Oh be-jesus. Why do I overshare? Did I really say that?
Okay, in the latest Momversation video Daphne from Cool Mom asks, “Is Your Mom-self Overtaking Your Sexual-self?”
My answer?
YES.
YES.
YES.
First of all … there’s a lot edited out of each video. There’s probably 30 minutes of footage that gets left on the production floor – never to see the light of day. Just so you know (a.k.a. damage control), Daphne mentioned that she had a single-mom friend who hasn’t had sex in 4 years offline. I retorted, “I am that single mother who hasn’t had sex in 4 years!” So I wasn’t quite having a random outburst about my sex life … there was actually some dialog about it that got edited out.
THAT SAID. It has been a long time. Maybe not 4 years, but a long, long time. And it’s true. I do feel like that sexy part of me is lost. And sometimes I feel completely pathetic about it. And not even pointy shoes can fill the void of actually feeling sexy because you are having sex. It’s awfully lonely sometimes.
Then again, these days I am a bit less cavalier about having sex. You could almost say that I am re-virginized like a born-again Christian or a Jonas Brother who is abstaining from sex because of their values. Maybe I should get one of those purity rings. Oh God. Please strike me down right now.
The truth is is that I just can’t find a partner. I am not meeting anyone that I am interested in having dinner with so I really can’t imagine finding someone that I want to get all sweaty and moany with. And honestly, having casual sex at age 35 doesn’t quite seem like who I am anymore. And I have nothing against casual sex. I was one of those people who had a lot of sex and then bragged about it to other people. If I was a SATC personality, I would have described myself to be a Samantha back in the day. Really. I swear to God. But clearly I have now morphed into a Charlotte (minus the religion) – it’s all about hope and love and happy endings.
Or maybe I’ve had all the sex one is supposed to have in their lifetime and therefore I have used up all of my credits in my twenties and early thirties. Good lord. I’ve used up my quota. That just can’t be right.
I just keep thinking that I am going to meet the guy who is going to blow my mind up and then it will be a done deal. That I won’t have to go through the bad date phase or the messiness. I’ve done that. If I have used up all my quota for sex, then I’ve also managed to use up my “bad date” quota too.
My plan now?
Meet guy. Live happily ever after. The end.
Something tells me it’s not quite going to be that easy.
Ugh. Shall we let the litany of bad date stories begin?
We can either go forward or backwards in the evening but the Friday that we spent in Vancouver was good test of my endurance.
After our train ride up from Seattle, CB and I had lunch at the hotel restaurant, took a long walk down Robson Street and then headed towards Yaletown. There we had beer and oysters at Rodney’s (which had a bartender so cute that it hurt me a little), espresso at Raw Canvas and then headed to dinner at Bin 941 (which served this duck breast with pancetta, goat cheese and truffle oil salad that was so good that it hurt me a little too).
After dinner we headed towards a place called the Railway Club. While we were there, CB and I happened to strike up a long conversation with a Day Trader and a Finance Regulator (of all people). The latter called bloggers the “scourge of the earth” and said that bourbon was disgusting (which by the way, is something akin to insulting my mother). I wanted to hate him but it’s so rare that you find someone who describes themselves as “Beautiful Mind smart.” (Seriously, he said a “Beautiful Mind smart!” More than once!) How could you hate such bravado? What an asshole.
The Day Trader was a bit dull, but then again I am dull, so what the fuck do I have to complain about? I wanted to “almost” hate him too but he was too cordial and kept shelling out for cabs and beers and such. With that in mind, I will have to call him top-notch. TOP NOTCH! (Even if he did suck down Red Bulls and vodka like an Olsen Twin.)
We all ended up going to two more bars, of which I can’t remember the names of because our new Canadian friends took us there. (You know, because I’ve worked through all of my trust issues in therapy and I now have graduated to trusting complete random strangers to take me to places that I’ve never been to.) As I recall, one place had a hockey jersey as the centerpiece of the mahogany laden bar (Canadians love their hockey!) and the other place was brightly lit, sported these Ikea stools and had a lot of flat screens playing 80′s music like Def Leppard and Bon Jovi. If any of you Vancouver readers can enlighten me, please do.
In order to gild the lily, we were whisked away to the Edgewater Casino for a night of craps table fun, but in the end CB and I decided to ditch the gambling scene in order to drink some more and people watch. To our good fortune, the casino bartender was completely adorable and young and irreverent which made the younger me completely fall madly in love with him for a FULL HOUR because of the fact that he was completely young, adorable and irreverent. How could you not?
At the end of his shift he handed me a piece of paper and said out loud and clear, “Here is the number for the VD doctor that you asked for.” He did this while there was some jackass talking to me about his Native Pride and about how he was a descendant of Genghis Khan and about how responsible he was and how he took care of his women … yada, yada, yaaaaaawwwnnnnn. All I could think was, “What’s a VD doctor? What does that mean?”
Since I am so pathetically out of touch with dating it was not till waaaaaaay later did I realize that it was actually his number. That he was trying to imply that I had a venereal disease so that the Son of Genghis Khan would leave me alone. He was also implying that I should call him because he is young, adorable and irreverent and that perhaps I am two out of three of those things … and that maybe we should get married or something like that because after an hour of me sitting there punch drunk, I MUST BE IRRESISTIBLE, RIGHT?
Or perhaps it was more like, let’s skip all of that falling in love and marriage talk and at least get to practicing making babies part. You know, cause he is a hot, young bartender.
I have been single for what seems like an eternity. Despite a smattering of dates here and there, I’ve hit a drought. And not just a seasonal drought, it’s more of like a sub-Saharan multigenerational kind of drought.
I don’t know how this happened, it didn’t start as a drought. It started as a break. A break from all the stormy weather you encounter at the demise of a relationship. I was going to take some time to reconfigure what it meant to be Giyen. But then break turned into dry spell and then into a full on drought in just a blink of an eye. I am just now encountering the notion of dating again. And am now one of those people who says, “Where do you meet guys? The good kind?”
At this point, I have been in relationships most of my adult life with some massive dating before and in between. I keep telling myself that I am going to start seriously putting myself out there but I never seriously do. Perhaps I am suffering the ill effects of too many RomComs. Or maybe it’s just harder to meet someone when you’ve become a woman of a certain age. So many guys that are in their mid-30s are ready to start procreating and I am not there. I will never get there. I don’t plan on having any more kids. As a single mom this means I am looking for a “daddy type” who doesn’t want kids. Where the hell do you find that (aside from someone who could be the age of my daddy as well)? Plus, Seattle is not known as the easiest place to meet people – a.k.a. the Seattle Freeze. People go to coffee shops and open their laptops and put their headphones on – instead of going to coffee shops to talk to people. This is nuts.
All I know is that watching Jon, Bryan, Hal and Mark, husbands of Dooce, Mighty Girl,Girls Gone Child and Cool Mom totally made me miss having a partner. But not for all the reasons that you would imagine. It’s just that I have a really odd sense of humor and I laugh all of the time. Sometimes to myself. I think it would be good to always have someone standing next to me so I don’t look crazy laughing to myself. That’s where a husband fits in. I think that it will cut down number of instances where people think I am nuts. Maybe by 50%.
