God, Sex, and Dazzling Sentences

“I’m fucking for God.”

I didn’t say it. Martin Luther King Jr did.

(IF possibly imaginary CIA wiretaps-and-transcripts and biographers Taylor Branch, Marshall Frady and “friend” Ralph Abernathy are to be believed.)

I read that line twenty-two years ago and never forgot it.

I was fifteen. I’d just seen MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. Water was in my eyes and fire was in my loins. I was moved by his passion. I wanted more of him. I wanted him.

Alas, he was dead.

And so the biography aisle at the local library would have to do. I was ready to be inspired by his larger-than-life excellence, righteousness and heroics: Time Magazine Man of the Year (1963). The Nobel Peace Prize (1964). The Civil Rights Movement. Loving husband. Devoted family man. Divinely-inspired poet/preacher. Martyr.

Oh yes, I wanted lots of that hot stuff.

Greedy, I started with the biggest, thickest book (that’s the way I like most things).

I was looking for the story behind those soul-stirring speeches and unflagging commitment to justice. I was looking for a manual of how I too could become that extraordinary and selfless. I was looking to worship a hero.

Instead, I read pageafterpageafterpageafterpageafterpage (you get the idea) detailing my beloved MLK’s affairs, orgies, and just plain lewd talk.

Now, that wouldn’t phase me. Some might even say I like that sort of thing. But then…

Then I was fifteen, idealistic, and a virgin. Then it was all very simple – and confusing.

And so I’m still mad at the writer of that biography. I was convinced he was lying. I suspected he was a sheet-wearing racist who wanted to discredit a great man – because you’re either a great man or a cheater. I hadn’t yet expanded my morality to include both/and. It was either/or. And so MLK had to be one or the other: how could he be a man of God and a man fucking for God?

I can’t remember the name of that writer or the title of that book but I still remember that sentence.

‘Course, the biographer can’t really take credit for it – that’s (allegedly) allllll MLK, baby – but it has stayed with me and formed the basis for two of my pet theories:

For connection. For communion. For ecstasy. For transcendence. For rapture. For redemption.

And maybe for some holy words.

Like: I love you.

Or: Love each other.

Because in the beginning was The Word.

August 25, 2010 | filed under: Meaning, Sex

20 people have we need you too.

our touch-phobic, sex-obsessed culture. We’re sublimating, kids.

Sure, I’m obsessed with sex. I’m also obsessed with food, status, security and avoiding pain and I’m willing to bet it is historic hard-wiring. It is my reptile brain. My mammal brain. My humanity. My femininity.

And, I suspect, my culture too.

Because other than my lovers, and my children are the only people who kiss and hug and touch me.

If I didn’t have two small, non-profit distributors of kisses and cuddles, my life would be bereft of skin-to-skin, lip-to-lip, chest-to-chest, and heart-to-heart contact.

And so in the sex dance the moments that most deeply thrill me have nothing to do with getting off. They’re about getting close. About skin and human heat and intimacy and together.

Like: the sweet shock of a suddenly bare chest-to-chest embrace.

Like: voluptuous, extravagant kissing that tells stories.

Like: permission to touch someone.

So I understand all the hullaballoo “adults” in the media are raising about pre-mature sexualization and teen hook-up culture (as if it is strictly a teen phenomena):

oh my god it will be The Death of Intimacy.

It is soul-less, mercenary, predatory, and if they keep it up, Those Kids Today won’t develop the interpersonal skills necessary to support lasting, loving, intimate relationships.

And the dyad is the cornerstone of North American culture, y’all! How will we fight about what marriage means and who gets to be allowed to do it if Those Damn Kids are too busy hooking up to settle down?

Those Kids Today are going to break society.

As if it isn’t already broken.

We worry, too, about the broken souls of promiscuous girls – when we’re not ogling them and eating them up – who use sex to feel loved. Who are lacking the love, affection, commitment and validation they (and all human folk) need, and so seek it in sex. Who shortcircuit love and emotional intimacy for carnal electricity.

Well, hell, don’t only point the finger at sad and lonely fifteen year old girls.

They’re not the only ones sexting. Trust. They’re not the only lonely ones aching for touch. Believe.

When I was eighteen, a young man knocked on my dorm room door and invited me for a motorcycle ride. It was night. It was cold. We went back to his house and he offered me hot chocolate. He stood at the counter, mixing the cocoa, with his back to me, and I felt an overwhelming desire to hug him. So I did.  I walked up behind him and slipped and tightened my arms around him. I leaned into him. I held him.

He stiffened.

Then he grabbed and held my arms and hands that were holding him and melted into me. I can’t even put into words what happened in that hug. There was a fierceness and a hunger in that surrender. That connection is forever carved into me.

He told me that he couldn’t remember the last time someone hugged him. And when he worked at remembering he realized that his last hug happened when he was seven years old.

Four years later, I married that guy. That was probably a mistake.

But emotion-free, intimacy-lite hook ups are probably less of a psyche-eating danger to Those Kids Today than is untrammelled, soul-scarring, love ‘n unprepared early marriage.

And we’re all hungry. For touch, intimacy, sex, cuddling, communion.

June 21, 2010 | filed under: Sex

28 people have we need you too.

honeypots, fairy tales and the myth of commitment phobic men

me, to Dave, two days ago:
Kelly:…I’m so much more nefarious and strategic than anyone gives me credit for
Kelly: ‘cept you.
Kelly: and my ex.
Kelly: He’s convinced our entire marriage was a conspiracy.

————-

And he’s probably not entirely wrong.

————-

Wondering: maybe, sometimes, this is what The Dudes think?

That this relationship business is a honeypot -

- a bait-and-switch almost too seductive to resist?

Because the truth is…sometimes it is a honeypot.

Sometimes we (and by “we” I mean “I”) want The Relationship more than we want the man in front of us.

But he’d look so nice painting that white picket fence.

And so he’ll do.

—————–

My ex is A Good Guy and I did him wrong.

In the aftermath of our split, here’s the score:

I have a beautiful house, two devilish/angelic kids (depending who you ask), a career, and pretty much everything I ever wanted.

(‘Cept a partner. But these things happen when they happen. And a vehicle with German engineering. But again, will happen eventually.)

He lives alone with the BMW,  rottweiler and leather sofa.

I can see why he thinks he got screwed.

I can see why he thinks that one of us had an agenda all along.

I can see why some of us are hesitant to jump in and swim again.

—————

At dinner a couple of months ago, my friend Lianne Raymond (teacher, life coach but she prefers the term “life poet”) told us that the young men she teaches are amazing. They’re sensitive, emotionally expressive, tender, affectionate and they have great communication skills.

And these sixteen and seventeen year old soon-to-be men come to her with broken hearts. They’re distraught when their relationships dissolve. They take it so much harder than do the young women.

Her theory? Heterosexual men aren’t allowed to express their emotions in other venues of their lives, so they often make their girlfriends their emotional centres. Their partners are their most trusted confidantes and sometimes their only source of emotional support. And so when they lose that relationship, they suffer intensely. They’ve lost the relationship, the friendship, and the emotional solidarity.

Women, on the other hand, are terrific at spreading their emotional needs across a network of friends and sisters. When a relationship breaks up, they’ve still got sources of emotional support.

And that’s why lots of women love Sex and The City. For the friendship. Because it is true.

———-

The connections?

I’m wrestling with the eternal issue of commitment phobia.

And here’s what I think: heterosexual men and women are equally emotional. We all have emotions, we just express them and the needs that drive them, differently.

Men need partners just as much as women do. Men aren’t inherently afraid to commit.

But I think the fairy tale that women decry as restrictive and delusional is just as narrow and confining for men.

I had lunch with a colleague and he told me that The Fairy Tale seduces and betrays men, too. He has two gay friends who married women and had families – and then had to leave them – because they desperately wanted to be let into the dream.

This dream needs to be re-dreamed so that love and family is at the centre rather than heterosexuality and rules that pinch us more than they protect us.

My point…I do have one,  you know.

In the fairy tale, where is the prince? Who is the prince? What does he do?

Not much, actually. He just shows up and satisfies female yearning.

Now I’m sure there are times when that is a great gig.

But do we care about the Prince’s character development? Do we care who he is? Do we even see him?

He’s Prince Charming. He’s tall, dark and handsome and his kisses break spells. He looks good on a white horse. He shows up to be married at the appropriate moment.

Basically, he’s marriageable.

Now, if I described a woman like that (marriageable) I think we’d all agree that I didn’t really say a damn thing about her. We’d have no idea who she is.

And so I’m wondering if “commitment phobic” men – and I don’t believe that men are truly commitment phobic – fear, deeply, that the women in their lives value them for their roles rather than their selves?

Do men fear being valued for their husband-ability rather than their intrinsic and individual worth?

And…if they do fear that, no wonder they hesitate to jump in and commit. Because if they do commit and it all goes to hell they’ll be sleeping on the leather sofa. Alone.

(Maybe with the dog but only if the dog commits the grievous error of peeing on bare female feet and so Must Go, too.)

And he’ll be gazing at the ceiling, suffering, wondering what the hell happened and what he’s going to do and who he can talk to while his ex convenes with her girlfriends, sisters and goddesses who eternally and unconditionally have her back, heart and soul.

If I was him I’d be scared too.

Wouldn’t you?

June 14, 2010 | filed under: Sex

35 people have we need you too.

He Kinda Makes Me Happy When He’s Not With That Other Woman

Discuss.

June 5, 2010 | filed under: Sex

64 people have we need you too.

Nice Girls and Nice Guys Finish Middle (Class)

Before we get into nice discussion about nice girls and nice guys, I want you to go watch this video.

____________________

(I mean it. I’m not even going to be nice about it. Go watch and then come right back.  I’ll wait for you. I might even slip into something more comfortable.)


(that space was you, watching the video. Thank you. I love it when you do what I tell you.)

______________________

I don’t know the context for this scene. I don’t have a lot of grounding in the series but based on this - and Joan, omg Joan is My People –  I suspect I would love it.

What I do know is this: there are some angry women on Mad Men.

Betty Draper, for example, our rampant pigeon shooter, is the (very nice) poster girl for nice girl rage.

I know some nice girls are nodding their heads, right now.

I mean, we know this story: about how women bite their tongues and their carrot sticks to keep it all in check. How we, historically, have made nice and played small. How an angry woman is a spectre. How ‘hysteria’ and ‘bitch’, liberally or even hypothetically applied, can shut us up.

“I don’t want him to think I’m a bitch.”

We’re nice because anger is dangerous. So we file down our nails and with it our edges and dull our teeth and nibble at the edges of directly expressed emotion and, let’s be honest, life.

We’re the nice women. We’re doing The Right Thing at the right time in the right way and probably wearing the right shoes while we’re doing it. Nicely.

And I have no doubt that a lot of  nice women are holding it together publicly and then shrieking at their kids at home.

I submit to you that the ‘nice girl’ is confined, constrained, and angry – and really, not so ‘nice’ at all.

________________

Nice means “pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory.”

Originally, though, nice meant ‘not to cut’ which became ‘not to know’ which became ‘ignorant’ which transformed into ‘foolish’ or ’silly’ which became what we’ve got now:  pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory.

Who aspires to this?

Nice is a social strategy and its tactics are quiet, smiling, obeisance, sacrifice, agreement, gifts, doing favours, ingratiation.

Nice is a bribe. Nice is a way to be un-noticed while raging inside at being un-noticeable.

Nice is a way to gain the trust of someone who has no business trusting you. In fact, in The Gift of Fear, Gary de Becker includes the ‘niceness’ ploy as a pre-indicator of violence.

Nice is patting your irritable kid on the head and kissing your philandering husband and then going outside to kill some birds.

Because a victim, especially a nice one,  is the most dangerous creature on earth.

________________________

All of this is what nice means, but what nice does not mean – and what we often conflate it with – is “innately good.”

So that’s nice, and The Nice Girl.

What about The Nice Guy?

_______________________

Nice guys. I’ve ended things with guys and had them reply, see? this is what happens to the nice guy.

And – perhaps like a lot of women – I let them think that.

Because I was being nice.

Women do this a lot. We tell guys ‘you’re such a nice guy’ when really what we mean is I would go out with you, but:

  • you’re creeping me out
  • your house is filthy which scares me and god forbid we live like that
  • your conversation is beige
  • you don’t surprise me
  • I’m smarter than you
  • you’re not bringing it in the bedroom
  • you’re aimless and I’d have to carry this thing
  • I’m worried that I’ll have to do all the work in this relationship
  • I think that all this sweetness is an act to cover up the fact that you’re flaky and once you’ve ‘got’ me, you won’t really be there for me
  • you’re not that great of a kisser
  • you’re too much work
  • you want to eat my soul
  • I know that this sweet stuff is a front. You don’t want to be nice to me – you want to own me
  • you lack initiative
  • you’re not intellectually challenging
  • I would have to unlock you
  • I see the future and it is me shopping for your family at Christmas while you watch TV
  • I can see what you want and it is too much

When I do this – when I spare the guy’s feelings to avoid a scene and just agree that yes, the problem is that he is too nice – I perpetuate the nice guy myth.

That nice guys finish last. That the good guy never gets the girl.

Which leaves a lot of men running around, wounded, thinking that ‘nice’ is a problem – and it is, but not for the reasons they think – that must be cured. The cure, they think – or dating gurus are quick to reassure them – is to be a jerk, or a pick up artist, or just plain not nice to women.

Any PUA will tell you that women don’t like nice guys or that good guys who are ‘too nice’ to women won’t be successful with women.

Not true.

It is weak, ineffectual, closeted control-freak guys that repel women (and people, more generally). Nice isn’t the problem.

Or maybe it is.

Here’s my PSA: just like The Nice Girl, The Nice Guy isn’t really nice.

Often nice is a social strategy. Nice is a mask worn by scared, creepy, angry, bribing, entitled, controlling people.

Nice covers a lot of anger.

This is what I know about  nice guys, and why I’m suspicious of them:

Because in life, nice guys are not getting what they want, and they’re mad, and they’ll be mad at me, too when I don’t toe the line (and I won’t). The worse a guy’s character, the nicer he’ll try to act.

But I’m too nice to tell a man these ugly truths.

And so flourishes the urban myth that nice guys finish last (with women) – if they get to finish, at all.

___________________

Just like the Nice Girls, Nice Guys are angry.

Nice appears to be flexible but is rigid: Nice has muscled and restrained herself, intently and vigorously, into compliance with everyone else’s expectations and so your failure to do the same – for her, for the world – enrages her.

And I’m okay with anger – anger is fuel and anger can be hot and oh, the righteous fires that anger will light.

But repressed anger is stasis. Repressed anger is vindictive, passive-aggressive, and insidious. Repressed anger is dangerous.

The truth is this: repressed anger is the shadow of Nice. Anger, denied, trails Nice everywhere, in every light.

Here’s another truth:

The Good Guy does get the girl.

But Good Guys aren’t necessarily nice. In fact, all the man and women I know, respect, love or want to love are most definitely not nice.

Nice: pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory, deceptive, dangerous.

______________________

My point: nice guys are not nice, meaning ‘innately good’.

Nice is just the angle they’re working to get what they want. And when they don’t get what they want, they blame nice, and strip away nice and show the world who they really are.

And who they are is who the women in their lives - who lied and told them they were nice - knew they were, all along.

I have some ‘bad boys’ in my life – but they’re not really bad boys. Instead, they’re men who are at home in their skin and their masculinity, sexuality, aggression, vulnerability, heart, darkness, light – and don’t need to camouflage any of it with a layer of nice.  I know that if I ever turned one of these men down, sexually or romantically, they’d never lash out at me. These guys – these men – would never call me a bitch or even a bad word (unless…well, never mind).

But the so-called nice guys? They’re nice until you don’t want ‘em or you don’t give them what they want. And then they call you a bitch or a tease or a slut.

Nice.

April 15, 2010 | filed under: Love, Sex, Sex and the Suburbs

43 people have we need you too.

on coffee, masculinity, and the joys of being friends with boys

Z: hi

Kelly: hi. how was your day?

Z:  ball busting

Kelly: what happened?

Z: well I had a great time today having coffee with this beautiful woman…she had this low-cut top on that had me drooling. But when I dropped her off she refused to kiss me

Kelly: what a bitch! you should drop her and never talk to her again

Z: I wanted to kiss her

Kelly: I understand. Here’s what I don’t understand: men. Maybe. Do you think I ‘get’ men? As in, understand them?

Z: No you don’t

Kelly: Explain

Z: in my view… you have this view of men that is somehow not grounded in reality… they constantly disappoint you by being typical men and acting as men do…that tells me that you don’t really understand their make up

Kelly: mmmmmmmmmmmm. good insight. I’ve specifically decided to throw out my fantasies, and just deal with people, as they are, for real. That’s been really rewarding, so far… So tell me about a man’s makeup

Z: A man’s makeup is that we are basically fuck-ups…

Kelly: what?!

Z: We dont have any depth or tolerance for pain. We see everything in terms of… “will I get fucked?” We are not emotional creatures so an onslaught of emotion from a woman has us running for the hills or joining the foreign legion.

Kelly: That sounds like true lies. Like a cartoon of masculinity, babe. How do you explain fatherhood? Or friendship? We’re friends and I’m not fucking you. You give me emotional support, and love, and advice, and ask nothing, so you’re deeper than what you just described. And I have driven you batty with emotional demands at times, and you’re still here. Not in the foreign legion, or in the hills, even though you’re not getting fucked.

Wait…I’m checking my purse for your cojones.

Nope.

Nothing. You must still have them. Or maybe you left them at the coffee shop.

Z: I am talking in generalities. After that it boils down to the individual

Kelly: it always does, for sure. This man/woman business is kind of bullshit. The issue is more temperament than gender. If I were dating women instead of men, I’d still have the same Issues. I’d find women who retreated from my emotional needs just like I’m SUPERB at finding men who do that, too.

Z: You have wanted more from men than they are capable of delivering

Kelly: OH YES. So very true babe. You were one of those, but you know I love you anyway.

Z: You don’t love me

Kelly: WHAT? do you really think that? You mean the world to me. I reference things you say, in my own head. You’re part of me

Z: Really

Kelly: Really. I talk about you, and the things you’ve taught me

Z: What do you say’?

Kelly: To myself or to other people? To myself: you’re one of the voices in my head now. Part of my decision making process. To other people: you’re my rock.

I’m so lucky. I have you. I have ___ and ___, too. Although I’m a woman who apparently doesn’t understand men romantically, my life overflows with male friendship. I have three amazing men in my corner, absolutely and unwaveringly. Offering friendship. Asking nothing of me except to just be me. And showing up, consistently. It is almost better than a boyfriend.

Unfortunately no one is having sex with me.

*le sigh*

Z: I’ll have sex with you.

Kelly: No you won’t, but thanks for the offer. Hey, babe, can I write about this conversation? About your fucked up definition of masculinity?

Z: Yes. But end it with the fact that you decided to have sex with me out of pity…

Kelly: Nope. No pity sex for you baby. You get hot lovin’ or nothing…so let’s err on the side of nothing.

Z: lol. love ya babes

Kelly: me too. And thanks for the coffee.

April 5, 2010 | filed under: Meaning, Sex

12 people have we need you too.

Talk is Not Intimacy. The Tyranny of Words.

I am not a morning person. To me, the wee hours are like The Bad Ex: unpleasant, defensive, and best avoided.

And yet by sheer force of will and habit and the tyranny of children wee’er than the hours, I rise early.

Like 5.30 am early. The ugly early.

And lo, he said, ‘let there be caffeine’.

So I’m always astonished when my sister or a friend says something like “but I’m not a morning person like you are…”

My head swivels around, exorcist-style, to locate this saintly ‘you’. When I realize I am that you, I inevitably have a whatchutalkingaboutWillis? moment.

(I had the same reaction when my sister told me “…but I don’t enjoy dating the way you do…“)

My point (and there is one):

I’m working against my body’s impetus.

My natural inclination is to stay up late(ish) and get up around 8ish. My most productive working hours are 9-11 in the morning and 9-11 at night.

BUT.

That’s not how my life works. My kids wake at inhumane hours and five days a week there are bells that ring and expectations of attendance accompany those sounds. The other two days there are expectations of waffles or pancakes.

So I just get up, drink lots of coffee, and try to make it all knit together while eagerly anticipating the future when my children become surly teenagers who resent the sound of my breath and my presence but sleep past 7am.

Or can pour milk in their cereal unassisted.

MIRACLES. HEAVEN. SLEEP.

I digress.

Now, just as I work against my body’s natural inclination with (lack of) sleep, I do this in The Interpersonal Thing, too.

I say: I’m a talker. Words are my foreplay. Talk to me, baby.

While this is true, it is not the whole story. Often, I’m silencing one of my languages at the expense of the other.

Body is quiet so words can speak.

I remember when I realized this: it was just after I realized I was In Love, probably for the first time. We were swimming in each other. Our physical boundaries were porous. While we had astonishing, wide-ranging conversations  and enjoyed a profound intellectual tension and communion, we were connected by touch and presence and being more than with words.

At the time, I had two room-mates. One day, I came skipping into the living room and landed on the sofa, right between them. They both shifted away from me so that our bubbles remained intact.

Another time, my bestest guy friend (my first boyfriend) from high school was visiting us. He was sitting on the sofa and I sat beside him, thigh-to-thigh and leaned into him. He stiffened.

Neither of these things were calculated. They were instinctual: I was so used to being right up close with someone – my new love – that I forgot in most relationships closeness is brokered with words rather than bodies.

I remember that stiffness, the moving away, the distance, and the chatter – and I treasure relationships where spaces contract and breach is welcome.

Like with my children, to whom intimacy is touch.

Which is not to say that we don’t talk. Of course we talk. We talk a lot. My eldest daughter, Sophie, is almost six, and she tells me that her favourite part of the day is our talking-time. We read stories together and I tuck the girls into their beds in their rooms. I sit with Lola, the little one (she’s three) and we talk while I rub her back and hold her close.

Then I get into bed with Sophie, wrap my arms around her and press her cheek to mine, and we talk while I stroke her hair. She tells me every detail of her life and all the things she’s thinking about and all the dramas in class and daycare and of course Hannah Montana, who has a talking horse.

And she always sighs and says, Mama, I love our talks.

I love our talks, too.

But more is being said than could ever be told with words alone.

I’m acutely conscious that right now, in this shimmering, evancescent, temporary moment, I have my children’s permission to touch them, kiss them, cuddle them, hold them, be with them, close to them.

And that is intensely precious to me on so many levels.

Our physical bond is the foil to my overwhelmingly word-centric world. Most of the time I privilege verbs over body – so much so that I’ll despair over a man who can’t seem to connect with me with words even if he’s telling me sweet things with his actions, his body, his daily presence and unremitting tenderness. I’ll assume he’s not verbally and emotionally fluent because I’ve unlearned his language.

My language.

And I know when I started locking down my physicality and unleashing my language.

The tween years.

The exact moment when I started becoming conscious that my body could – and was – sending messages was the moment I started restraining it.

Started fencing off space.

Started closing down emotional, physical signals.

Stopped being affectionate with adults and even same-age friends.

Stopped touching people.

Started talking on the phone. For HOURS.

This is no coincidence. I know this with my body and when I’m not careful, my tongue thinks for me:

I wish we could just fuck and get it over with so I wouldn’t be so tongue-tied and shy.

Now. I do understand that some tsk-tsk-ing might be in order. I’m not necessarily advocating sex as an ice-breaker (mostly. maybe).

But what this accidental truth tells me is that intimacy is not just words.

Words are sometimes a fence, fencing, sparring, defence.

Body is my first language. We have our physical selves, our hunger for touch, and our ability to effectively communicate needs, wants and desires long before we come into words. (Just ask an infant or her exhausted parent.)

All of this is to say that naturally I’m a late-riser and a body-talker. Yet I bow to the demands of my life and get my ass out of bed early so I can talk (and write) pretty all day.

So when I read this,  astonishment, horror, recognition:

Historically, women’s sexuality and intellect have never been integrated. Women’s bodies were controlled, and their sexuality was constrained, in order to avoid their corrupting impact on men’s virtue. Femininity, associated with purity, sacrifice and frailty, was a characteristic of the morally successful woman. Her evil twin, the succubus (whore, slut, concubine, witch) was the earthy sensual, and frankly lusty woman who had traded respectability for sexual exuberance. Vigorous sexuality was the exclusive domain of men. Women have continuously sought to disentangle themselves from the patriarchal split between virtue and lust, and are still fighting this injustice. When we privilege speech and underplay the body, we collude in keeping women confined. - Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity (emphasis mine)

And that is why I write about sex.

March 29, 2010 | filed under: Mama Monda, People, Sex

32 people have we need you too.

my sexy friend made me celibate. sort of.

The Latin Quarter. Friday night. My friend Joanie is holding court. She knows people. She’s having an mmm-hmmm hot conversation with the guy behind the bar. He looks like a kid but I’m pretty sure he owns the joint. She’s in her fifties and he’s fascinated.

I’m fascinated. She can salsa. She can hold a man’s gaze and say something utterly innocuous and make it sizzle. She’s sultry.

The woman can flirt. If I wrote down the things she says, you’d say what? There’s nothing innately smoky in that sentence.

It’s not what she says. It is how she says it. She says it hot.

So whenever we get together, we speak a mutual language: men.

We like ‘em.

LOTS.

She discovered Plenty of Fish. She announced that she was holding auditions for the role of “boyfriend”. There was a flurry of dating. Lots of dating.

If I’d had a blog then…oh the stories we’d tell.

So when she told me she’d decided to be celibate, I was incredulous. I had to get her to define the term because I was sure we were using it differently.

When you say you’re celibate, what does that mean?

She explained.

Yeah, it pretty much means “not having sex.”

Stunned. STUNNED, I tell you.

I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who was celibate.

I’ve known people who weren’t getting laid, but that was never by choice. I have had many conversations about sex, but until then, I’d never had one with a sexy adult who said they’d decided not to have sex.

So…why? What’s that all about? What’s that like? And why, again?

She was exhausted and disappointed with the dating scene. All this energy, activity, heat-seeking action, and very little connection. Holding space for a partner. Yearning, scanning, searching, mingling, chirping, chattering.

She said it was bit hamster-on-a-wheel: a lot of activity, with very little traction or direction.

So she thought she’d opt out. For a bit. Until she got her bearings.

Or until someone inspired her to change her mind.

I’ll admit it: I was not sold.

I was, however, curious.

Joanie is juicy. What was it like for this delicious creature, built for lovin’, to be solo and sexless?

Joanie said that she found it quieted the noise in her head – the noise that she was so accustomed to hearing that she didn’t even hear it, any more.

Until it was quiet. And then it was really quiet.

When she took sex – and not just sex, but Looking For Love – off the table, she started noticing and connecting with the people around her. In the moment. Just to connect. Not to angle, anticipate, interpret, discern, or decode.

She said that when she was ‘in the market’, she’d go to a party and scan the room, trying to figure out who was with whom, who was looking, who was looking at her. And that informed who she talked to and how she talked to them.

It was all agenda. It was all seeking. It was more noise than signal.

And when she decided ‘no more sex for you!’ (to herself), the noise…subsided.

Now, when she went to a party, she was at the party, not in her head. She was with you, not wondering about your orientation or availability.

She just enjoyed herself, in the moment, instead of engineering future imaginary moments.

That blew my mind. Turn down the volume? Be here, now?

Wow.

But I wasn’t giving up sex or maybe A Great Big Love for inner peace.

Screw inner peace.

(I feel very peaceful after sex, for example.)

Right now, I’m digging me some inner peace.

I don’t know if I’m going to claim the word ‘celibate’ because it seems so dried out and well, unsexy, to me – and I doubt I have much of a commitment to the word or the course of action.

I’m not abstaining from fucking so much as avoiding fuckwittery (mine, mostly). I’ve decided I’m not allowed to be in a Grown-Up Relationship until I’m ready to grow up.

So something’s shifted in me in the last three months. I’m not having sex. I’m not collecting men.  But I am pretty damn happy.

And it’s not just me who noticed. At our recent sex toy party (strangely good timing, don’t you think?), my friend’s husband told his wife that I looked “really happy.” My daughter’s daycare leader wondered if I have “a really good man in your life, because you look so…happy.” My sister told me that she’s noticed that I seem really relaxed and…wait for it…happy.

And my friend Joanie was right: the noise was overwhelming but I was so used to it that I couldn’t hear it.

Now, suddenly, I hear all kinds of things that I ignored, before.

Like what the men – and women and children – in my life are really saying to me. And what they mean to me.

And trust me, it’s juicy.

March 23, 2010 | filed under: Love, Meaning, Sex

34 people have we need you too.

butterflies are a drug and I’m in rehab

Inevitably I fly high into romance on the wings of butterflies.

Yet I plot – and make – cautious exits well-marked by righteousness and reason. I watch, wait, evaluate and think my way through break-ups.

********

Butterflies.

I question butterflies. I like them. They don’t happen to me a lot. What’s that all about?

Romance novels and chick flicks and Disney movies and even Isabel Allende (I just made fervent  sign of the cross over my literate, magic-loving heart and any time I mention her name, you should do the same) make it seem like love is lightning bolt.

Or a flock of butterflies.

- Which is why, when they happen to me, I get very stupid. I hook into a myth that tells me This Is IT.

- Which is also why – beyond the obvious sexism of the cruder versions –  I had a profoundly emotional reaction to the Seduction Community. I felt like PUAs were teaching men how to game the myth – and that this was wildly unfair. Society makes good and sure most women get socialized into thinking that butterflies are a precursor to The Big Love That Was Meant To Be – and to embrace them. Then PUAs come along and tell guys how to induce the butterflies, to hook into the myth – and therefore the romanticized decision-making that accompanies the invoking of that myth – without actually delivering the outcome the myth promises. So women making decisions based on romance and myth and butterflies are malleable – and easily screwed*, both by PUAs and our own stories.

- Because they are our own stories. Women write them, tell them, buy them.

So. Back to butterflies. In my most recent romance – with a very sweet man I actually called “my boyfriend” (very rare occurrence) AND introduced to my friends (very, very rare occurrence) –  we both worried that we lacked butterflies.

What did that mean? What did it our future hold if the beginning lacked butterflies? We certainly didn’t lack for hot sex (oh yeah),  great conversation and easy company. But the stomach-flips? Nope.

Let’s flip that.

When we were little, my sister was a word-scrambler. At Disneyland, she saw the monorail, and shrieked “Look, look the runamail!”

She got excited by butterflies and called them “flutterbys”.

Maybe that’s just about right.

**********

Last year was My Year of Unavailable Men.

I know, I know. They’re all toxic and commitment phobic.

I’m not buying that. Most of us – men and women – fall in love and get married** at some point in our lives, which suggests to me that most of us – men and women – get to a wanting-love place and find a person with whom to share that place.

I don’t think the problem is men. I think the problem is my screening process and the fact that I was trying to force my reality to match fantasy.

Fantasy is good. Excellent. Delicious.

It  is simply not a great place from which to launch life-altering decisions.

***************

The fantasy:

the one. meant to be. predestined. love at first sight. butterflies.

that attraction means something more than “I’m attracted to you”

The white hot truth:

There is no soul mate. I know, this is particularly hard news to take because you are longing for The One 24-7. But, guess what, The One is The One because you say he/she is. And that’s way more liberating and empowering than anything preordained or supposedly destined.

Choice. Chosen. Decided, deciding, every day.

Selection.

***********

A word that keeps coming up in my hypnotherapy sessions is selection. I’m actually more passive than active with romantic selection (hence: not the right kinds of men). I often reward persistence. I have been moved by the force of another’s (apparent) desire for me. I have valued The Relationship and The Relationship Products instead of weighing the worth of the person in front of me. I have made decisions based on emotion. I almost always enter into romance hastily, and on pure emotion. I have made decisions based on potential. I have bought a LOT of fixer-uppers and then, once, fully moved in and committed to the renovation, realized: I can’t live like this.

I have lied to myself. I have spent a lot of time wishing and a-hoping and a-praying that something wasn’t true.

Like my Very Bad Lying Man.

On our first date, he said and signalled things that were food to a hungry soul. He showed he was attracted to me. He made me laugh. He was clear from the drop that he knew what he wanted and what he wanted was me. He walked me to my car and noticed my headlights weren’t bright enough and said he’d help me switch them out for shinier ones. Who doesn’t want more shine? He kissed me passionately and well. He called me to make sure I arrived home safely. I felt desired, respected and protected.

Heady stuff.

And that sweet stuff, even for the decidedly unsweet person, is easy to do (and fake) on a first date: a few well-chosen words, touches on the arm and the small of the back, holding doors open, offer to help solve a problem, a steamy kiss, a quick and caring call.

Butterflies.

*******

“I want something, and you’re here” is not selection.

And so I return to  my sister’s childhood wisdom and name butterflies for what they are: pretty, fleeting, flitting flutterbys.

Clean closets are my revolution.

_________________

*Please note that I don’t have any issue with the carnal connotation of “screwing”. Really and truly. In fact, I like that sort of thing. I just don’t like when we lie and trick and bullshit our way into people’s affections and elicit implicit expectations in order to get laid.

**using “married” and “marriage” as a short-hand for deep, loving, intimate committed relationship. Marriage can be a symptom of such a thing or a condition thereof. But not always.

_______________

this note is part of a series outlining the story of the Very Bad Lying Man, a few months after the fact:

December 2009. The thin line – cleavage, even – between vulnerability as strength and just out-and-out stupidity.

Here are the breadcrumbs. Bits of the Very Bad Lying Man fell into these posts while the un-love story was happening:

August 2009. Vacation. Day 1. I am THAT Scene in When Harry Met Sally, but It Is Real. And Better.

August 2009. On Being a Needy Girlfriend and What IT SHOULD Teach You

August 2009. When Tough Love Turns Poetic. In a blood, guts, and broken-ego kinda way.

September 2009. On Harm, Healing, Ceilings and How Absent Apologies are the Pits – The Sorry Series, #1

September 2009. How To Receive an Apology. How To Accept an Apology. How To Forgive. Or Maybe Not. – The Sorry Series, #4

December 2009. ask and ye shall…well just ask, anyways.

January 2010. I am the female Bluebeard of suburban Vancouver and I am running out of closet space.

February 2010. Love is a Compass.

February 2010. sexifesto

March 2010. butterflies are a drug and I’m in rehab

March 2010. hearsay brilliance: “Only go when the light is green”

March 18, 2010 | filed under: Love, Sex, Very Bad Lying Man

38 people have we need you too.

turns out I do NOT hate the ENTIRE Seduction Community, After All

Yo. I’m a fragile flower. Rejection is my nemesis.

And because of that, I’m softening up to sections of the Seduction Community.

(Also: cleavage. Dating gurus are not all teaching “How To Bed as Many Naive Twenty-Five Year Olds as Possible Through the Judicious Use of Insults”. I could be a little more sensitive to the differences and nuances and lines that cut across the “how to date better/improve your social skills” field.)

This week I read David DeAngelo’s “Double Your Dating” and was shocked – SHOCKED, I TELL YOU – to discover that it was useful and I liked it.

Sure, there were bits  that irritated me – more on that, in another piece to follow – but I put myself in the shoes of his target audience and grew a little respect. Even gratitude.

DO NOT TELL ANYONE.

Because, as I mentioned, I’m a fragile, rejection-averse flower. I go on a lot of dates but I have no recollection of EVER asking a man out (unless we were, you know, married) or initiating a first kiss. I have been turned down for sex three times in my life.

So of course when I read detailed instructions on how to approach women and escalate a new relationship it seems a bit foreign to me.

It IS foreign to me – because someone else always handles it.

So maybe I should be glad that there are men teaching other men how to handle this with ease and grace (and that there are men willing to learn this, thereby making things more comfortable for me).

Because if I had to handle this I’d be paying for sex and growing old with cats.

__________________

I’m Not Picking on Pick-Up Artists. Much.

Interview with A Former Pick-Up Artist

wherein I take a (temporary) break from bitching about Pick-Up Artists

What Do Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Seduction Community, and The New York Times Have in Common? Don’t Worry, I’ll Tell You

March 15, 2010 | filed under: Sex

12 people have we need you too.

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