The Dull Roar

I spent the years between ages 18 and 20 with a permanent knot in my stomach. Those were the years between when I met my first love and when we finally got together. In that time, everything was so extreme; the good things sent me soaring and the bad things had me bawling. The day he first kissed me (May 24 1995) was the happiest day of my life and thoughts of the day we broke up make me lower than even thoughts of his death do.
In the years since Snickers, there have been a lot of highs and lows. I've been sent soaring by other kisses and been plunged to the depths of misery by other breakups. That's what love is all about, right?
Except somewhere along the line, I decided I've had enough of it. At 34 I'm exhausted. Rather than thrilling me as they once did, the ups and downs of love and relationships just wear me out. Chemistry and attraction just don't do it for me anymore; now when I meet a man who gives me butterflies I either relegate him to jumpoff status or run for the hills.
These days, compatibility and manners are what send me swooning (to the extent that I'm capable of swooning anymore). You can have the heat of passion; I'll take the dull roar of comfort any day. I find life infinitely more enjoyable without a knot in my stomach.


sent while running the streets

You Want to Sleep Where?!?

As I may have mentioned a time or two, I don't like sleepovers. Now considering the fact that I'm a bachelorette for life, I would have thought that this was no big deal; I was under the impression that sleepovers were the exclusive domain of serious relationships. But apparently, this is not so. Apparently it's an acceptable process to stay the night after you've bumped uglies with someone, even if they're not your current one true love.

Well I'm here to tell you people: I do not get it. I don't get sleeping at someone's house and I absolutely don't get someone sleeping at mine. In the immortal words of DrJayJack, "You need to get up and move your ass out of there before the doors close" (source). We're done, we cuddled, I'm tired. It's time for you to go. What's so wrong with that?

I used to think this was one of those ways in which my mind works like a man, but as I get older (and so do my victims) I'm realizing that I might be alone on this one. It seems getting up and leaving afterward is a must-do for a jumpoff, but a wifey or wifey-to-be is expected to stay. Yet another reason to permanently avoid wifey status if you ask me. But it does beg an interesting question for my male readers out there; does a woman who insists on leaving after it's over give off jumpoff vibes??

 Give me your two cents in the comments.

You know you want it

Hello people!
Sorry for being MIA - I'm having some technical issues and have been reduced to Blackberry blogging...those of you who know me in real life know how problematic that is. But fret not - I'll have all kinds of interesting things for you to disagree with once my computer is over its dramatic moment.
Anyway. The other night I was in bed watching my beloved Raptors and happened to flip to The Hills on a commercial just in time to catch a very interesting conversation between Kristin and Brody. For those smartie pants out there who do not torture themselves by watching The Hills, these two are 'friends' who apparently have some kind of romantic history and are 'hanging out' while Brody is on a break from his girlfriend. Or I should say that Brody thinks they're just hanging out and Kristin wishes they were dating. All caught up now? Good.
So now K and B are hanging out and she starts digging (a girl's favourite pastime) and asking 'what are we doing? And where is this going?' (a girl's favourite question). Being a typical man, Brody deflects the question by asking her where she wants it to go. But does she come right out and tell him she wants to date him? Oh no of course not. She's all evasive and says 'I just don't want to get hurt'.
Almost every woman I know does this, and I wonder if we really think we're fooling anyone. Asking a man 'where is this going?' in and of itself is just like hanging a big dirty 'I want a relationship!' sign across your neck, isn't it? Lucky for us gals, men don't always clue into that right away. That's why they turn around and ask  us what we want. And then we lie. We say 'I don't know', 'I'm just having fun getting to know you', 'I just don't want to get my feelings hurt', and other evasions and half-truths when what we really mean is 'I want to lock you down'. Right? Because if we were just looking to get our parts oiled for fun, wouldn't we just say that? I don't think people really concern themselves with what's gonna happen unless they're worried that whatever happens is gonna involve a big ole punch in the face.
But that's just my opinion. What say you peeps?

Other People's Logic - Your RMV

This topic comes courtesy of Justin, one of my favourite people to bump into when I’m running the streets. If you live in Toronto and you don’t know about tdot.tv, head over there (after you read this post) and check it out. Thank me later.

I was watching this video this morning. I thought it was interesting, it certainly made my head spin a bit, but I had another post for today in mind so I filed it under pending blog posts and went about my business. But my mind just kept running back to it so I figured the universe was trying to tell me to write about it today.

For whatever reason I wasn’t able to embed the video in here so I’ll give you the highlights. It’s called “Why You Must Know your RMV Before Dating”. Your RMV is your “relationship market value” – all my business majors can understand that one. Basically the idea is that you must first assess what you are (note that – what you are, not who you are) before you can assess what you want in a partner. Are you a fatty? Then you have no right expecting to land a man who is in shape. Do you have a successful career? Then yes, you may have a financially stable man. Do you have kids? Yes? Then no you may not have an unencumbered man. And on and on she goes.

Now let me be fair and say that she’s not as harsh as I’m making her sound. She does say, quite rationally, that if you are a couch potato and you’re looking for Mr. Universe 2009 there will be a disconnect.  “He values physical fitness and you don’t”. Reasonable enough, right? But there’s something about this whole concept that offends me. It’s the…commercialization of relationships, I guess. All this emphasis on what we are and what we have and what we can rationally expect our partners to be and have just makes me sad. It doesn’t leave much room for organic attraction, does it? If we all approach dating this way, where will we ever find another King Edward and Wallis Simpson? Another Romeo and Juliet? Those are kind of overblown examples, but you get what I mean.

Now if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you should be calling me a hypocrite right now. And it’s true that I don’t know many people who have more rules, guidelines, and codes for dating than I do. But in my defense, none of them have much to do with how a man looks on paper. 

Case in point: A few months ago I was chatting with a girlfriend about a man I had my eye on. The first three questions she asked me were what he does for a living, does he have a car, and whom does he live with? My answers? I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know. I don’t ask those questions because I don’t see what real relevance they have to my life at the beginning of a relationship.  What is relevant to me is the intangible things; does he have manners (always my first question!), is he funny, is he smart (whether he’s educated or not), does he have similar values and tastes, does he have pets? Those things matter to me and I don’t much like compromising on them. But the other stuff to me just smacks of riding someone else’s coattails. What do I need a rich man for if not to get him to buy me something? What good does a bodybuilder do me other than to lift me up and carry me around? As long as I feel that each of us can hold our on in a relationship; that we’re each contributing and trying on an equal level (and that has nothing to do with financial contribution), I think the rest of it can fall into place.

The thing about this way of thinking is this: Isn’t it just a little too easy to find a man who matches my level of education, my income level, and  lives in as nice a neighbourhood as I do but is a complete asshole? I think it’s a bit of putting the cart before the horse. What someone looks like on paper doesn’t mean much to me. I know I sure as hell don’t look good on paper and a man who subscribes to the RMV way of thinking will surely pass me by.  But he’ll be missing out.

You'll come around

If you’re single and in your mid-thirties, you’re extremely lucky you’ve probably figured out a few things about yourself. You know what you believe, who you are, what you want out of a relationship, and what you like and don’t like.  And while we all recognize that self-exploration never really ends, once you get to a point where you really know yourself, it’s a little easier to make the tough decisions in life. At least it should be.

If you know me in real life you know that some of my “fundamental truths” about life are a little…weird.  I don’t believe in sleepovers. I consider bad manners a worse offense than lying. I would never dump a man for cheating (if he did it the right way). Chivalry and generosity make me uncomfortable. I believe married people should live in separate houses. I hate pets. I don’t like going to the movies.

With all these idiosyncrasies, things with a new dude get off to a bit of a rocky start. While I believe in strategic honesty, bombarding a man with all this weirdness right from the start can be a little off-putting, don’t you think? But at the same time, I am a weird, strange, and quirky girl and to not let a man know that from jump would be wrong.

But whether I drop my wisdom weirdness on a man right from the beginning or after I’ve locked him in with pussy somewhere down the line, his reaction is always interesting. Some men will agree. A lot of them will try to argue me out of my way of thinking. And in between are the dudes who say “You’ll come around”.

“You’ll come around” is usually prefaced with some kind of smug, one-sentence dismissal of my point of view (and therefore the thought process behind it). It goes something like this:

Max: “I don’t like cats and I have no intention of ever living with one.”
Dude: “Oh you just haven’t met my cat yet. You’ll come around.”

Max: “I don’t want to sleep at your house. I have a bed and an apartment that I love and pay for.”
Dude: “Oh you’re just afraid of intimacy. You’ll come around.”

Max: “I like being single and am in no hurry to tie myself down.”
Dude: “Oh you’re just hurt. You’ll come around.”

These conversations make me want to stab someone in the eye.

Here’s my thing. My way of thinking makes sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to everyone else because they’re stupid and I get that. I don’t proselytize and I don’t expect anyone to come around to my way of thinking. I let people be who they are. Or I try to, anyway. But what “you’ll come around” implies is that my way of thinking is wrong and that spending a little time with this person will allow me to see the light and come around to his way of thinking. Which FYI is just as preposterous to me as my way of thinking is to him.

But what’s a girl to do with a man like this? Do I throw him back or do I give his propaganda point of view the fair consideration he has not given mine? Most times when a man says something like this to me, a light flicks on in my brain that says “This is not the man for you”. I don’t tell him that and I will continue to spend time with him, but with the knowledge that this isn’t going to be something long-term. And then it ends. Usually because I didn’t come around.

I cheated…but I love you!

Today’s topic comes courtesy of Mizzlovelippz who responded to my desperate twitterplea for something – anything! – to write about when the well was running kinda dry. (We also have to give a little shout-out to Boboleechron who suggested I write about “rainy days and stewed pigtail”, even though I couldn’t find a way to make that fit for the blog).

Ah, cheating. It’s one of my favourite relationship issues because it is so ripe with material. Who cheats more, how we cheat, why we cheat, what is cheating, it’s a never-ending discussion. But for today we will focus on MizzLoveLippz’s question, which was this:

Wo/men who cheat and claim they love their [partner]

Are cheating and love mutually exclusive? Consider this scenario. I have cheated once in the past. Well, twice if you want to get technical about it but the second time didn’t really count. I’ve also been cheated on. My first love and I cheated on each other in different ways, for different reasons, and we chose different methods of dealing with it. I was looking for something that I was missing in our relationship; a level of closeness that Snickers would not let us achieve. And I think he was looking to punish me, probably for that and various other things that had gone on over the years.

I think cheating gets a bad rap. People are quick to blame, accuse, judge, and scorn a cheater without examining the behaviour that contributes to the cheating. Not that I’m justifying it, but the truth is that in a relationship, we hurt each other in a lot of ways; we abuse trust, we withdraw attention and affection, we betray and we disrespect our relationships. But none of those behaviours seem to carry the same stigma as cheating, and I wonder why that is.

Consider the case of Jon and Kate. If you follow me on twitter you know that I was near to barfing watching Kate’s interview on Monday night. Not just because of her bad mullet I disagree with the notion of bad mouthing the father of your children on television, but because her version of what has gone on is just way too convenient for me. She has a trump card and she’s using it – the ‘photographic evidence’ of Jon’s infidelity is the shield behind which she deflects all blame or responsibility for the demise of her marriage. But what she seems to be forgetting – or what she clearly wants us to forget – are the ways in which she went wrong; from what I’ve seen of the show, she belittled, undermined, and emasculated that man on the regular. So is it any surprise that he took up with some young thing that probably made him feel like a god?

None of which is to say is that it’s our fault when our partner cheats on us; but the fact is that people have needs and if they’re not met in one place they will – consciously  or not – seek to meet them elsewhere. That’s just life.

So what does all this mean, really? Does the fact that Snickers and I cheated mean we didn’t love each other? I’m inclined to say no. I think that what I did was completely incidental to the relationship; to be honest I really wasn’t thinking about Snickers at all at the time.  And in a lot of ways, what I did was helpful to our relationship…it made me more careful with him than I would have been otherwise. As for Snickers, I think his act of cheating in itself had nothing to do with me or how he felt about me, but I know that the way he chose to go about it was a kind of punishment. And in the end, it wasn’t what he did that caused our undoing, but how he did it. And even though the relationship ended, the love never did.

I guess the main distinction for me is the way in which the cheating was done. Can a man love his fiancée and still get a fast hood suck from a stripper at his bachelor party? I’d say yes. But does a man who loves his wife have an affair with her sister for 10 years before he files for divorce and tries to take their children away? I’m not so sure.  I think it comes down to whether the act of cheating is really taking anything away from the relationship. If my boyfriend or husband got a little beats from a side girl from time to time, it wouldn’t even faze me. To me, that is taking nothing from me and our relationship is continuing uninterrupted regardless. But if my boyfriend was wining and dining another woman, confiding in her, and sharing details of our relationship with her, please believe we’re gonna have some problems, even if he never saw her privates. 

That being said, cheating is still an assholey thing to do. Unless you’re lucky enough to be with someone like me who doesn’t give a shit, that fast beat that you grabbed on the side is gonna cause your girl a whole lot of hurt if she finds out. And the fact that you’re willing to take that risk might not mean that you don’t love her, but it definitely says something about you. And not in a good way.

i swoon...

for man cleavage. I just think it is the most delicious ever. A man with good cleavage just drives me to distraction! And I thank the gods of man cleavage for bringing this trend into my life because these days, nearly everywhere I go I see it. And I drool.

I mean, really. Just look at this:

Whew. I'm starting to sweat.

If you want me to swoon over you good man cleavage too, check out this guide on MensXP.

And if I can't have it, then I'm fakin' it

Ah the big O. I've talked about this before but a discussion that came up at Inside Our Heads the other night prompted me to re-examine it.  We were discussing the importance of orgasms and whether the ladies on the panel ever faked it. And after a quick internal debate about whether I should tell the truth, I admitted that yes, I'm a faker.

See here's the thing: I'm a cerebral person. My brain never shuts off, so the concept of just being in the moment doesn't really compute for me. During secksy time I will invariably be distracted...sometimes it's by something as small as the ticking of a clock or a song playing in the background; sometimes i'm thinking about the meaning behind what is happening. But either way, the constant machinations of my brain often stand between me and my O and no matter what the man is laying on me, it's just not gonna happen. And so, in the interest of getting my beauty sleep, I have to get my "When Harry Met Sally" on so I can move on with my life.

I know some of you are side-eyeing me right now wondering why I can't just be honest. But if you've been paying attention you should know by now that I soooo can. The problem is, that sometimes it's just not worth it. Because when you tell a man that the Big O is not imminent, moretimes he will take it as a personal challenge. You've laid down the gauntlet for him and he's not going out without a fight. He will pull out his "best" material to assert his manhood and drag you kicking and screaming to the summit. Before the night is over, you will have sweated out your press n curl and begun to chafe in unpleasant ways. See where all that honesty gets you? Tired, sticky, sweaty, frizzy, and stinging. All of which could be avoided with a few strategically-timed moans and muscle contractions.

I will admit though that there is the rare exception to the above scenario. And that is when you encounter the man that will accept that sometimes the O is not about him. This dude's manhood does not rest on the back of your orgasm and he will accept what you say and still try to make it an enjoyable experience for both of you. He might ask you what he can do to help you get there, but he's not pressing the issue.  Unfortunately, this the exception rather than the rule and you can't bank on this outcome. So I say just make it believable and move on with your life.

My name is max, and I'm a faker.