Musings on Life and Love

Image by PhotograTree via flickr

The scene is familiar: I’m at a party chatting with a group of friends. Gradually, we draw in the nearby group of guys, and before long, I’m amiably discussing quantum physics or artificial intelligence or some other topic I’m completely unqualified to have any opinion on (but do, anyways).

Then, the conversation turns personal: what do you do, where do you live, do you have roommates? I suddenly feel like a sea anemone with bright flowery tentacles, trying to ensnare the unsuspecting innocent guppy into my trap.

“Actually,” I reply, “I’m a full-time single mom.” Often the expression on the guy’s face reminds me of a black and white mushroom cloud rising up after the bomb has been dropped.

When the smoke clears, drinks need to be refilled, a buddy needs to be found, and my friends and I start swapping stories about how absolutely adorable my three-year-old is. Disaster averted.

Every once in awhile, though, some poor fool is too distracted by the décolleté and short length of my dress to run screaming in the opposite direction. He gets my phone number, and inevitably, the question becomes, “so how does this work, dating a single mom?” Read more…

Image by pareerica via flickr

For me, they usually come quietly, stealthily sneaking upon me when my thoughts are elsewhere.

The close proximity, the smiles, the steady eye contact, the pressing of knees in the bar, or a careless hand resting just a moment on my feet snuggled under a blanket. Jokes, dimples, and shared confidences. Whatever the cause, butterflies flutter in my stomach, and I’m thinking about a guy in a way I never have before.

What are these butterflies? Attraction, a crush, love?

Zack, for instance, made my stomach twist, flip, and want to shout for joy the moment we met. Unfortunately, he left on a ship, for five months, a few weeks later. Think it’s grueling waiting a week for the person you like to call you? Waiting five months to see what those feelings really were was torture.

These insects of attraction flit about, blind to what is healthy and careless of the past or future with an individual. Read more…

Art by mollycakes via flickr

Some women go through relationships like shoes; I go through men like jobs. I’ve had 29 jobs since I started working when I was 16. I’m not even going to try counting the guys I’ve had crushes on, dated, or hooked up with. My longest job lasted a year and a half, my longest relationship approximately four months.

These days it seems whenever I get together with my friends, they need a review: “Where are you working now? Which guy is this you’re dating?”

Breaking up with the last guy who found such shortcomings in my job insecurity has induced me to muse upon the connections between my work and my love life.

Every new job and every new relationship forces introspection. When people ask me what I do, I tell them the exact description of the jobs I’m currently working. Lately, those jobs have included special education aide, tutor, English as a Foreign Language teacher and grant writing consultant. So, I was struck when my new boss-to-be looked at my resume and observed that I’d been teaching six years. It was longer than I thought.

Maybe this is why I dislike statistics. I know some people find comfort in the rules of math, the seeming hard facts that digits provide, but like so many aspects of life I find this data a matter of perspective. Read more…

Photo by Brett Arthur via Flickr

Heads turned when this very Hot Guy walked into the Halloween party I attended this year. Dimples to the heavens, sparkling, mischievous eyes, and muscles a girl just can’t help but hang onto. Unfortunately, the illusion was quickly shattered by how obviously he wanted to get laid.

The first girl he struck up a conversation with hastily found a way out, groaning to us about how unattractive it is when a guy brings up sex within minutes of meeting. The rest of us concurred and didn’t bother conversing with him most of the night, though Hot Guy seemed to pervade the party.

Meanwhile two girls were in a flirting battle over the same “Nice” Guy, (who claimed to be single, but days later revealed that was just a part of his Halloween costume too), because he could actually hold his end of a conversation. Read more…

Photo by John Fraissinet via Flickr

When I broke up with the last guy I was dating, I tried to be polite about it. I told him he was nice, cute and fantastic—and he replied with a low blow about my “lack of stability.” Eww. He hurt my feelings, especially since I had tried to be amiable. I reacted by doing what I swore I would never do. I told him all the awful things I’d thought about him over the last month since it first occurred to me that maybe I didn’t want to date a guy who wore white shoes hiking and complained about them getting dirty.

I’m not usually such a bitch, but early on in our discussions, he’d said he didn’t see any point in staying in contact with the girls he dated once he’d broken up with them. So I felt I didn’t have anything to lose. If I’d thought we could be friends, I would have acted differently. Read more…