Entries Tagged 'LOVE & Other High Risks' ↓

I’m now dipping my toe in the dating scene. Literally, the last date I went on was a foot massage. I work from home and I go to church with menopausal lesbians, so online dating is the perfect place to meet men.

Here’s what I have learned about online dating in your 30s and 40s.

People tell you exactly who they are, believe them. As Maya Angelou and Oprah have said so often. With online dating this is true.

Many of them are obviously still furious about their past relationships. Steer clear of someone who’s not over it, I say.

They’ll say things like “I want a boyfriend-like situation, but I want you to need nothing from me because I’m offering nothing like time or attention unless it’s on my terms.”

Thanks for telling me that I absolutely do not want to be your not-girlfriend.

No Games and No Drama is a big request. It makes me sit back and wonder why this dude is attracting games and drama. Thanks, but no thanks. This guy is already starting with a chip on his shoulder and a preconception that texting him is a matter of desperation, or he doesn’t keep his promises, so like, his girlfriend gets mad at him. But, he doesn’t feel he should have to deal with her inconvenient feelings.

Others will say seemingly innocuous things like, “I work 60 hours a week and I want someone to spend my free time with.”

What? That five minutes every full moon when you can’t really bare being alone? Could this be the reason you got a divorce?

Resentment about money comes through very clearly in online profiles. They’ll say things like, “Coffee is the first date, we should make sure we’re a match before I spend money on dinner.”

Real generous guy. Can’t wait to spend the rest of my life fighting over money with you.

Others will feature themselves with shot glasses and beer in every shot. Whether they are boating, in a bar or at a friend’s house they’re getting the party on.

No alcoholics please.

One of my favorites is: “I have two children and they are my life, they will always come first.”

Um, yeah, I’m glad you’re into your children, but being told right up front that I will not be a priority is not a turn-on.

Then there are the guys who obviously do not take care of themselves. 40 has a way of looking vastly different from man to man. There’s the athletic type whose hobby is always rock climbing or biking, then there’s the guy who obviously spends a lot of time eating hamburgers and watching football on the couch. The beer belly is the dead giveaway, and something about the palor of their skin and the lack of brightness in their eyes.

Another big tipoff that this is not the guy for me is when he can’t be bothered with periods or capitalization. Or they message you and you might be slightly interested but realize that they are incommunicative—which makes for a not awesome relationship. This can be discifered from their inability to carry on a messaging conversation.

You: Today I went to get an amazing foot massage and had a delicious lunch. What did you do today?

Him: not much

Where is a conversation supposed to go from here?

The beauty of online dating is that I don’t have to meet any of these guys in person and accidentally fall for them or have to fend off advances from undesirable dudes.

But, then there are the other ones. The sweet ones. I’ll write more about them later.

Images: Wikamedia Commons

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Sometimes I remember someone from way back, or think of someone across the entire planet from me, and I marvel at the feeling I get.

I feel love from and for this person stretching thousands of miles. Maybe my grandma, an old lover. Perhaps a good friend who’s been out of touch.

Across time for decades, with hundreds of milestones in between and many experiences since past.

And Yet, the love is clearly there.

And you can feel it so well you can almost touch it. Even if you really never want to speak to the person or see them again. The love remains.

I often feel my first husband’s love stretch across the Universe. I know always, every-second-of-the-day, that my Grandmother loves me fiercely and sweetly. I feel, sometimes, the affection of an old boyfriend or long-since gone friends. And it makes me feel . . . well, loved. Knowing they are well-wishing me from afar.

Other times you can be sitting right next to someone who is “supposed” to love you and feel completely and entirely that there is no love there. And sometimes you can pretend that you don’t feel the lack of it for months, years, even decades.

I ponder that sometimes.

And sometimes when I meet someone that I haven’t seen for 10 – 20 years I can’t get over the fact that they still look like them. Seeing people who were once 20 who are now 40 and they still look exactly like themselves. It astounds me every time. Maybe they’ve aged, but it’s invisible to me. It’s like I’m remembering who they really are. Which is a profound feeling to have. Like the big long elastic of time and space constricts, pulling you closer together for a minute, and there they are – as them as ever – still connected to me in that way that you might call friendship or love.

I’ve been reading Conversations with God by Neil Donald Walsh and in it God says that time is like layers of paper, one on top of the other on a spindle. He says it’s vertical and all time and experiences are happening simultaneously. (S)He says that we travel between the papers – time periods – during our dream state. He says this is what a deja vu is and it also explains that feeling you get when you wake up and the dream was so real and had so much clarity that you feel it and that sometimes when you wake up exhausted it’s because you’ve been time traveling.

My brain can hardly comprehend this, but they are wondrous things to ponder.

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I had one of the best palm readers in the country, Myrna Lou, come to my The Future is Bright; Let There Be Light party this last weekend. I wanted to mark the milestone of this bright shiny new chapter in my life: post-divorce and 39.

Myrna Lou told me some awesome things, like that my soul mate will be here very quickly and I won’t be single for long. She said we will be very close, two-peas-in-a-pod, “like one person.”

I love hearing that.

But, first, she said I’m coming into a Wildee Time.

By Wildee she meant that I will be very popular with men. She said, “Everything in pants will look good to you.”

“You’re going to have a lot of fun for a little while, before he gets here and takes you out of the Wildee Time,” she prophesied.

<—— This is me grinning from ear-to-ear.

I love monogamy. I do. I actually think the confines of marriage are very comforting. I dig marriage. I love having a mate. I think the intimacy of it is wonderful.

And I also believe that monogamy is best when there are periods of Wild Fun sandwiched in between relationships.

This will be my last Wildee Time, she indicated, so it’s going to have to carry me through to old age. I intend to appreciate it, savor it, and take in the many pleasures of it.

Now that I’m 39 I’m hoping my mother won’t take my Wildee Time so personally.

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I came across an article, “An Unmarried Woman,” in a borrowed Elle Magazine by Rebecca Traister.

Evidently, women have turned their noses up at marriage. At least according to the conservative right. The column is all about how women are “choosing not to get married.” You know, because we suddenly hate men. They’ve become superfluous. (The article quotes a bunch of right wing politicians and pundits calling the unmarried mother a bunch of really mean names.) Seems they think women don’t want to be married to a nice, sexy, stand up man. Which is strange, because just about every woman I know would adore being married to a sweet, funny, hot guy — all the better if he’s the father of their children.

Except these same women are also willing leave if he’s emotionally abusive or disconnected, if he’s a addict, if he beats her, if he steps out on her, if he gambles away all the money, if he’s commitment phobic, if he lets his personal hygiene slip below that of an orangutan or if he’s crazy selfish. To be fair, these women will put up with a hell of a lot of these behaviors before they finally do leave the father of their children.

Sure, there are women who visit the sperm bank and buy some $29.99 sperm. But, that’s after they’ve dated a lot of “not so Mr. Rights” and they’ve run out of trial and error time. Or they are lesbian and would love to be married; but these same pro-marriage conservatives won’t let them.

Here are the stats: the median age for a woman’s first marriage is 26.5, compared to the previous norm of it being 20 to 22; A recent Pew report says that “barely half of Americans 18 and older are married;” and over half of all births to women under 30 are to unmarried women; one-third of all teenage girls become pregnant before 19-years-old; the divorce rate hovers just below 50 percent.

Well conservatives are just up in arms about this problem women are committing on society, so sayeth this Elle column.

This rise in Immaculate Conception is astounding, don’t you think?

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So I bought Fifty Shades of Grey, the chick porn series that is flying off the shelves. Professional, strong women are getting all hot and bothered by hideously lazy and trite writing and messages even worse than Twilight.

I read a chapter or two, mainly because I was curious about whether I could still get horny. Synopsis: boring virgin college girl rejects appropriate advances by a nice guy and a good friend and instead chooses to be the sex slave of a high-powered, arrogant CEO who has her sign a contract allowing him to do any violent or abusive thing he wants to her. How deliciously orginal. Flipping to the middle I saw the word “suspension,” and thought:

“Tracee have you had men treat you like shit? Have they used you for sex? Have they tried to control your behavior and isolate you from your friends, family and outside interests? Have they been violent towards you, even hurting you during sex?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Was it sexy?” I asked.

“No! It totally sucked! It was painful, humiliating and made me ashamed for years and years afterward. It changed the way I felt about myself and men in general,” I remembered.

“Do you want to attract more of those kinds of men into your life simply because they ‘make one hundred thousand dollars an hour?’ or find abusing you an irresistible temptation?” I asked.

“No way,” I said as I tossed the unread book into the recycling bin and hauled it out to the curb where the garbage man carried it off to its appropriate destination.

What the hell is wrong with us? Women, I mean. That’s what I keep wondering. There must me some kind of character flaw, deeply imbedded within women either straight up in our DNA or so deeply ingrained by over 2,000 years of culturally-enforced submission, that we think being treated violently and abusively is sexy. Even for pretend. I mean, would women have even tolerated domination by men if there wasn’t something in us that wanted to be controlled and desired the act of submission?

Are we so desperate to be wanted and desired that we are willing to see any advance or attraction as good?

Here’s a truth you might want to ponder. . .

Reading sexually explicit material or looking at sexually explicit images is going to be sexually stimulating no matter what the content or subject matter is. Need I say more about this than to utter the name V.C. Andrews, author of Flowers in the Attic? Those books are filled with incest and completely abusive coercion, yet my generation could not resist passing them discretely to each other in junior high because of the explicit sexual content. (Do girls still read these?)

The choice is in what you want your brain to be wired to for a sexual response. If you read about submission and domination over and over and become sexually aroused, then that will become your fixation and fetish. Child molesters don’t just wake up one day and attack the nearest kid. They first dwell and fixate on the idea until their brain is so wired to this deviant sexual behavior that they then act on it, making all sorts of justifications to themselves in the process. It is the same with rapists. It is the same with any and all sexual behavior. What you focus on expands.

If, instead, you choose to entertain fantasies of making soulful and deep-heart connections with a strong and gentle, respectful, committed lover, your brain will be aroused and respond sexually to that.

What you focus on not only expands, but it is in fact, invited into your reality and attracted to you.

Consider for a second what kind of message the mass purchasing and reading of this garbage by educated, strong, independent women gives to men. “Treating us like shit actually does turn us on. Keep it up! We love it!”

Explore the idea that we have expanded the domination and submission archetypes of gender and expanded the abuse of and violence toward all women around the world, (the reverse of what I imagine we would all say we want) by the mass consumption of this type of material. We’ve practically handed them the stale, old excuse, “but she likes it.” Think I’m exaggerating? Read this post about what junior high boys believe girls like: She liked it. 

For me, having experienced the disrespect, violence, sexual abuse and coercion of men in my life already, I know that I now prefer to fantasize about, and attract, the deep soulful connection I deserve. In reality there is nothing sexy about being treated like shit. 

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