Tag: relationships

somebody’s watching me

“I always feel like somebody’s watching me, and I have no privacy.” — Rockwell

I couldn’t resist bringing up the 80s synth pop in light of having learned that my beau has found my blog. This nugget was made self-evident as we were having our exclusivity conversation. He said things like:

It was too great a coincidence that he would mirror back to me my own language, yet I didn’t put it together fully until I’d arrived home. I texted him, “When did you start reading my blog?” and went to bed.

I knew it was inevitable that he’d stumble on it or be curious enough to seek it out, and I was willing to share after we’d gotten to know each other a bit better…

He seemed almost apologetic for having stumbled upon it — and quickly swore that he wasn’t creepy or anything. He told me that he respects me more for having a deeper understanding of what I’ve been through and an intimate window into what probably amounts to excessive introspection. And he even handled my last post fluidly. He understands that I’m writing about me and not about him.

I suppose the lesson in this, if there is one, is that I’m worthy of being appreciated for being myself, even when I let it all hang out, and regardless of what relationship drivel du jour I publish here.

p.s. Hi, Sweetie!

does water seek its own level?

A few weeks ago…

One of the common relationship aphorisms that sticks in my mind is “water seeks its own level.” The counselor my ex and I went to years ago, in fact, said this to us. And, for reasons I shall soon share, it has come to mind again…

I’ve been seeing the gentleman once accused of aggravated assault (sounds kind of badass, doesn’t it?!). Very early in our getting to know each other, he confessed to me just about everything you can imagine a person unloading:  a troubled childhood, severed ties with family, medical history and more. He still sees a therapist to work through the whole arrest ordeal. As I wrote earlier, he doesn’t look so good on paper.

And yet there’s something about him… I know, you’re groaning. And you should be. The last thing I need is a project.

We were chatting the one night (just before he told me everything) and I recall teasing, “You don’t scare me at all! …but I’m pretty sure I scare the living hell out of you!”

Now I think it’s fair to say that I’m a little scared.

So I’m wondering if the roots of my attraction are reflected in shared experience:  I’ve written about how the failing of my most significant relationship shattered my self-esteem. What I’ve yet to share is a story that I guess it never dawned on me that I’d need to write about here. But now I do.

More than three years ago, I went through a crisis in my family — the very family I helped to create. I was emotionally traumatized. When I think about it, the image I see of myself during that time is me in bed, nearly catatonic and drooling, unable to get up, unclean and unable to go to work.

Memory is a liar. In fact, in the midst of the worst of it, I rose each day, showered, dressed and went to work. I obliquely mentioned to co-workers that I was going through a stressful time with a family crisis, my head was cloudy and I apologized for any areas in which my incapacity caused them to overcompensate during this couple of weeks. (I suppose it needn’t be said that this was a precursor to the split, another manifestation of the symptoms and issues of all that was wrong in my marriage.)

As I slowly “recovered,” I didn’t realize the entirety of the damage to my psyche. I may have believed that I was functioning at full capacity just weeks later, yet external feedback (processed and accepted more deeply after the fact) suggests otherwise. Thus, nearly six months later, I found myself being treated for depression. Within 48 hours of taking a serotonin enhancer, I was a completely different person — a person more like the self I knew.

Still, something in my brain seemed to have changed. My ability to concentrate or focus never really seemed to return to 100%. In other words, the emotional trauma had done sustained damage. For awhile, I thought it was the depression, allergies, hormones or any number of things that can cloud one’s thinking. I’ve since read up on it and, with no formal training or diagnosis, believe that I experienced some amount of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I worked with my usual tools to alleviate the symptoms — applied kinesiology (AK), yoga, meditation, organic diet,cognitive therapy, and Holosynch, a meditation soundtrack that puts the brain into a deeply relaxed state. I quit a stressful job. I’ve been selective about the energy in my environment (people, places and media).

Still, having done this work, I find myself drawn to someone still very much in the midst of healing himself.

So I wonder what this attraction says about me:

  • Do the things that resonate between us have to do with our pain? And, if so, haven’t I already been there? Haven’t I rebuilt my self-esteem? Haven’t I done the hard work?
  • Or is it because of his strength and maturity, having worked through so much, and that he strikes me as so adult…and so willing to embrace all of life head-on?

we were married to the same man

Over the past two years or more, I cannot tell you how many times I heard, “Sounds like we were married to the same man!” I found women at work, women at the salon, and friends I’ve known for years who all expressed the same sentiment.

I guess what it comes down to is that there are a finite number of reasons that relationships don’t work out. And, as it happens, I’ve found several women who share a story not entirely unlike mine. Several, it seemed, had some sort of midlife crisis and then…

In one particular example, a high-end builder with an exclusive clientele just decided he didn’t want to do that sort of thing anymore. After bumbling about for a few years, taking some classes and trying to figure out what he wanted to do when he grew up, he ended up in retail. Because he was more mature than the high-schoolers reporting to him and had a bit of know-how, he was quickly promoted to supervisor. Cheers to the family dental plan…and a couple of hundred dollars a week in income! Sure, it was a contribution, but nothing like supporting a family with the income to which they’d become accustomed.

His wife was a trooper throughout this transition, but finally opened herself to the possibility that she didn’t have to be responsible for him financially or emotionally or otherwise. He had become another child to a woman weary of parenting.

Another woman’s husband spent much of his time lying about on the sofa watching the television when he was meant to be looking for a job. He racked up credit card debt and lied about money issues.

Here’s where the relationship rubber hits the road. We’re here to love and support one another in ways, as long as we agree to what those ways are. (Most, but not all of us, know what we’re getting into before we marry.) We’re not here to parent our spouses or support behaviors that don’t nurture us or our commitments. We’re not on this Earth for another lesson in co-dependence.

Long (years) after I’d asked my wasband to go back to work, he was still protesting that “we’d agreed that he would stay home with the children.” In truth, we’d “agreed” because he’d lost his job and it seemed like our best option at the time. Like a toddler on the verge of a decade-long tantrum, he’d dug in his heels and was not about to budge from his position. He changed his internal script to, “I gave up my career to be home with my children.” And he seemed to believe it!

Relationships must change and evolve. They require communication. Agreements made must often be renegotiated. And it takes two committed adults to embark on that sort of work.

much ado about exclusivity

The gentleman I’ve been seeing recently asked me if I was ready to be in an exclusive dating relationship with him, to “give this thing a chance.” We talked about it for a while over the phone (which is how we manage the challenge of our sporadic actual in-person dates scheduled around my parenting gig), and then decided to think about it overnight.

I can’t deny having had mixed feelings. I mean, I like the thought of casually dating at this time in my life. Being open to receiving masculine energy from more than one direction sounds great — at least as a concept or in theory. In practicality, I haven’t the time to date more than one man at a time and, besides, I like the one I am seeing. My personal history shows that I am a monogamist at heart.

Also, we’d already been physically intimate, both expressed a desire to respect and attend to another’s physical and emotional safety and, frankly, this exclusivity discussion was overdue — at least as far as sex was concerned. I don’t sleep around, and I don’t want to be intimate with someone who’s putting my health at risk, either. So even if I were interested in keeping my options open, I wouldn’t be interested in getting physical with another man at present.

Still, I was startled to experience fear in considering whether I was ready for exclusivity. To be fair, my beau used the word “commitment” almost interchangeably with “exclusivity” and, in my mind, these are vastly different concepts (as in one of them usually comes with a ring). When we were able to meet the next evening, he clarified that he had merely meant to imply certain expectations, in particular honesty and open communication.

Ultimately, we agreed to giving this thing a chance, fears be damned. I can agree to being as honest and open as possible. I can open my heart to possibility. And we agreed to use the more palatable “exclusive” to describe it.

my mouth was a bad girl…

I used to be a bit of a bad girl…or at least my mouth was naughty.

I’ll give you an example from at least 15 years ago:  A girlfriend and I were out at a bar, enjoying the crowded patio and looking for a place to sit, preferably with a little shade. We found a couple of guys at a table and they invited us to sit down.

We chatted for a while, and the cuter of the two guys seemed to be more interested in my friend than me. That is, until he said something like this:

“All you girls want to do is go shopping.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I drawled, “I kind of enjoy cunnilingus, too.”

I suppose it goes without saying that jaws dropped. Shock was often my signature move in those days.

It probably also goes without saying that the better looking of these guys asked for my number. We went out once. He was an ass. He repeatedly told me to loosen up, though I felt perfectly at ease. He actually said to me at the restaurant, “Order anything you want.” As if I were planning to order anything less!

Why this story came to mind I don’t know. My head-to-mouth filter still performs less than optimally. But I think it’s nice to be older, because people seem less shocked, less judgmental and more accepting of frank conversation. There’s a more mature fluidity to serious discussions about values and flirtatious discussions about sexual preferences or proclivities. There’s more genuine laughter. In other words, I’m not so shocking anymore; I don’t feel like such an oddball. Either I’m just more comfortable letting my freak flag fly or I’m better at surrounding myself with people who adore me for who I am. And that’s good stuff!

Mack Truck logic

While in a committed relationship, decisions must be made, compromises reached, peace kept, etc. Standard methods of give and take don’t always work, especially when both parties feel particularly strong about something…permanent birth control, for example.

I’d given birth twice, didn’t want to be on the pill and wasn’t in to the idea of having some sort of surgery to prevent another pregnancy. He didn’t want his junk messed with.

We had several civilized discussions, including with friends and neighbors, about the topic… one of them went like this:  A girlfriend stood in our front yard and gestured with her hands while saying, “Oh, come on! She’s pushed a head the size of a cantaloupe out a hole this big — twice! — and you can’t even have a minor outpatient procedure?!”

I thought we had reached agreement…yet the appointment was never scheduled. So I resorted to Mack Truck logic, which goes something like this:  “Look, you have older children and ours. If I get hit by a Mack Truck tomorrow, regardless of whether you re-marry, you’re done having children. If you get hit by a Mack Truck tomorrow, I might meet someone and want to have more children.”

Fast forward to dinner at another couple’s home weeks later. The other gentleman is talking about his vasectomy:

My husband:  “So did you have to shave yourself?”

Me:  “Oh my god, is that what this is about?! You’re afraid of shaving?!”

The next day I scheduled an appointment for him with a urologist by the name of Dr. Hackett. Poetic, no?

I’m not sure Mack Truck logic will work with every man or in every situation. But it made sense to me!

Try it. Let me know how it goes.

put on “keep warm” status

Guys do this to us. They stay in contact, loosely, leaving us on the back burner and checking in every so often, just to make sure we’re still “warm.”

Heck, I’m pretty sure you could characterize more-like-it‘s behavior toward me this way… For awhile, he’d reach out once every week or two just to say “hey,” sometimes to say something suggestive, but not ever to take action. I liked him, still do…but it was infuriating. Infuriating because I wanted him to call and say, “Hey, when can I see you?” or something much more forward.

Some girlfriends and I sat on a patio with cocktails one evening chatting about this “keep warm” thing men do to us. And here’s what we concluded: Why shouldn’t we do it to them?

being adored

In addition to learning to be vulnerable all over again, I find that there’s a bit of an adjustment period to allowing one’s self to be appreciated. Goodness me, it’s sometimes difficult and uncomfortable to accept a steady stream of kind, thoughtful and flattering words, behaviors and attention!  It’s been a long time since a fella has adored me for being me — all of me, which can be a lot! — and one hardly knows what to make of it all…

I find that I have three conflicting (and rather telling) automatic responses to all of this:

  • The first is to be skeptical and suspicious, to wonder if I’m being flattered to some end, or played. But as I quickly rule this out, I wonder:
  • Have I aimed too low? Is this man who seems to adore me putting me on some sort of pedestal? Does he worship me because I’m somehow a better combination of smarter and prettier than he’s dated in the past? (Egad, this appears so narcissistic in black and white!) Stated even more plainly:  “He likes me; what on earth is wrong with him?!”
  • Finally, I have to concede that it’s possible that a kind, intelligent and attractive man simply enjoys my company, respects me, finds me attractive, and treats me as I ought to be treated.

Let me point out that I think it’s big of me to admit the kind of bullshit that I’ve uncovered in my psyche. Here’s the truth: I’ve always gone for really attractive men — often the kind of men who are out of reach, unattainable, narcissistic, or who I somehow end up feeling that I have to chase or do something to be worthy. I may have felt I’d achieved something by “getting” that kind of man in the past (for the time we were together) but, in the end, there was always a part of me that ended up feeling insecure in ways.

This time, it’s different. I know that for a relationship to be successful, I’m going to need to let someone into my life who adores me for just being who I am. I wrote earlier about paying attention to my feelings, observing a man’s behavior and actually putting some of the “dating theory” type stuff I’ve learned into practice. A man will demonstrate the type of person he is. He will show me right from the beginning how he intends to treat me. And I will create very clear expectations.

I see myself doing this in relationship to a beau these days and, against all odds, these new behaviors, attitudes and perspective are coming quite naturally to the fierce new me:  I let him call, plan and make dinner reservations; I allow him to buy me dinner; I expect him to open doors for me and offer me his coat when I’m chilled; I don’t protest when he says or does something kind; I surrender to his putting my pleasure before his own. And I find I’m quite okay with being adored!

getting tested

Woo hoo! It seems I’ve made it past the interview stage, into not only hand-holding and smooching, but also into the stage of frank and mature discussions about health…that is, sexual histories, STDs and how to enjoy these blessed bodies in a way that’s respectful and safe.

My beau brought up the discussion under the guise of talking about dating. I thought we might talk about dating philosophy or have that discussion that two people who’ve met online frequently have about continuing to see and or meet other people. (Which, by the way, is fine with me…because I’d rather a fella meet a lot of people and feel absolutely certain that I’m the one for him.) Instead, he brought up sexual history, number of partners (for the record, I stopped counting more than a decade ago) and STDs.

For a moment, some of these questions seemed rather blunt…that is, until he followed up with, “I’ve had one.”

It turns out he was once exposed to HPV, the virus which, depending on the strain, can cause either genital warts or cervical cancer. Neither of which sounds all that appealing to me. Nor does this virus, which is carried and passed along by so many that middle school children are routinely offered a vaccination to prevent it, seem like a daunting hurdle to a healthy sex life. After all, I would expect that a man wear condoms anyway — at least in the initial stages of a relationship, before longer-term solutions are considered.

Still, there are many questions:

  • Does the risk go away? Is this something that, because he got it, he still has? Or might his immune system have rid his body of it?
  • Have I ever been exposed (I mean previously, by someone else)? Is it possible to have had and built up my own immunity?
  • How is it contracted? Might touch or saliva expose one to risk and how much?
  • What, if anything, might I have been exposed to or be carrying around with me?
  • What else don’t I know? What other questions should I be asking?

For the record, I’ve never had reason to suspect that anything was awry down there. I feel and, by all appearances, am healthy. My most recent relationship was long-term and monogamous…as far as I know. My annual exams have always produced “normal” results. And, since, I’ve had only a few partners and with whom I’d say I’ve had “safe” sex.

But I’ve heard stories, too.

The safest, smartest and most respectful decision I can make for both myself and my partner is to get tested, learn the facts and educate myself as much as possible about all the risks and issues of being sexually active. And that’s why I’ve scheduled an appointment at my OB / GYN’s office for this week. Cross fingers there are no surprises.

the things I didn’t know

I don’t know whether I know how to be truly vulnerable or how to be okay with being vulnerable.

There. I said it. The “v” word seems a little frightening to me.

I don’t know how to confess all my past sins and be completely open and be loved in spite of and for all the baggage and reality of me. What I know how to do is move on, power through, push forward, sometimes as though a bull in a China shop…a bull with a smile on my face.

But I’m learning:  I’m learning how to be soft on the outside and strong on the inside. I’m learning to speak my truth and trust that I won’t be judged for the worst of it, but instead as a complete, whole and sometimes complicated woman. And I’m learning how to slowly step backward and allow a man to move toward me, and to let him think he’s leading this dance.