How to Lose a Guy in... Ten Minutes.

As I try to figure out a new direction to take my writing in, it occurred to me, why not write about all of the stuff I couldn't write about before?  Of course I'll need to tailor it to the new PG audience.   The stuff I'm talking about is all of my dating adventures over the past 10 years while I was divorced and dating, ya' know pre-relationship. I couldn't really tell all, since some of the people involved were reading me, and that would have been awkward.   However, the twist is, it won't all be making fun of all the psych ward escapees I encountered, it will be a lot of revelations of things that I did wrong.

Oh yes, Madge was wrong.  Hey, I admit it.  A lot of you that read my blogs on Myspace back in the day, will probably say "We coulda' told ya' you were wrong!".  Yea, yea ok, sometimes it takes some of us a while.  Sometimes people never learn.  I'd rather be wrong and have figured it out than still be convinced I'm right and still be alone and miserable.  Once I became generally unmiserable, my whole life, not just dating changed.  I got back on a career track, and the kids and I started to thrive.

Wait, let me clarify, I wasn't miserable because I was alone, I was just miserable, period.  Now, I could be alone and be happy.  Make sense?  Moving right along...

I used to think I knew it all.  I was convinced that brow beating a man into honesty and forcing his hand was somehow a sure-fire way to attract them to my womanly wiles and fall madly in love with me.

Bah hahahahahaha!!!!

I was so obsessed with honesty after my lie-filled marriage, I became "Date-zilla".  It was all about laying all the cards out at once, and if a man followed-up on our date I would go into interrogation mode about his intentions.  And if they weren't what I wanted, I pouted, and was passive-aggressive, and did the guilt thing.  Oh, I was convinced that I didn't do that... but I did.  At some point I think we should all be videotaped in our lives, because sometimes what we perceive we do, and what others see are two vastly different things.

Oy, I hate to admit it, but it's true.  Of course, it wasn't with everyone, a good number of guys I was trying to ditch because I just wasn't attracted.  I would say 90% of the men I met just weren't interesting to me.  I was very picky.  But there were ones that could have had a chance, had I not blown it.  However, I do think things happen for a reason.

Once I started to learn to be confident, act like I didn't care, and set up boundaries and walk away when the boundaries didn't suite me... things started to go my way.  That was the tough one, walking away after the boundaries were set.  Sometimes you want something so bad, you make a bad decision and say, ok screw it I'll go meet him just this once.  As they used to say on Family Feud, "X".  Wrong answer.  The fact is the guy I'm dating now, my boyfriend (oh that word still seems so silly at my age), didn't start really respecting me until I said no to the nonsensical situation he wanted to have with me. I thought I was being cool saying I was ok with a casual dating thing, but yet being passive-aggressive to him about wanting a relationship and then really being hurt when he went out with someone else. 

Truth be told, I wanted a relationship with him and it was ok to admit it and walk away if he didn't.  I was raised by a pack of angry feminists to believe relationships weren't important (yet the twist was, once you were in it, it was for life).  Yet I finally was shown that it's ok to want love, especially after 10+ years without it.  It's not ok to be addicted to it and be a Liz Taylor.  But I had to accept it was ok to want love, and stop fighting it internally.  That was a lot of what made me angry inside.  However once I accepted it, I needed to keep my standards and boundaries and hold out for the right relationship.  I had to learn patience.  That was like teaching Sid Vicious to "just say no" to heroin.

All right, this is getting long-winded, this could be a book, so I'll cut it short for now.  I'll turn it into a mini-series.  This will be "Roots" for our generation.  Wait, "Roots" was already in our generation.  So it will be the "Roots" of the dating lessons genre.  Nevermind, I'm  going to turn into Star Jones here with all the self-promotion.  Anyway, stay tuned, more dating revelations to come...