the vanilla if it is OK to add something in? Does the vanilla say "ooh--snickers, come join me?" What if the vanilla wants more, but gets scared to ask. Or looks at all that vanilla and assumes ice-cream only comes in vanilla?

And the snickers--what if the vanilla rejects it? It is scary to be in little pieces, with one part of your self over there and another part over here, and how can you feel whole when you keep cutting yourself into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces. You already feel like a freak, what with your wrapper off and all--you have to take your wrapper off before you have a chance to merge with the vanilla, but how do you find out if the vanilla is interested? The advantage of only hanging out with snickers if you can leave your wrapper on till you crawl into the the other snicker's wrapper. But with vanilla, you can do that! Can you just open the end of the wrapper, and pop out a bit? And what if the vanilla is busy looking at the TV and doesn't realize you've popped out of your wrapper for a bit? Or clueless? Or horrified? (My current eharmony profile, under "stuff only my best friends know" says "I'm kinda kinky." I say it with a little more poetry than that, but I changed it yesterday to say it flat out instead of with hints. Today I had more men 'close' communication with me than I'd typically have in a week! But if that freaks them out, clearly it would have been a waste of time!)

And then, if the vanilla says "oh, yes--I've always wanted snickers," or, more likely "hell--a pretty cute, smart, funny chick that's interested in sex, will do anything I want if I just take charge? Sure, why the hell not? She's got nice tits!" (I've worked fast food--you'd be shocked what the food says when it thinks no one is looking)--but what if the vanilla doesn't really know how to get the snickers out of the wrapper, does the snickers instruct the vanilla on how to take charge?

And another thing--how long should the snickers flirt with the vanilla until she starts to take off her wrapper? How many vanillas will look at her and say "oh, no way!--Skittles, maybe, or Starburst? Even Nerds, but no way in hell can I handle chocolate! And caramel! And Peanuts!!! NO!!!!" And how much time does the snickers want to waste on the vanilla if he's just going to hate the way the caramel freezes up and sticks to your teeth anyway? Especially if the vanilla lives 2 hours away?

So it is all very confusing.

And yet.... We as a country, maybe as a "Western Civilization," well we seem to suck at navigating gender issues. 150 years ago we all of a sudden said "women--you are no longer property. You now get to have some modicum of self." Jane Austen said "cool--how does this work?" And the Brontes said "this is how it might work." And Tolstoy said "this is how it isn't working." And Ibsen said "but this is what happened under the old way." And Strindberg said "this is why this is scary!" And DH Lawrence said "this is why it would be worth it to make it work."

And then something bizarre happened: we stopped talking about it! We said "poof--men and women are equals! Nothing more to talk about." And it is scary to talk about issues of gender (or race or religion) because people get touchy and get hurt or angry. So we just don't talk about it.

So, part of the reason I write this is because I think we need more honest dialogue. I don't have much hope to learn how to make a blizzard tomorrow. But maybe, just maybe, this process will teach me a little more about how to figure it out.

Addicted to Dating?

There is an energy going on in my life right now that I don't like to admit. I seem to be slightly addicted to the attention I'm getting from men. I was at a vanilla party tonight and several guys flirted with me. (Cute, professional, sweet guys!) I doubt I'd go out with a vanilla guy because 'that conversation' is just way too overwhelming to me. But I am addicted to men's attention and approval, even when I'm not interested in them.

It isn't addicted in an extreme sense of the word--I'm not going to have a 'girls-gone-wild' moment. But there is a strong sense that I need that attention. I like the fact that I seem to always have at least one man who is interested in me, and I miss him (whoever "he" is at any given moment) when he isn't there. But, truth to tell, since John they've all been rather interchangeable.

Steven didn't e-mail me from 12:59 pm yesterday until 6:32 pm today. Why that is 29 hours! Intellectually, I think 'well, he has a life. Duh, and good for him.' I wouldn't want someone with no life, but, well, I missed him. I missed the validation as well as the terrific conversations we've been having. And, when I saw he'd been on the CollarMe, where we met, twice today without e-mailing me, I started to get rather nervous about the entire thing, re-read e-mails to see if I'd said something wrong, replay phone conversations in my head. Really rather neurotic.

But Steven is the current in a long line of men that have been unable to truly capture me (and, truth to be told, several of them haven't been interested enough to capture me--I'm kindof high maintenance in my own unique way--I don't like fancy meals, but I want to know the depths of a man's soul, which means he doesn't only have to visited it, he has to communicate it!), and yet their energy is necessary to how I currently live my life. I wouldn't want to not have the attention because I thrive off of it. I was even glad that the ex tried, rather clumsily, to get me in bed last week.

I'm not sure if this is really unhealthy, or if it is a little healthy. The unhealthy side seems to be a need for energy that I can't fulfill myself. I'm relying on something I'm getting from others. I need external validation.

At the same time, we all live in various stages of relatedness. We need that relatedness. Maybe it is just healthy that I'm finally admitting I want to have connectedness with others. I am vulnerable and I'm comfortable with the fact that I'm not fully self sufficient.

Meanwhile, I'm having dinner with John tomorrow--and I'm rather nervous about that. I don't know how to be with him as a friend and not wish it could be more. How to not have it cut away at my self-esteem and confidence and just quietly erode my sense of self. I want to try. I value so much about him, but if I have to pick one of the two of us, I'll have to pick me. I think, ultimately, we could maybe be a 'let's-get-together-once-ever-couple-of-months' friends--but I can't have those searing, soul connected, intimate conversations I've had in the past. The fact that he didn't want me enough to persue me rings through our encounters and undercuts the joy.

Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?

(Apologies to someone or other, who already had that title a year ago, but a very different review follows.)

Maureen Dowd, in Are Men Necessary, and some columns like “Should Hillary Pretend to be a Flight Attendant,” proposes the theory that men avoid women who are as smart or ambitious as they are. Quoting a Slate article, Dowd seems to believe “They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point ... It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.”

There are other reasons to believe that men avoid women who are smarter or more ambitious. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that only 5% of women with PhDs will get married after completing their doctorate.

I’m an over-educated, ambitious woman; I’m quite smart according to conventional intelligence assessments. And I’m single.

But I believe Dowd and the Slate study have it wrong. The study in the Slate article was odd. It looked only at seemingly quantifiable statistics but asked the daters to rank the opposite sex based on intelligence, looks and ambition. It had NO assessment of actual intelligence or ambition, only looks. (They had someone outside the study rank the looks of the participants. If any quantifiable intelligence testing or ambition ranking happened, the authors never mentioned it.) The participants ranked the potential partners after a 4-minute conversation. In other words, this isn't real intelligence, it is whether someone has an aura of intelligence. Same with ambition.

People of quality don’t date on quantifiable data. We date on how someone feels, their energy, their ability to engage, connect, and develop an interplay and interconnection. Men, at least men of quality, would never say “oh, her IQ is 5 points higher than mine—I’m not interested.” Please! Same with ambition. No man of quality is going to say “well, her dream job is .387% more prestigious than my dream job. Next.” But they will notice a woman who is focused primarily on that. Anyone who is able to convince someone else of 'being intelligent" in a four minute conversation, is probably focused on that. In my experience, real intelligence isn't about using big words that impress, intimidate and don't communicate (although I can deconstruct heteronormative, hegemonic paradigms with superlative if superfluous alacrity).

Maureen Dowd is in the top half a percent of most influential people in the country, and she is trying to prove she is in the top quarter of a percent. She proves herself all the time. She clutches. Her energy has tighter, narrower waves that feel constricted.

Until 2005, very few men found me attractive, and until 2005, I would have bought right into Dowd’s theory. But in 2005, I quit a power job that made me miserable. By 2006, I had as many dates, vanilla and otherwise, that a gal could wish for. I’m not stupider or less ambitious than I was in 2005; in fact, if anything, I’m a smidgen more successful because I stopped making a compromise that made me deeply unhappy. But my energy shifted.

I used to go through life saying “I can do it myself. I don’t need your help.” I clawed my way, not to the top, but to spitting distance from the top. But all I wanted was to reach the top because my life disappointed my soul and I desperately needed a change. I clung to any hope that would transform my life.

Once I quit a job I hated, which I viewed entirely as a stepping stone to a job that I would hate less, I stopped clutching as much. My energy became less tight, less closed, more welcoming and reciprocal. When I proved myself at work, all the time, I also proved myself in the rest of my life. I couldn’t turn that off.

Few of us, of any gender, are interested in lovers, friends, or even work colleagues, who spend sizeable amounts of time proving themselves. It isn’t a warm dynamic.

As I shifted my relationship to work, more men became interested in me, which made me more confident, which meant more men became interested in me. In the last year, I’ve become as picky in my private life as I am in my job. No one would look at me and say “wow—I bet she has multiple men interested in her.” I’m plump, don’t wear too much make-up and spend little energy on my appearance. I mean, my hair is clean, but sunscreen is the only facial product I use religiously.

But I am happy. My energy is good, and that strong energy has room to give and room to accept. I can listen to men and be interested in them. Granted, I won't see them again if they aren't also interested in me, but I no longer demand to be the center of attention.

Now, this does not mean I don’t support women’s achievement at whatever they desire. And there is an unfair result of sexism—it is harder for women to achieve the same level that men achieve with the same effort. That unfair playing field makes it more likely that women will clutch and fight to achieve their dreams. But women need to realize they have far more control over their destinies than the Maureen Dowds of the world give us credit for. We can very much affect how we are perceived by making a life where we are happy and content. And it does little good to blame the individual men we date for the unfair playing field.

Can't We Just Be Friends?

This week, the trickle of men wanting my friendship has become a deluge:

• My ex
• A guy I went out with twice that I'm not attracted to (but wish I were)
• A guy I went out with twice that isn't that attracted to me (but I think wishes he was)
• A guy I went out with once, 2 years ago, who made me feel really shitty about myself, but claims it was all him and can't we be friends?
• A married guy, a ferry ride away, that wanted me to be his mistress, but when I said no way, wants to be friends;
• A guy from Asheville NC
• A guy from Egypt

I can't do it. I don't understand how people make a friendship between a single, straight guy and a single straight gal work. I have gay friends that I adore, but that is different. With all the rest, there is an unspoken rejection on one side or the other.

Harry (in When Harry Met Sally) said something like "Men and women can't be friends because the sex thing always messes it up." And I agree.

All of this is underscored by Edmund. I knew Edmund in college. During my first year, he lived one hall over from me, and walked through my hall to get to the dining hall. Somehow or other, we became friends, and I thought he was was flirting with me here and there. Edmund was my height, incredibly thin and had a receding hair line. But he had sparkling, laughing eyes, clean energy and deep wisdom. I actually remember wishing I could fall for a guy like Edmund because he was, pretty clearly, 'in my league' so to speak. Be careful what you wish for.

Throughout college we were friends, but nothing more. After college, he moved to Seattle, and the following year, I did too (not for him--although it didn't hurt he was there). We became the very best of friends. We did everything together--hanging out at least 3 nights a week, watching Star Trek, talking on the phone every night before bed. And I fell for him; but he wasn't romantically interested in me. He would put his arm around me, run his fingers through my hair, kiss me on the eyes, and I would snuggle up next to him in a movie; but he 'didn't feel that way' about me. We shared our hopes, dreams and insecurities. He would spend hours (literally) on the phone, explaining how painful it was to him that 'no woman was romantically interested in him.' I guessed that I, somehow-or-other, just didn't qualify as a woman, in his eyes.

Finally, I literally broke up with him. I confronted him about whether he knew I was romantically interested (and he confirmed he did), asked what the hell he meant when he said no woman was interested in him, and told him I couldn't be his friend. That was 1998. He hadn't had a girlfriend since, when I saw him is 2005. I wonder if he is trying to find his way out of a very deep closet; clearly something is wrong because he would make someone very happy, should he ever figure out what the hell he wants. But I know what I want and a co-dependent, platonic, friendship with a man that sucks out all my romantic energy (not to mention my self-esteem) just isn't it.

All of this convinced me that friendships between straight men and women is something close to emotional cancer, to be avoided at all costs. I have to wonder if the universe is trying to teach me something here, but I don't see a way through this. I'm going to try and see if I can be a distant friend with my ex--I saw him this week and have no emotional stickiness towards him. I couldn't imagine getting back with him. But he feels stuck--he isn't growing, isn't deepening. I don't really see where the energy would come from his friendship. But I also feel like I owe him a little--not a lot, but he was an important part of my life and so if I can do coffee once a month without emotional blowback to me, I do want to do that.

But the rest--I don't know a way through this one. Part of it is my time. Some guy in Egypt or Asheville--I have no emotional stickiness there, but I have real friends, that I've been friends with for decades, and they rank higher.

The one that really matters, of course, is John; I'm attracted to him and I don't think he's all that attracted to me on a sexual level, otherwise, I think he'd try to find a way to make it work. But he does want friendship and I could see our friendship being SO illuminating and rich and enlightening and smart and fun. I kept going deeper and deeper into who I am and what makes me tick with him. In a little less than a month, he and I went deeper than all my therapists ever have. You can easily guess when he and I stopped corresponding simply by looking at the frequency of my posting here. And yet it feels like Edmund all over again. He would take the energy that I need if I'm going to find a partner, and I would be constantly questioning what was wrong with me that he wasn't attracted to me that way, and we'd flirt a little and I'd wonder what the hell it meant and try to believe if I just did something right, he'd finally be interested. I'd put my life on hold, waiting for him, and then I'd grow to hate him for it. John is going to make some woman incredibly happy, and I would watch from the sidelines and feel like my heart had been torn out and all my fire had been replaced with ice as I grew slowly numb. I can't put myself through that slow, inexorable rejection again, and I don't see another way out of it even as I miss him with every cell in my body.

I don't think anyone actually reads this blog, but if you do, and if you have made friendships work with single people of the gender to which you are attracted, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Playing Games?

After one date, I believe I have met what can only be termed as my soul mate. Intellectually, I know how cheesy that sounds, but that is the only way I can describe it. Our energies vibrate off each other in a way that is both emotionally grounded and lusciously sexy at the same time.

I have always played dating games. Always. And this time, I’ve decided not to. This terrifies me! I grew up on the East Coast, and I think West Coast women underestimate the importance of a man choosing to come to you. Games are just a way of taking a step back so that the man can come to you and find the distance that he wants, and in coming to you, he realizes if he cares for you.

And yet, with this man, I’ve decided not to. Several of my vanilla girlfriends have chewed me out for this—saying I absolutely cannot risk that with this man I claim to care about. But here’s the thing: This is the first man I’ve met in my 37 years that just opened me up and I was able to let go of all my self-consciousness, and all the ways I try to present myself in public. I was just how I really am, not who I try to pretend to be. And we just resonated with each other. I can’t expect to have that vital, centered and alive energy if I play games with him.

So I’m letting go of that entire dance of not returning phone calls when I want to and what not. But, I’ve decided on one single game, which is that I’m going to assume that he is my soul mate. This means, I’m not going to ask for reassurances. I’m going to let him set the pace, and I’m going to give him all the space he needs, because I know we are meant to be together. It will work out. I just need to give it room to breathe; I believe we will work.