How I’ve Avoided Having “The Talk” – Guest Post by Demeter
By Honey on May 5, 2009 in Dating, Featured
Below is a guest post from a friend I know IRL…sort of. We’re in the same program and have many of the same professional and research interests, although she started long enough after I began that we’ve rarely run into each other in person (we don’t even live in the same town!). We do, however, follow each other’s many blogs, pseudonymous and otherwise. If you like what you read here, check out Demeter’s House.
Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It’s been four months since my last sexual encounter.
Four months–I know, I know. A terrible sin for a woman in her sexual prime. But it goes back to that tricky question Honey raised last week about when to reveal certain things.
Maybe part of my problem is that I’ve spent too much time over the years with my guy-pals, sitting in creaky wooden chairs at the neighborhood bar as we drank our beers and talked about girls. On those Guinness nights my guy-pals told me that they would never date a divorced woman. And they sure as hell wouldn’t date a divorced woman with children. My guy-pals, who admittedly function under overly-simplistic equations, saw it this way: single mom = needy, clingy woman. And my guy-pals ran from this most ominous breed of female.
When I was sitting around having those beer-induced talks with my guy-pals, I had no idea that I would become the divorced woman. With children. But wait, there’s more. The children happen to have pervasive developmental disabilities.
Running yet, boys?
When does a girl throw out such a detail in a conversation with the cute guy she just met at the folk art festival? I mean, I know it lies somewhere on the continuum between telling the guy your name and telling him the deep dark secret of, say, how your first love broke your heart when he slept with your best friend and then ran over your poodle–twice. I’m just not sure WHERE on that continuum it rests.
I’m not too giddy to throw out information about my kids. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my them–I’m not. They SO rock. But my relationship with them and my love for them is one of the most intimate parts of who I am; that’s not something I’ll share with just anyone. And then there’s the other reason I’m reticent–I’m afraid that if I reveal too much too soon that a guy will read me all wrong, that he’ll place me in the lump of clingy women from which to run. The irony is, I’m one of the most independent women that guy would ever know.
My response to figuring out when to have the talk? I’ll confess–I’ve cheated my way out of it. Lame, I know. I’ve avoided meeting new men and instead have stayed in that comfort zone of men who already know me, who already know I’m strong and funny and willing to tear a tiger apart with my teeth for my kids. First I looked to a couple of my guy-pals, ironically enough (they somehow forgot their fear of the single mom when the single mom was me). In very short time, I remembered why I had been their Guinness pal rather than their girlfriend for all these years and forgot about trying to date old friends.
But old boyfriends . . . that’s another thing.
I’m not sure exactly how I got involved with my ex again. We’ve always had this damned amazing chemistry, and the only reason I broke up with him was because my brain knew that he and I were a bad match even if my body didn’t. But, hey, I’m not in the market for a match right now, so he’s the perfect fit.
Perfect . . . except that he lives a couple states north of me. Which means that my thumbs are the only parts of my body that are having regular sex. Huh, that’s inconvenient.
Inconvenient, but for now, it’s good enough for me. I get to have mind-blowing (though infrequent) sex with a man who respects me as the bad-ass momma that I am and has no desire to cross that boundary into the kid zone I so fiercely protect. Plus I don’t have to worry about picking up his socks in the morning, which is a definite plus.
I know, though, that someday, maybe years from now, I will want to be in a LTR again, and when I get to that point, I’m going to have to confront the question that Honey posed. And I won’t be able to cheat my way out it.
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