Mixed signals. Different expectations. Reading between the lines. This is what has fucked men and women up since women started to get a say in all this.
In our grandparents’ generation, women just played the hand they were dealt. You stuck it out with someone and the relationship (if it wasn’t abusive) was an operations team. Who ran the farm? Who raised the kids? Romance? Maybe.
Our mothers’ generation had a bit more choice. They had appliances, the dream of achieving perfection and Valium to help them survive marriages to men raised by PTSD war veterans. They had women’s lib and Roe vs. Wade. They had Petula Clark songs and grew up on a diet of Katherine Hepburn romances. Some of them got divorced. Many of them still relied on a husband’s income to make life happen. (Yes I am painting a heterosexual portrait here, I’m generalizing and writing what I know.)
But now here we are two generations later, with the financial means to make choices, and we have been fed a steady diet of be skinny and hide your smarts and if you are lucky you will find your prince! Take your small nose and your perfect boobs (and ass) and ride them all the way to a neighbourhood full of Audis and Subarus, Pilates and yoga, mojitos and girls nights and spa trips, dad bods and date nights and cottages on the water.
You too can be Meg Ryan or Jennifer Aniston, but not after fifty, because who wants to see that? Snag the prince before the clock turns 12, Cindy! Before your last fuckable day!
And I wonder why I’m a spaz about dating?
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I wrote that last night, upset because my anticipated date, which maybe never was a date, didn’t happen. I was ok with the date not happening, because there are loads of reasons for that, but I kind of felt like I was left hanging. In a typically female way, when I read, “I will let you know in a couple of hours” at 5pm, I expect an answer that evening. Or at the very least, the next day when the date was meant to happen.
Anyway, I won’t get into further detail about things I’m discovering in this new world of maybe sorta dating, like the green light in FB Messenger (something I’ve paid ZERO attention to previously). But I made the best of it and went for manis and drinks with friends.
I woke up this morning, feeling like I needed a zing. And zing! My phone was alight with messages from another old friend/colleague man, who is super fun and super hot. A bit nutty and drinks and smokes too much for my taste, but totally good for a debaucherous night that could end up… zing!
Then on the way to work, stewing about my shite day yesterday, where I failed to smash the patriarchy in that job interview, zing! The first man I’ve gone on a date with in two decades, a dude I met on an app, sends me pretty photos from his Mediterranean vacation. Zing!
So what I’m trying to say is, while some of this is total donkey balls, it’s also kind of fun. I don’t need any of this to go anywhere. I just want to be treated with respect and courtesy. If you want my sunshine to shine down on you (and it’s some damn fine sunshine if you can earn it) then make an effort. I am looking for a feminist fuck buddy. And the only prerequisite is that you treat me nice (oh and truly believe women deserve equal rights). But I am realizing that it’s going to take a lot of auditions before someone has the good fortune to land this part. And that’s ok, because God invented battery powered devices for a reason.
I don’t need you, make me want you. Be a mensch. Treat others as you’d like to be treated. Make me feel like the queen that I am. Let’s go to cute places and do artsy things and I will make you feel like the king that you are. I’m not ready for someone to govern the kingdom with me… yet. But I’m not ruling out the possibility either.
Dreaming of Maria Callas 