dating over 40

The Affair

Posted on by akiwifreund

I am stuck in bed except for times that I need to run out for doctor appointments, so I have become a heavy Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu patron. When Hulu offered a month free of their Showtime shows add-on, I jumped all over that – I haven’t had satellite/cable TV for at least seven years and there are certain shows I was hearing about over and over regarding their quality casting and writing. I powered through “Masters of Sex” and tried to watch “The Affair.”

“Masters of Sex” is fascinating on many levels. First, it’s set in the 1950s-1960’s, when discussion of the nature of sexual response did not occur in public. Second, Masters’ and Johnson’s breakthrough publication immediately preceded The Pill, which as we should know right now, freed a lot of women up to choose if and when to become pregnant, therefore leaving a lot more doors open to pursuing higher education, gainful employment and a variety of sexual partners. Third, it’s fun to see the period costumes and sets; oh, how nostalgic we become in looking back.

If you have not seen the series and you do not know the history of Masters and Johnson, caution: spoiler alert.

They convinced themselves that anything they did to contribute to research – anything – was NOT an affair. Masters was distant towards his wife and children and refused to explore anything sexual with his wife. Johnson was previously divorced with children (also a rarity for her generation) and she took on sexual partners without pretending that the interludes were for anything but sex. So in the name of research, they started an affair. At first, they would run stopwatches and talk about plateaus, but as the proverbial fly on the wall, the audience knows they are making some weak excuses to do the nasty. After a while it just became common knowledge, at least to Mrs. Masters, that Dr. Masters and Virginia Johnson were more than simply researchers to each other.

I could only get about four or five episodes into “The Affair” because it made me uncomfortable. It’s a modern examination of how men and women perceive opportunity. Again, spoiler alert – if you want to see it but haven’t yet, look away. Half of the show is dedicated to the telling from the perspective of the woman, and half is dedicated to the perspective of the man, but it’s not immediately apparent in the first episode until halfway through. When we watch through Noah’s eyes, Alison is a young, attractive woman who wears short shorts and practically throws herself at him. Her face is open, she is giving him bedroom eyes when they interact, there is always a half smile playing around her mouth, she speaks with confidence. Noah is stuttering and fumbling, unsure of himself, but going along with what she is offering because she has invited him. When it’s Alison’s turn to show her perspective, she is perpetually sad because she and her husband lost a child, and she is the one who is unsure of herself and feeling unattractive and lost. In her eyes, Noah is the instigator.

The reason why this particular series gets under my skin is that sometimes when I send another man away, I marvel at the information that comes back to me by mutual acquaintances. Like, were we even in the same relationship? Did he hear nothing that I said? Did he think I wouldn’t catch him lying?

But what if, like in the show “The Affair,” he really believes his version of the story? And what if I really believe my own version? The three men I lived with are no longer in contact, so I can’t ask them what they think now about what happened then. Do they even remember? The first one spent all of his rent money on porn and video games. The second one stole money from me and disappeared for days. The third one was controlling and abusive. What if their version of what went down is to say that I was controlling and demanding, or, I don’t know, wore unattractive socks? How can you even dispute something that the other person takes as fact? Does it ever work to try to change someone’s perception?

And then there’s Josh Duggar. I posted the quintessential meme on Facebook last night: “Marriage is between one man and one woman…and my sisters…and that chick from Ashley Madison.” He’s spending a lot of time now saying he’s sorry. I wonder how he justified all of his actions? When you strip away his church and his parents’ protection, there isn’t much left to hide behind. Duggar can’t claim he was seduced by his sisters. He can’t cry that he was duped into creating two accounts with Ashley Madison or that he didn’t make the profiles himself, since he very deliberately entered his grandmother’s address as his own. Also, is he (or his dad) going to waive the magic penis around and say that Jesus forgives him?

Poor Little Bird II: The Saga Continues

Posted on by akiwifreund

On my profile page on Fetlife, I specify that I am going through a health crisis and I can’t play in any way. I meant this to indicate that I can’t date, go to parties, go to dinners, Skype, sext, or email, because to me, all of those forms of communicating leave the door open to “playing,” even if it’s just writing a few paragraphs. It still requires effort and imagination. I still have to please the other person and try to fulfill their expectations.

This morning I woke up to an email from a guy who had cancer for decades, acknowledging that he is aware that I’m experiencing major health issues right now and explaining his personal experience being sick. Then he says that while I’m sick, we could still sext and get to know each other, and when I’m well we could meet and play.

I’m not quite sure how to process this one. On one hand, it’s still the idea of, “Oh, look, you have a broken wing. I’ll just fuck the other wing, k?” But since this is coming from someone who has been sick for all of his life minus one year, I know that he will understand what I’m dealing with. I also understand that he’s eager to jump into the dating pool because this is the first time he’ll be able to screw around cancer-free. He probably has a lot of catching up to do – as opposed to me, as I seem to have experimented more than your average bird in the decades leading up to this illness, so I don’t feel like I have been missing out.

Another factor that needs to be considered when sexting or emailing someone without meeting them first is that when you finally do meet, sometimes it kills your boner for the other person. I’m thinking about one date in particular where we became very sexually intimate over messenger, but when we met for a date, I immediately wished that I could take it all back, there was so little attraction to him. I feel like such an old lady now when I tell someone that I’m not interested in sexting. It’s simply not true – I love it – but now I think it would be best to limit it to men I actually know and want to jump, and only then if they can hold a conversation with me above and beyond “Show me your boobs.”

Yes, I Have a Type

Posted on by akiwifreund

I like men. Tall ones, short ones, fit ones, cute ones, nerd ones, “dad body” ones, I can find something to appreciate in many. However, there are certain things that make me stupid – panty-droppers, if you will. They are:

  1. Firemen. I mean, c’mon, this should be a no-brainer. Granted, some are cuter than others, but family and friends alike encourage this particular addiction by sending me photos and buying me calendars. Even my realtor sent me a picture from a property she was renting to five firemen in Tempe, AZ – one of the guys was posed naked on top of a bicycle out back at the pool, helmet on his head, cigarette in his mouth, and holding a rifle. He was quite fit. His leg very coyly covered up his frank and beans. It was my dream photo minus the rifle and the cigarette. He had it blown up to poster size, which made it easy for the realtor to capture and forward to me. Nearly every day someone posts a half-naked fireman (or if it’s my lucky day, fireMEN) on my Facebook wall. My best day was just a few days after I got Dumb and Angry to move out of the house, I had to call 911 to get help because I thought I had popped my shunt out of the little hole in my cranium, and I was in heaven because I had a house full of firemen. They were all running through my house telling me how much they loved it while a couple stayed with me to work me up, so as I was being wheeled out of the house, I told all of them that I was looking for a roommate. Pass that up? Not me! Of course, I was in crazy pain and had just taken a big dose of painkillers so I was high as a kite, so who knows what else I said to them. I’m pretty sure I didn’t try to stuff dollars down their pants.
  2. Tall men. My first two live-in boyfriends were 6’2″ and 6’3″, and a former boyfriend was 6’4″. I tried twice to make a date happen with a guy who was 6’6″ (he wussed out, had just gotten divorced and was too damaged to follow through), and I think the guy who told me I looked like his dead wife was at least 6’3″. What is it about the tall guys? I’m not sure. I mean, yeah, they can see the top of the fridge, but big deal. I think because I’ve never been considered small, I don’t feel like Godzilla around the tall guys, as in, “Me smash little puny men and snap their thighs like twigs!”
  3. Musicians. I’m talking real musicians, like the ones that can play seven instruments or don’t rely on electronic alterations like auto-tune. I’ve lived with two drummers who could also play other instruments. I think I would give my left pinkie finger to go out with Glen Hansard (at least until I figured out the hard way that he’s a nutter or something). I think this stems from playing a few instruments while in high school and teaching myself a little piano, because I understand what is needed in order to be really good. Kid Rock can kiss my fat ass, he’s as talent-less as they get.

What I miss the most is being able to flirt, especially when I encounter a guy who would normally be somewhere on this list. If I attempted to flirt, any reciprocation would be along the lines of, “Oh, look, the sick lady with the cane and the droopy face is trying to get some action!” I can’t walk down the street with confidence while simultaneously looking for strong biceps or shapely buns because I can’t see further than a few feet in front of myself. You could parade a tall, naked fireman playing a guitar in front of me and all I would be able to see are his toes. All of my good years are being wasted in this bed while a whole new dating pool churns in the world outside my door. It seems criminal.

There’s No One Waiting

Posted on by akiwifreund

I belong to an online support community where patients, family members and care providers can ask questions of each other or find others who are facing the same challenges. One man was trying to be proactive as the spouse of a woman newly diagnosed with a debilitating autoimmune condition, and asked basic questions, such as would it be worth it to see a specialist vs. a regular internist, and what should he expect from the insurance companies? Here is my reply:

I love hearing about supportive spouses! My mom has a very supportive husband, and my sisters do as well – we ladies have terrible genes, unfortunately.

Just keep in mind that “supportive” might mean different things at different times. Fatigue and pain are the most common symptoms of any autoimmune diseases, and what she may have been able to do one day might change the next day, and then change back that day after that. Confusing, right? It will be. In fact, there are going to be other odd things about her condition that will confound her, and you. One thing that I like to tell people in my circle is that they should not start any conversations with, “Why don’t you just _______?” If there was an easy answer, we’d have it already.

My personal experience has been that it is tougher to deal with the doctors and staff than it is my insurance company. Don’t be afraid to fire doctors and look for new ones if they refuse to treat your wife (and you) as people who are involved in your wife’s care. It doesn’t do anyone any good to just blindly follow without understanding or questioning why certain things are being ordered, like meds or tests. I don’t get along with doctors who don’t allow for an open dialogue. Sometimes I will even write down a list, and when the doc enters the room, I first ask, “How much time do we have?” and then I tell that person I have a list. The good ones appreciate efficiency. And boy, read as much as you can. Get info from reputable websites, but also look for posts on your wife’s condition from people like us. There may be times when she thinks she is completely alone – but someone inevitably will confirm that she’s not crazy, and whatever is happening is affecting someone else as well.

Just as a side note: I live in a very large city, but have a hard time finding a decent rheumatologist – no one wants to go into that field because there aren’t any cures and the patients all complain. Anyway, the last time I went to see the nurse practitioner, who I was handed off to unwillingly, he told me that if I would just lose weight, the lumps in the tendon sheaths in my hands would go away. I told him I didn’t walk on my hands, so I didn’t see how losing weight would affect the lumps. I fired him.

And my final piece of advice is that I beg you, both, to keep your sense of humor. Try to find something to laugh about every day, even if it’s at the absurdity of what is happening at that moment.

What I would like to add, though, is that I hope his spouse realizes how lucky she is. Dating at my age is no picnic, and heaping complex diseases on top of that guarantees singlehood. I’ve been left by men I have been seriously dating when they realized that the surgeries would be a constant in my life as surely as I have green eyes. That’s why it kills me that every time we get to question of who is in the waiting room for when I get out of surgery, the nurses ask me multiple times, “Don’t you have someone in the waiting room?” It’s always the women who are disbelieving – surely not all men are put off by my bald head and scars all over my head from surgeries? Believe it, sisters. There is no one waiting for me to come out the other side okay.

What’s In a Name?

Posted on by akiwifreund

Some time ago, I had an exchange of short messages with a guy on a dating site. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen with my most recent shunt surgery and how long it would be functional, but I was feeling, well, like I wanted to check out the pool. So of course my shunt went into failure immediately after I sent the first few messages, right around the same time he asked me what kind of relationship I was looking for. I sent him a message saying that I had to go into crisis mode without giving him any details and that it wouldn’t be a good idea after all to try to date, and that I wouldn’t be on the site anymore. His response was, “Well then why are you here, sweet pea?”

My first instinct was to get all poundy-poundy on the keyboard and slug him verbally. Then I took a breath because I needed to evaluate why that response got me all worked up.

This bothered me because 1) I was telling him that I was getting off of the site, so asking me why I was there after I said I wouldn’t be on anymore was at best redundant and at worst insensitive; 2) He doesn’t know me well enough to call me “sweet pea,” so that came off as being really condescending; 3) I’m still a human being trying to make a connection.

On a grander scale, how much does terminology affect how others see us, and how we see ourselves? If a man who doesn’t know me well calls me “sweet pea,” it tells me he doesn’t respect me (or women in general). It’s kind of like petting a strange dog without knowing if it bites people it doesn’t know. Maybe some women are charmed by pet names like that from strangers, but I’m not, and I do bite.

Back when I was in school all the way to my mid-20’s, I was still trying to figure out how I wanted other people to refer to me. One friend and I attached the word “babe” after our names, so she would call me the equivalent of “Kiwi-babe” and I would call her something like “Kristi-babe.” Another friend and I decided, after much debate, that we were not girls and not women, but rather “chicks” – the kind that could hang with the guys and play darts and drink whiskey and be super laid back. Later in my 20’s the “babe” moniker fell by the wayside, but “chick” stuck around. I also managed to pick up the nickname Chester the Molester while working at a restaurant, but I wasn’t alone – there was also Pea Pod Todd and Nicki Pickle. After living in a few more states and tucking more adventures under my belt, a co-worker nicknamed me Chuck. The guy I was messing around with at the time refused to call me that because it was too masculine, as in “Oh, Chuck, that feels so good.” Nope, it didn’t work for him, the straightest man on the planet.

In my 30s, I got further away from the usage of “girl” to describe myself, but was okay with the word “chick” still. But now I’m 41, and I realized that I immediately lose my lady boner when a man refers to “cute girls” or implies that I am a girl. I also don’t get hot for any man who is open to dating a 21-year-old when he is in his mid-40’s – I mean, really, how is it possible to have anything in common, especially if the man claims to be looking for a long-term relationship?

Now that I have decided I am a woman, it means I can no longer crush on Hozier or Ed Sheeran, because that would just be creepy. Pretty soon I am going to wear a variety of fabrics and patterns all mashed together, yarn tied into bows in my hair and garish blush and lipstick. I will forgo the awful perfume that smells like cat pee and cigarette smoke because I’m allergic to perfumes, but just know that I would make it part of the final package if I could. The biggest thing is that I will stop caring. I won’t give a rip if someone calls me a bitch because I’ll say it right back. That’s what I look forward to the most about aging – kiss the filter goodbye!

Man Purse

Posted on by akiwifreund

This week I received my results from 23&Me; specifically they provided the raw data to me, and I opted to have another company interpret it for $5. Some things I already knew about, including my green eyes, inability to do anything except burn in the sun, and my dislike of bitter foods. The tests also confirmed I’m three times more likely than the general public to get lupus, rheumatoid arthritis or scleroderma. The kicker was the gene that makes me unable to learn from my mistakes repeatedly showed up. I was like, “Hey, 23&Me, get outta my dating life!”

Back in 2006 I was using Plenty of Fish for dating. As per the usual, I was getting messages from men who did not seem to be matches at all – they were just looking for a piece of ass and they couldn’t write a complete sentence to save their lives. Then I got a message from a guy that was an entire paragraph, showcasing his correct use of punctuation and grammar.

All of the advice columns I read about internet dating now suggest that before you trade too many messages, make a date and meet each other – that way you’re not entirely emotionally invested, and there is still a lot to learn about the other person through face-to-face interaction. Well, I did not adhere to that rule at all. I replied, then he replied, then I replied, then he replied, and so on, each message getting longer and longer. Then we talked on the phone a few times, and it seemed like it was an easy flow of conversation. Then we made the date.

I was  kind of excited because he was a bit of a traveler like me, he told me he was a massage therapist, and he looked handsome in his pictures, with surfer curly hair and big blue eyes. I mean, c’mon – a massage therapist, AND tall (6’1″) AND cute? It sounded like I hit the internet dating jackpot.

I picked my favorite place, The Blue Nile, one of the only Ethiopian restaurants in the Phoenix area, now permanently shuttered. I figured it wasn’t expensive and we’d be able to eat with our hands. I was salivating at the idea that he would actually pass the exotic food test, and I was mentally picking out curtains for when we moved in together.

So I was waiting in the parking lot for a few minutes and I got a text message from him that he was running late, but he would be there in about 20 minutes. This was at a time when everyone was using a flip phone and texting took forever because we all had to use the number keypads to choose the letters we wanted, and there were no shortcuts. I told him it was okay, and to stop texting and concentrate on driving.

When he arrived, he confessed he was late because his bus was late. If you don’t already know it, no one in Phoenix rides the bus. It’s a very spread out city and no one wants to transfer four times just to get to a location. So I was quite startled to find out that he didn’t have a car. The first thing that crossed my mind was, “Great, it’s all up to me to haul him around.” His attire for the date was less than impressive. He told me that he had spent time in Hawaii, so his attire matched that story, but the Hawaiian-print shirt had a 10″ slice across the front, and he was wearing a cross-body purse that was red cloth printed with black batik flowers. It was definitely a purse and not a messenger bag.

We went in to the restaurant and started learning more about each other while waiting for the food. My style is to make jokes because I dearly like to laugh. However, every time I said something witty, instead of playing along, he would stop, stare at me intensely and ask me what I meant. Every time I joked, I would have to explain it. Do you know how NOT funny that is? Also, he admitted he wasn’t actually currently employed and had just graduated from massage therapy school, so he wanted to pick up clients just by word of mouth. Oh, and he was sleeping on someone’s couch. Oh, and when he lived in Hawaii, his chest was temporarily pierced so that he could do the body suspension until either the cords broke or his skin ripped. Oh, and he walked over hot coals. (Okay, that last bit was cool, but it wasn’t enough to cancel out the rest.) So to recap: no car, no job, no place to live, no sense of humor, a cut up shirt and a man purse.

By the time dinner ended, it felt like the longest date ever. When the server dropped the check, Man Purse stared at it and said over and over, “Gosh, I wonder what my half is?” The entire meal for the two of us was $20. I took pity on him and grabbed the tray and slapped down $25 in cash and said it was my treat. He got a hug from me in the parking lot. I didn’t even offer to give him a ride home.

Side Eyes

Posted on by akiwifreund

Internet dating takes a lot of patience. It takes a lot of patience, a sense of humor, a filter, a hard candy coating, and a take no prisoners attitude.

I have had many forays into internet dating, though the concept is a lot more organized than when I first dipped my big toe into it. See, kids, first there was instant messaging on AOL. Then MSN messenger became popular. Then Yahoo messenger joined the fray. Any other programs after those big three were copycats and fleeting.

The internet used to be very difficult to navigate and very boring. I remember poking around on it circa 1991 and thinking it wasn’t at all interesting – it moved painfully slowly, and it was like reading a 102-page term paper. But only a few years later, when these messenger programs were becoming popular, pop-up ads and porn were running amok like children who only ate sugar for all of their meals. So it didn’t take long for sex and porn to work their way into conversations happening on messenger windows.

By 1996, the internet was evolving quickly. I remember how exciting it was to join chat rooms to talk about a topic and actually connect with other people in real time. From my profile, other users could tell that I was a single woman in my 20s, and within a few minutes, I would be trying to juggle upwards of 25 windows of private chats – specifically, men who were trying to hit on me. Sometimes there would be bots in the room who would automatically start a chat when someone new would join, and they would include a link for you to click; but being the savvy users that we were, the other members of the chat would send out a general warning to ignore “STACIA69” or some similar screen name because it was a bot that would send your machine a virus. Decades before textspeak, we all had to learn cute codes and acronyms. There was no DTF (down to fuck), but I’m pretty sure the original was BRB, which, depending on who you ask, either stands for “be right back” or “bathroom break.” The chat rooms I chose to enter would be based on my location; at that time, I lived in Albuquerque, so I would enter a chat for that city or state. I hadn’t dated much before moving to New Mexico, so I wasn’t exactly confident in my ability to catch anyone’s attention. Suddenly, hoards of men wanted me! They all thought I sounded cute – blonde hair, green eyes, not too tall or short. If I felt like we could have conversations lasting more than two minutes before a guy started talking about banging, I’d go out with him. BAM! Internet dating.

Fast forward to 2003, after two live-in boyfriends: I relocated to a city where I didn’t know one single person. By this time, there were a few very popular sites set up specifically for dating, including eHarmony (which was heavily running ads on TV) and LavaLife. I tried to take the free eHarmony quiz, and at the very end of it, I wasn’t completely turned down, but I did get a message saying “Only 3% of the male population would be interested in dating you. Bear with us, it may take a few weeks to find someone who would be a match.” I joined LavaLife instead. I think they had categories available for people to choose broken down into “Dating,” “Long-Term Relationship” and “Just Sex” or something like that. I quickly found out that it didn’t matter which category you designated – the men would hunt you down for just sex. I remember that I went on a few dates with a guy who was a chauffeur, and I wasn’t feeling especially connected or attracted to him, but we were having an okay time – or so I thought. At the end of our third date, he turned to me, exasperated, and said, “So are we going to fuck or what?” I chose the “or what” and that was the end of that. Another guy that I started talking to through the site was in Italy (Yay! Very exciting!), and we started talking on Yahoo messenger. I think it was only five minutes into the conversation when he started sending me buzzes to try to get my attention because I wasn’t answering fast enough, then he told me he didn’t want me talking to any other men. To clarify, I wasn’t allowed to smile at or even look at other men, even if it was a guy ringing up my groceries. BAM! Internet stalker.

Around 2005, Match.com and PlentyofFish.com entered the picture. At that time, both were very rudimentary; Match considered you a “match” if your height/weight/age/eye color fell within the other person’s parameters, and Plenty of Fish allowed users to send emails, but that was it. It was around this time that I started singing to myself, “Shopping for men! Shopping for men!” every time I’d log on. I had become a lot more specific about what I was looking for in men, starting with their grammar – if they couldn’t formulate a complete sentence, I’d write them off and move on. I also noticed that the messages from the men on Plenty of Fish were getting more and more outrageous, so I didn’t really take anything on that site seriously, because I think all of the guys were DTF and crazy to boot.

OKCupid entered the scene around 2008 or 2009. Their contribution to the now-crowded internet dating scene was the questions. The questions ranged from “Are you looking to settle down and have children?” to “If you caught your husband looking at animal porn, what would you do?” You could answer as few as five questions or as many as a thousand, but the more questions you answer, the better the picture prospective dates could compile from your answers. (Of course, everyone is expected to be on the honor system and answer truthfully. You should always answer “No” if you are asked if you would do something immoral and/or hurtful, even if your instincts say that you should answer “Yes” to screwing that turtle if no one would ever find out.)

In 2011, after many starts and stops with internet dating, I was giving it another go, but sticking to the free sites – OKCupid and PlentyofFish. Surprisingly, on PlentyofFish, I had a decent conversation with a guy. We were talking about traveling and road trips and seemed to like some of the same things, but had enough diverse interests from each other that I would be able to look forward to new adventures. We talked about where to meet up in the next week. So upon waking up the next morning, imagine my surprise when I opened a message from him that was sent at 3 a.m. and it was a folder of dick and cum pictures. I replied back asking what in the hell he was thinking, because we hadn’t been talking about sex at all. He gave some lame excuse about not meaning to send them to me. I told him that shit would not fly with me, and he apologized. The next morning I woke up, and there were more dick and cum pictures, sent around 2 a.m.! I replied and asked what the fuck was going on, and he said he was a recovering alcoholic and had impulse control problems. I didn’t feel the need to stay in touch with him. (Also, just as a side note, if your dick is smaller than a thumb when it’s hard, I don’t advise sending unsolicited pictures. Warn a girl first.)

A lot of the messages I was receiving on OKCupid weren’t going anywhere either. I think I went on a handful of random dates, but nothing made it past the initial meeting. The way that I was being approached was pretty trite – almost every guy said, “What’s up?” or the bad grammar version thereof. At least when I approached men, I would find something in their profiles to talk about. One guy immediately asked me out for dinner, so I looked at his profile, which didn’t contain any information, so I next looked at the questions he answered. One theme that kept coming up was his dabbling with hard drugs, including meth, coke and heroin. I replied that I wasn’t interested and I wouldn’t date a user. His reply was, “C’mon, it’s not like I’m going to do blow off your tits. Big deal if we go out to dinner.” Yeah, buddy, still not interested in wasting an evening with you.

I swore off internet dating forever after having some bad experiences. However, now that I have relocated and reconnected with my uncle, I discovered that HE is doing internet dating. (He is also texting on a regular basis, which I blame on him having a 16-year-old son.) He found an age-appropriate girlfriend for the first time in his life – he’s in his early 60s. So of course I irrationally think, “Well, if he can do it, maybe I can try again.” Never mind the fact that I walk with a cane and have a droopy face, and most days I can’t be bothered to wear my wigs because they’re uncomfortable to lay down in…someone has to be okay with dating Quasimodo, right???

On second thought, no. I don’t want to be someone else’s internet dating story.

Dumb and Angry

Posted on by akiwifreund

With perfect timing, “Elastic Heart” by Sia came up on my Pandora just as I finished writing this title. She sings, “You did not break me.” I know, I know, so angst-y, like a teenager!

Out of everyone, I have the longest history with Dumb and Angry. When I was in the fifth grade, my family relocated from a suburb of Minneapolis to the smallest town imaginable – 300 people. It was the beginning of the awkward years for me. Almost immediately, though, I started getting love letters from this boy. Eventually I made plans with one of the girls from my class to stay at her house, which happened to be near his, and the boy and I were able to hang out a few times to play on the neighborhood merry-go-round and swings. All I really knew about him was that he hated his step-dad and that he was a year older than me because he had to repeat a grade. After a half a year I dumped him unceremoniously because I had a crush on another boy.

When we were in 10th grade, without knowing the other had done it, we auditioned to get into the public arts high school that had just started accepting students the year before in Minneapolis (and is currently in operation). One day in the middle of winter we were both called into the principal’s office of this school out in the middle of farm country to receive our certified letters telling us we accepted and were going to be living at the “Fame” school the next year. Heading back to our classrooms we were so excited, doing that mix of whispering and screaming and throwing out “I can’t believe it!” every few steps. I was thrilled to be going back to the big city, and he was happy to leave his horrible home life.

We had vastly different lives at the Fame school. He was a straight male in a school that had a ratio of 4 girls for every boy, and he fucked around a lot. A LOT. Dumb and Angry also did a lot of drugs, including weed, acid and huffing. I was at the other end of the spectrum and didn’t date or do anything except follow the rules. I held a lot of hair back while drunk girls barfed, but I was never one of them. I kept my distance from him except for attending one party together where we kissed once. I knew he had always had feelings for me, but I never really encouraged him.

The day after we graduated from high school I left to live on Mackinac Island in Michigan. I know that he had started dating a girl from the class behind ours; years later I found out that she used to say to a friend of ours every day, “What can I do to make Dumb and Angry like me???” Apparently she was finally successful, and they moved to Seattle and had a kid.

In 2007, when MySpace and Classmates.com were still being used, I received a message on one of those sites from Dumb and Angry indicating he wanted to reconnect. For about six months we talked on the phone, emailed, shared pictures, sent packages through the mail, made plans for him to visit and basically had a long-distance relationship. I was definitely flattered that he was still interested in me romantically and I was unsatisfied with my dating life, so it was easy to get into a situation with a familiar person with whom I shared history. However, as the months went on, it became glaringly obvious that he was angry ALL OF THE TIME. He was not making a lot of money and he was living with roommates, and the woman he had married and had a kid with cheated on him, so they had divorced. He constantly complained about how everyone was out to get him and he was a huge conspiracy theorist. I called it quits when he kicked in a door at the house where he was living. It was extremely depressing to talk to him and the violence scared me.

In 2013, I received a message on Facebook from his ex-wife, who just happened to be living in Arizona with the guy whom she cheated on Dumb and Angry with, along with the son with Dumb and Angry and another son with the live-in. She began a campaign to convince me to give it another try with Dumb and Angry; he didn’t understand why I broke it off with him, he was a completely changed person and very passive, he had been under duress when he kicked in that door. I caved. Dumb and Angry and I resumed a long distance relationship. It turned out that we just missed each other when we were in Minnesota at the same time – me for a vacation, and him because his mother passed away. His mother bequeathed him her car and a lump sum of cash from her life insurance.

We started having serious talks about him relocating to Arizona to be with me and be closer to his son, who by that time was 15. At first he was looking into buying a trailer for $10k, but I knew that was not a great option in AZ – he’d have to cool it down in that 117 degree heat, and he would probably end up repairing the trailer so much that he would end up doubling the money he put into it. Eventually we settled on buying a house. He had the cash for the down payment but horrible credit, so we agreed that the house and loan would be set up under my name.

The day he arrived in AZ was the day I closed on the house. He had asked for me to find help for him to get his motorcycle off of the moving truck, so a good friend who was also a motorcyclist arrived to assist. I told Dumb and Angry that I didn’t know if we could start unloading the truck because I hadn’t received word that the deed had recorded, and he threw a fit. This was my first indicator that he had indeed not changed. I was embarrassed that my friend had to witness the meltdown.

I was still renting a place and so couldn’t move in until a month later. Dumb and Angry didn’t lift a finger to help me even though I had helped him with cleaning the house, getting set up with a bank account, finding stores for staples and revamping his resume. He had actually driven his motorcycle to my old place to pick something up while the moving crew was loading me up, and even though he told me previously he would help, when I asked him to vacuum, he refused and took off. The moving men called him a dick.

Three weeks after I moved into the house my shunt went into failure. He refused to visit me at the hospital – including on my birthday – even though he wasn’t working. When I got home from the hospital after I had two back-to-back surgeries, I asked him if he could get me a glass of water while I changed into pajamas, and he told me to stop being lazy and get it myself. Ten days after those two surgeries I asked him to drive me to the grocery store because we had run out of everything, and he was swearing, swerving and flipping other drivers off, all because I had asked him to help. I was in a lot of pain in both my back and abdomen where the surgeries had taken place and being thrown around in the car did not help. He deliberately tried to run into people with the grocery cart in the store. A couple of weeks later he moved into the spare bedroom, saying he was doing it so I could rest – but he had never, ever been concerned about my well-being before, and the way he could not meet my eyes told me he was lying. We fought about his refusal to help me in any way, he pushed me, I called the cops. I didn’t press charges but instead gave him another chance. I had to have two more surgeries and be in the hospital a total of three additional weeks by the end of August, and still he wouldn’t lift a finger. If I wanted food, I had to go to the grocery store – and I had to make sure I made his dinner or he would lose his mind. He refused to cut the grass, saying stupid things like, “But I like the grass knee high.” I reminded him that the city would fine us if it wasn’t done.  He didn’t clean anything in the house either, because that was “women’s work.” Over and over he would tell me that if women would just stay home, there would be more jobs for men and they would be able to support their families. At that time, I made more than twice his salary, but I always told him that it was OUR money, not MY money. I was constantly walking on eggshells waiting for him to blow. To add to my stress, I was also working two jobs from home and finishing my bachelor’s degree online.

Finally, after yet another fight about him refusing to mow the lawn (which took 1.5 hours every two weeks, as opposed to the 15 hours I put in weekly doing all of the cooking and cleaning and other miscellaneous chores and repairs), I had had enough. I sat down and worked up an entire spreadsheet of the expenses each of us contributed to the house while we were together for the five months and tallied what I owed him, as his investment was larger because of the down payment. I proposed that we become official roommates and sign an agreement, and he could continue to stay in the house rent-free; for every month he stayed, a dollar amount would be deducted from what I owed him. I specifically entered a clause twice that stated that if he threatened me or physically harmed me, he would forfeit the entire dollar amount.

For a short time, we were able to be civil. I took on all of the duties around the house – which, honestly, was not different from what I had been doing before. His son still came to visit whenever he could be bothered to drive down to get him. Dumb and Angry was still very much dumb and angry, though. He still ranted and raved about women taking all of the jobs, and p.s. – he also hates all minorities and homosexuals. However, he did hang out more with his ex-wife and her boyfriend, and Dumb and Angry claimed to be best buds with the boyfriend. I think that was because the boyfriend was beating his ex-wife, and he fully endorsed that behavior. Dumb and Angry would always yell at his son that he would never become anything after graduating high school; I imagine it’s what he always heard from his step-dad when he was growing up. Dumb and Angry lacked common sense as well. A story that sticks out in my mind was a day that I was doing trimming and cleanup all around the yard and I had just purchased a chain saw. He kept pestering me to let him use it, so I finally said, “Okay, cut off all of those suckers around the base of the olive tree.” Instead of cutting around the base of the tree, he put the chain saw at the tips so they just kind of waved around, and he said, “I don’t think this is going to work.” So I took the chain saw from him and cut them all off at the base. All he said was, “Oh.” I said, “Okay, if you really want to cut something, why don’t you cut off the dead arm of that cactus?” He went over to a cactus that was about as tall as him, and instead of cutting off the arm, he cut the cactus off at the ground so he killed the whole thing. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, “I didn’t know the cactus was growing out of the ground.”

I guess that Dumb and Angry was complaining to the ex-wife that he was unsuccessful with dating because women were just looking for money (not the real reason, which was that he hated women and we could smell it), because she encouraged him to get in touch with a woman he had dated in high school around 9th grade. He followed his usual MO with her, emailing her and carrying on a long distance relationship and telling her how great he was and how everyone was picking on him and conspiring against him. At the same time he became more and more hostile to me. Eventually he started threatening to shoot me and I took to hiding in my room so I could reduce my interactions with him completely.

When I had had enough of that business, I wrote up a formal letter asking him to move out within 30 days, as it was clear we should no longer be in the same house. I indicated I would continue making payments to him to pay back the amount owed. At first he was making an effort to find a new place to live, but then at the fourth week, he served me with papers telling me he was suing me for the house and that he was going to force me to put his name on the deed. I quickly found an attorney who replied that Dumb and Angry was obviously in violation of our agreement with his death threats AND that it was against the law to try to force someone to put a name on a deed.

After another month and more letters back and forth between the attorneys, Dumb and Angry moved out. I found out that the old girlfriend from ninth grade flew down from Minnesota and married him two days later after seeing him for the first time in about 20 years. They did not intend to live together (which was probably a good thing because she has two pre-teen daughters whom Dumb and Angry would have made miserable) – and the only reason I found this out was because I received a tax notice saying that the house they purchased together in another part of the city had been fraudulently classified as owner occupied since the wife wasn’t going to live there. The marriage itself made me chuckle – he had to go that far back to find someone who would take him??? I can assure you that his dating problem was not money-grubbing women, but rather the large chip he proudly carries around on his shoulder.

Can Men and Women Really Be Friends?

Posted on by akiwifreund

Recently, I had to cut off a friendship with a man I have known for 10 years. I did it very deliberately and specifically told him why we could no longer be friends – as opposed to other methods such as always appearing to be too busy, or never answering calls/messages.

At the beginning of this month my sister passed away, and ten days later, a friend passed as well, both from cancer. Both were young, and their cancer took over their bodies very quickly. I felt as if I had been crying non-stop since I moved to Minnesota. So when this friend, Clueless, texted me about taking care of destroying old, useless MRI films for me, I told him what happened. This is how he responded:

“How old was he? How did he die?”

Now, let me rewind a little bit and tell you that I had told him when my sister was sick that it was imperative that I move back to MN as quickly as possible so I could say goodbye to her. His response was, “Well, WHEN is she going to die?” Up to that point he had been calling me to complain that he didn’t have any friends, and the people he had considered himself close to – me included – were all leaving the state and he wasn’t going to have anyone left. So when he started quizzing me about the friend who passed, I ended each short answer with, “Why?” After the second time I responded with “Why?”, he told me he felt as if I was fishing for condolences.

Fishing for condolences.

He told me that he was justified in demanding that I defend why these deaths affected me.

Let me go back even further to February 20, 2013. That was the day I had my third brain surgery (I’ve had 10 at the present date), and I was lying in my hospital bed, in horrible pain as the anesthesia was wearing off. I got a call from Clueless. He wasn’t calling to see how I was doing; instead, in his most whiny voice, he said, “This is day one without Nasty, it’s your job to keep me from calling her.” Nasty was his ex-girlfriend, whom he wasn’t currently seeing, who ended up giving a cable guy a BJ like she was living out a porn scene, and Clueless found out about it. Nasty was a very mousy woman with glasses and braces who called in sick at least twice a week at her workplace because she didn’t feel like going to work. The only reason Clueless was so attached to her was that she is a swallower. They had nothing in common, fought constantly, and she didn’t understand any of his cultural references because she was at least a decade younger than him. That day in the hospital I tried to follow his rantings, but he got pissed off when I dozed off, and hung up on me telling me that he was going to call back the next day and quiz me about what he said. And he certainly made good that promise.

Let me go back even further. In 2005, I joined an online socializing group. We would sign up to events listed on a calendar, hosted by other members of the group. It was a great way to meet new people and try new things. I hosted a few events myself including a dinner night at an Ethiopian restaurant. Cluless joined the group at around the same time. At the events, we would often gravitate towards each other, always laughing and sharing stories. We ended up dating. Now, the length of the dating varies according to whom you ask; we lasted about six months, but Clueless says it was only one month because the rest of the time he was trying to find someone better to date. He also had a list of 42 qualities he was looking for in a mate. I met all but two because at the time I had already lost all of my hair and so didn’t meet his minimum requirement of shoulder-length hair, and my bachelor’s degree came much later. At the time we were dating he wasn’t working and he was getting his food from the food bank, but was still convinced that he should buy an investment property. Clueless would often tell me that he was different from everyone else – he really, really didn’t want to work, and he wanted all of his income to be passive income. No, really. So when he told me he was going to have his mortgage broker cook the numbers so he could qualify to buy another property, we got into it. (By the way, #3 on his list was to have a girlfriend who would NEVER question and always tell him he was doing the right thing.) During the fight he told me I obviously didn’t know what I was talking about because I had never owned a home. It didn’t matter to him that I had already been in real estate for 12 years at that point; he had just gotten his real estate license six months prior, and that outweighed any experience I had. I told him that the crazy prices in the market weren’t going to last and that he shouldn’t count on a house becoming instant income, and he obviously couldn’t handle taking on another mortgage. (Incidentally, six months later the market crashed and his properties were sold at 1/3 of their high values. He is still kicking himself 9 years later.)

Anyway, it got ugly. We didn’t talk for a year and a half. When he contacted me again, it was to tell me that he didn’t know why we broke up. I reminded him. He said it wouldn’t have worked out anyway because it always weirded him out that I don’t have hair. Lemme just tell you that he’s a few inches shorter than me, is losing his hair, and doesn’t care for his teeth, so his rotting mouth smells like moth balls. He’s completely obsessed with appearances and it kills him that other men are taller than him, and he has spent thousands of dollars on hair products. He doesn’t see the merit in making an effort with his teeth.

Since reconnecting, Clueless and I have kept in touch and even had times where we could comfortably be friends. We’ve shared birthdays, movie nights and game nights. We did not, however, resume dating. I couldn’t view him the same after knowing that he respected me so little.

Besides the phone call I got on that day of surgery and his jerky attitude with my most recent losses, there have been other times that he has not acted in a caring manner. For example, whenever he wanted to socialize, he would insist I drive 60 miles round trip to his house, because he could not handle driving from his workplace to my house, which were only 2 miles apart, and for all but 8 months in the last 5 years I haven’t been able to drive more than 2 miles or be upright for more than 30 minutes, if at all. In other words, if I couldn’t get myself to his suburb, he wouldn’t waste his time with me. Also, during one of our conversations in the last year, he told me that women do not age well, only men, his mother included.

So when I told him that I was no longer interested in being friends, he became very defensive, telling me that he was a much better friend than me because he would always reach out to me (and say incredibly shitty things!). I blocked his email, phone and Facebook accounts.

It doesn’t help his case that after I left Phoenix he invited himself to my friend’s house under the guise that he was sad that I left and he ended up trying to force himself upon her so that she had to push him off of her and kick him out of the house. He was mad. I was tempted to bring that up when i was telling him to fuck off, but why drag her into it? He thinks he has some magic micro penis that is going to put girls under a spell if he just waives it around.

Maybe the problem isn’t whether men and women can be friends, but rather what kinds of patterns of behavior do we fall into because of our history. When I think about what I enjoy out of any friendship, it’s sharing adventures and quality time together, and there’s give and take, plus a fair amount of respect for both parties towards the other. Ultimately I have decided at this point, Clueless can kiss my fat ass.

Goodbye, My Almost Lover

Posted on by akiwifreund

In 2013, I was kind of limping through the year. I had surgeries on February 20th, May 20th and May 26th, and by the time I flew back to Minnesota to attend a high school reunion and help my parents with organizing their house, my shunt had already formed a huge bubble in my back when it cracked after only being implanted for a month. I had just seen my neurosurgeon the day before flying out and he had given me the okay to leave Arizona because besides the large collection of CSF under my skin, I seemed to still be functioning.

What is really different about the school that I graduated from is that the majority of us lived on campus in a dorm, much like college. Only juniors and seniors attended, so the people in my graduating class were together for two years, and the class before us and after us were around for half of our tenure there. The advent of Facebook was really a boon in our attempts to stay connected with our classmates; we came from all over the state of Minnesota to attend the “Fame school” and basically felt largely that we were the rejects of our old schools because we were more intense about our art areas than most – and let’s face it, just different in general. So when one classmate organized yearly picnics for the students who graduated between 1991 and 1995 (just so there would be some overlap), we all knew that if we made the effort, there was a pretty good chance that we’d see some good friends.

I took up the task of being the event photographer. If you ever feel guilty about sitting around on your duff at a gathering, it’s a great excuse to talk to every single person who attends.

This one guy, Hot Dog (and you’d laugh if you knew his real nickname!), was in attendance. He was always in my peripheral group of friends, since he was a year younger and dated one of my classmates. He was wild. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that he had a wild mouth. He always looked a little wild, with flyaway frizzy hair, cherub cheeks and tree trunk arms, but his cutting wit was dangerous. I always thought of him as being an obnoxious younger brother while we were in school. If there was a way to make jokes about dead babies and grandmothers, he’d be the one to do it. And it was never at a quiet volume. Never.

True to form, while I was visiting with Hot Dog at a picnic table with a couple of other friends, he lifted a cheek and let out a fart. He did another one when I whipped out my camera, saying, “I was just blowing Brad a kiss.”

Only two days later, when I was back at my parents’ house, my shunt went into total failure and I lost most of my vision. I had to fly back to Phoenix to be operated on again by my neurosurgeon because the neurosurgeons at the Mayo in Rochester turned me down – they didn’t understand my symptoms, so they didn’t want to work on me. Any plans to socialize were impossible.

But after that reunion, Hot Dog stayed in touch with me. I’m not sure if I sent him a message first, or if he initiated contact, but we commiserated over our mutual disgust for my most recent ex-boyfriend (Angry and Stupid? Dumb and Angry? I will have to look back at what I nicknamed him initially.), because we were all classmates together. He actually married (and subsequently divorced) the classmate that he dated through his time at the arts high school; they were together about 13 years before she found Jesus, and I think they were as close to being soul mates as anyone could hope.

After a few months, our messages became more intense. He was always supportive of what I was going through with my brain stuff and tried to understand as much as anyone could who had never had a chronic condition himself. We had some discussions about my difficulty as a bald woman finding any men who were okay with my hair loss. It was immediately easier for me to open up to him because for him, my lack of hair never diminished my femininity in his eyes. Then I found out that some of my kinks were the same as his – not an easy feat, as anyone in the kink world knows. I’m not saying that I am anywhere as unusual as the guy who thought it was hot to have his jaw stomped on and teeth knocked out, but there are certainly more than 50 shades of dirty out there. We had many steamy sessions of sharing our wants and urges. He also talked about how good it felt to start working out again, getting back into the karate he had picked up as a boy, sweating and kicking and punching and trading fat for muscle. We discussed the possibility of coordinating a road trip for him to come down to Arizona.

And then he got sick.

At first he was joking that his intestines exploded. At least, that’s what it felt like to him. But as it turns out, after his doctor insisted multiple times that he suspected the atypical presentation was actually cancer, and his body flying apart was caused by stage III colorectal cancer. He had to go through multiple rounds of chemo to try to keep the cancer that had spread to other parts of his body under control before one big surgery was performed to cut it out. At the same time that he was going through that, I had already had four more surgeries and was waiting on another one, and was in excruciating pain for 10 months because of a leak that could not be fixed until we figured out what I was allergic to. Rather than talking about what we wanted to do to each other, our talks shifted to his fears about never having full functionality or a decent quality of life ever again.

The surgery was extensive. He had a bowel resection and they removed his rectum completely, sentencing him to a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. The surgery was not as bad as it could have been – the doctors had no idea what to plan for, everything would only become apparent after opening him – but it was certainly bad enough.

We traded more messages, but there were a few times when it sounded like he might try to reconcile with his ex-wife. Around the same time, Ping Pong came in for his final round, so I let Hot Dog know that I would no longer be able to talk dirty as we had been, but I didn’t want to lose touch. Our talks were never the same and we went radio silent fairly quickly.

Around the end of March of 2015, I saw an article about a guy who was modeling with his colostomy bag, and I sent it to Hot Dog letting him know that I was thinking of him and hoping that he was getting stronger. I didn’t receive a response. At the end of April, when I figured out that I would have to move back to Minnesota, I sent him another note letting him know I was landing very close to him. Again, there was no response. At that point I figured that he really didn’t want much to do with me after I went back to the ex and he tried to move on.

But then he died.

It was actually just two days ago. I found out because like every other morning, I started by opening my laptop and catching up on the news. That was the first thing that came up on my Facebook. It was like being punched in the stomach. From what I’ve been able to gather, they succeeded in removing all of the cancer, but the surgery was so invasive that the aftereffects were eroding his life on a grand scale. For a short amount of time he allowed pictures to be posted of some events he attended and it seemed he had taken up residence at his favorite coffee shop to sketch, but he did not update Facebook himself.

I was not the only one who was shocked by the news, but towards the end, he kept only his most loyal people close to him. I understand. I came in late and left early. But I still wish we could have had a conversation, and maybe some laughs, all better face-to-face rather than 1600 miles away, before the option was forever off the table.

On Friday we will all have to say goodbye to Hot Dog. He was so many things to so many people, but to me, he was my biggest regret. I didn’t see the diamond that was camouflaged by all of the shit jokes.