It's gruesome that someone so handsome should care

I am prone to bouts of jealousy, in romantic situations. I am never irrationally jealous. And my jealousy tends to signify that something's rotten in the state of Denmark. Or is at least a little bit awry.

I have fought it, but I've never been able to kill it completely. It is in my blood. It is my very nature.

So I am letting it be a lesson, or a series of lessons. My jealousy has taught me:

Love won't change a person. I can't date a person's potential. Musicians are trouble. Artists are trouble, also. Dating a player very probably means getting played. No one's vagina is magic.

This one's controversial:

I should not sleep with any man I'm not seriously involved with.

Not on a why-buy-the-cow-if-the-milk-is-free theory, exactly, although -- lord help me -- there may be something to that -- a person can't be "used" for sex if they're not giving it up. Of course, if you're after casual sex, then, by all means, do it. Do it twice, or a hundred times, do it and do it and do it well. Do it until you're dirty, and then take a good long shower.

But if what you want is something else, if casual sex is not what you're after, if it makes you feel sad and empty and dissatisfied, don't do it.

I thought I wanted for most recent man -- this fantastically beautiful man -- to lie on top of me.

And I did. And he did. And it was lovely.

But it turned out that that alone was not what I desired. Or rather, the lying on top of me did not work out because once he drew his body over me, I decided I was after something else. Something more substantial than the weight of a beautiful man's body, draped upon me.

Something he couldn't give, something I probably didn't want from him to begin with.

And all the while, as sexually attractive as he was and is, I knew and know, that what he could give was not enough. It would never satisfy. And that's okay. I got what I wanted, or what I thought I wanted. He is not smart enough, not competent enough, not mature enough; too flaky. And that's okay. I am in all reality too much for him, too verbal, too noisy, too demanding, and that's okay, too. We brought what we had to the table. And the meal is over.

It was what I thought I wanted. And at the time, perhaps it was. But I realized something, in that interaction: no more of that, no more of him. I am not remotely constituted for such things.

If I am going to throw down with a man, I want something different, something truer, something more. And absent that, I will take nothing.

I Thought I Was Over It

We broke up fifteen months ago.

And I really thought I'd long since moved on.

I saw him, and he's put on quite a bit of weight, Jason said.

A photograph, pulled from his website, confirmed my friend's observation.

At first, this made me giddy.

He has grown worse in my absence, I thought, smug and righteous and full of schadenfreude.

But the more I thought on it, the sadder his fatness - and my reaction to his fatness - made me.

My glee suggested an unhealthy degree of attachment, for people who aren't invested just don't give a damn about such trivial things.

His weight gain signified to me that he is drinking, frequently and heavily.

And that realization killed whatever small shred of joy I found in his increased girth.

That realization impressed upon me just how sick he still is, and just how not-over-it I still am.

Could you admire it from afar, please?

I can deal with a lot of things on the race front. I can deal with my own family's hypersensitive, holy-shit-it's-time-to-prove-we're-down, nervous "We love Black people! Whatever makes you happy! We voted for Obama!" They mean well, even if they're unschooled in issues involving race. They are trying, in their desperate way.

And I can deal with the reservations of his family, with being described as the Jewish law student girl, with being told you're getting your swirl on, the pointed choice of Jungle Fever as an after-dinner movie. They are trying, too, trying to feel me out. To test me. To see what I'm made of. They have a stake. I am happy to roll with that, for now.

What I cannot suffer is this:

we were sitting in a coffeeshop, and a woman came up to him and began fondling his hair.

A total stranger, a middle-aged white woman.

"Um, do I know you?" he asked.

"I'm just admiring your hair," she said.

"Could you admire it from afar, please?" he asked.

She did not move away. She went on to call him unusual-looking and exotic.

He handled it well, I thought; he was far more polite than I would have been about the entire thing.

I was enraged.

"Were you jealous?" my good friend Andy asked me after the fact.

I had wondered that soon after the incident; was I responding out of a sense of displeasure that this man I am interested in is being touched by another woman? Or worse, out of a sense of personal ownership?

I thought on it, long and hard.

It was not that.

I have never been denied bodily autonomy in that way, in public, by a stranger. I have seen it happen to white women who are pregnant -- the indiscriminate belly touch -- horribly offensive, but nonetheless a different thing entirely.

It is fundamentally bad manners to touch a stranger's hair. Right? I mean, this is not socially acceptable. It has never happened to me, and it did not happen to me the other day. It was not my experience. I wasn't entitled to have the reaction I did.

And it was a painful thing to watch. Because it wasn't just hair in his case; because black people have been denied bodily autonomy throughout the course of US history, and this unsolicited touching felt like such a violation of this man's space, and bodily integrity, and personhood. It would bother me to see happen to any person, but as I'm starting to really care for him, the ferocious Italian wingnut loyalty in me flared bigtime, and I wanted to smash this woman in the face with the nearest blunt object.

His hair is not in the public domain! I wanted to scream.

But it was not my sentence to scream. I had to defer to his reaction, to his judgment. Because while I bore witness to this imposition, it was not my space that was violated. It wasn't my hair that was touched.

He, unfortunately, has been dealing with this shit for his entire life. I have been observing it for about five figurative minutes. I need to handle my white girl outrage. And figure out how and where I fit into all of this, honestly.

It Is Hard to Blog About Your Dating Embargo

When you've violated the embargo.

It is even harder to do it when you actually like the guy you're, um, violating the embargo with.

But I will write more later.

Stop Expecting It To Look Like What You Thought It Was Going To Look Like

I worry that this man is wrong for me somehow, that he fails to live up to some image I've created of who I'm supposed to be with. I had this picture in my head, you understand. Of a very particular kind of man. It makes me slightly sick to think about. It does.

Because I saw something, something I wasn't even aware of. It involved nothing less than a master's degree, it involved a certain background, a certain educational and occupational and class status. It involved a big old boatload of pretension. And I wasn't even self-aware enough to realize it, I didn't know that this was my bias.

And if you'd asked me, in the abstract, I would have denied it. I am not one to conflate intelligence with education. I am not impressed by class status. I'm not. My parents never went to college. I don't believe that anyone is his job. Tax brackets mean very little to me. Advanced degrees impress me for the work involved, but I don't think that people who've attained them are somehow better or smarter, more interesting or more desirable than those who haven't. And I don't care about money; this is not what motivates me. And no one told me that I should date men with particular degrees, or jobs, or aspirations. No one told me that.

It just happened that the world I fell into was a world in which the people have or are attaining particular degrees, and jobs, and aspirations.

And this man does not.

He is not that.

And it makes me sick to my stomach, ashamed, even, that this is even an issue.

Because he doesn't look like what I thought he should look like, propositionally. Aesthetically, sure, he is perfect. Better than perfect.

When I met this man, when I first laid eyes on him, I thought: this man is physically stunning, beautiful beyond reason. And attraction to his utter gorgeousness is where it started, and I thought at the time, ended. And maybe it is. I want(ed) him to lie on top of me as soon as possible, and be done with it.

But.

I am realizing, very slowly, and to my consternation and surprise, that I am not done with it.

Something else is on the table, here, as my dear friend pointed out to me tonight.

You thought you wanted one thing from this man, he said, and it turns out, you could want something else entirely.

And he is right.

I want to know what, if anything, this is or could be. I want to cast my preconceptions into the water, and drown them. I want to learn more of who this man is. Because he is beautiful, and kind, and earnest. Because it doesn't need to look like what I thought it was going to look like. Because life is complicated and messy and strange, and this could turn into something other than what I thought, after all.

And yes, I want this man on top of me. That is self-evident. If you saw him, you would understand. But I want something else, also. Something I haven't wanted from a man in years, really, not since the likes of my last serious boyfriend, much-adored and terribly wrong for me. Something surprising, and rare.

I want to see where this could go.

anytime there is spanish wine

or any wine, for that matter --

and the drinkers decide we'll spare the glasses, and just take turns mouthing the bottle, trouble is a-brewing.

and i found myself a hot mess of trouble tonight.

Surprise!

This man I met recently is all wrong on paper, he is exactly the wrong man for me. And I have only known him a few weeks. He is smart but unpretentious, calm, rooted, happy, stable, and everything that I typically am not attracted to and should be attracted to, but he is not brilliant. Nor is he exceptionally ambitious. And he is unironic--I don’t get his humor. He doesn’t get mine. He is all wrong for me. My attraction to him comes as a surprise – the fact that it has transcended mere physicality is a surprise anyway – he is a beautiful man.

But he is exceptionally good, sweet and kind and open. And I look at him and my ovaries scream babies. Which is something that none of the derelict men I have been with or been attracted to up until this point have ever inspired, mostly because they all have been in very real senses children themselves.

He is not who I expected. He is not what I expected.

And maybe it’s not him. Maybe it's me. Maybe I am not what I expected, after all.