2008-02-26
It Really Doesn't Suck
"I would kill myself if I was single in this town."
"Girl, I would NOT know what to do. Wouldn't have the first clue what I would do if I wasn't married."
"I don't know how you do it."
For real?
Is it so awful that these quotes aren't just the result of women who've been skewed scared by having been married or partnered for several consecutive years to the same person?
A few people say, "I envy you. You have yourself."
Yes.
I very much have myself and for that I am vocally grateful on some level of every, single day.
But the fact is that the persistence it takes to date and make out like a normal, healthy adult should is discomforting, to say the least.
My hopes never go up very high and honestly?
Should they?
My recent steady dates included a dude who was trying to kick drugs and hacking while living with his mom and driving her Buick and a guy who had not matured sexually. At all.
I didn't add it all up on the first one for awhile and was once complaining to my best friend that we never did anything during the week.
Her response?
"Well, is he allowed to go out during the week?"
Touche.
Another, more recent conversation that took place a month into my resuming my seat on the Board of Directors of Unquestionably Single Women, went like this:
"I'm dating someone and not really sure how I feel. Maybe this isn't the right person for me and maybe it's me. I dunno. How do YOU know when to cut out of a budding relationship?"
"Dude. Seriously? If someone tells me he is a middle-aged virgin or that he doesn't think his past drug use is a big deal then I pretty much don't think twice about the fact that I need to use some very sharp scissors and cut any buddings off the vine."
"True."
The thing that I'm sort of fascinated by is that how I feel about, and how I respond to it is heavily based in my own internal feelings.
Now, for the record, this pisses me off. I wish whole-heartedly that I could have negative amounts of self-awareness and that I could stumble through life as one of those charmed idiots on whom the sun is always shining and never burning.
Sadly, this is not my Karma.
Mine is such that I have to constantly learn that I'm fucking accountable.
This is hard for a Pisces.
I don't necessarily feel owed.... but I feel jealous that I have to work so hard and others seem to drift along, oblivious but much happier in general than I am.
Anyway, it's alternately depressing and exhilarating to be single in my thirties. It's depressing because I feel like I am aging and that I'm not an adorable ing�nue anymore; I'm not a young lady with a lot of charisma and on whom a lot of attention rests just because I'm interesting.
I'm not cute anymore.
A lot of charisma becomes intimidating to men in their thirties or they write it off as a negative value.
I am optimistic that men in their forties aren't sporting the same shattered self-esteem and concern about.... appearances? Perfection?
Whatever it is that makes men in their thirties so sad and unable to get it that a confident, bold woman is a blessing not a burden.
I've lately noticed that men in my age group are terrified of me. They want to compete with me and I'm not interested in that at all. I WANT a guy to take charge but I want a guy to take charge in a manly, natural way and not in a passive-aggressive or hesitant way.
It's just so clear to me with whom I want to be and that's the good part. It's good to know who it is that I've been holding out for. It's good to know who I am so that I know faster and more completely who is right for me and who is not.
On the other hand, the depressing part, is that I don't meet a whole lot of men who understand how good it is for a woman to know who she is and to be confident.
An argument ensued not too long ago with a guy I was seeing and it was about the way I treat people.
This person was doing that thing where you try to bring someone down to your level, where you try to shake them so that they throw some water on their fire and lessen the expectation of how they want to be treated, of what they want in life.
Obviously, it didn't work and I saw through it which made me really happy because there was a very long time when I would have been taken aback and would have questioned myself to the nth degree about my own value.
As in, "Omigod. I'm such a bitch. I'm not a good person for feeling that this guy isn't right for me."
I didn't feel any of that so, great, right?
But I did feel like maybe it's sort of hopeless for a few years, until I'm more in a stage of life where I meet men who are a little bit older and who understand that there are millions of women like me with elected positions and enduring friendships and unfathomable pools of deep abiding love that they only want to share with one person, with one family and that this powerfulness is not a character flaw; in fact, it's the best possible kind of woman.
At least for the right man.
So in spite of all of the negatives I hear almost every day about how terrible it must be to be single, I thank the God I do believe in that I am who I am.
That I am single.
That my time for partnership is still to come and that it will be hugely, undeniably, uncompromisingly great.
arizonasarah at 4:23 p.m.