Month: February 2016

Gay Guys Can Be Shitheads Too

So my physical relationship with men has been a roller coaster. I’m attracted to men, but it’s something I’ve only been able to explore fully in the last 9 months or so. That means my experience isn’t where I want it to be. Of course, there’s no shortage of men who want to fuck me or be fucked by me, but this is difficult as well because I’m interested in a much narrower grouping of men than I am women. Not to mention that a lot of guys with sex on their mind throw all courtesy out the window when they’re trolling online and I deserve more respect than this. Yup, that means I don’t want to see a picture of your dick. Try the novel approach of actually having a real conversation (and not about sex).

I just ended a horrible, albeit super short encounter (supposed to be physical in some way) with a guy I met on Grindr. Okay settle down, I hear you and you’re right. The Grindr crowd is a fairly toxic population but I’ve met a couple of good people on there and had awesome sexual experiences with them, plus I can usually weed the shitheads out. Actually, I’m about to talk about a guy I had ruled out once before. I should have stuck with my earlier ruling.

Anyway, the short explanation of what went down is that I wasn’t attracted to him. After we had agreed to meet he had an event to attend and would be over shortly after. I heard from him next when he said he was just finishing up eating tacos. Since highly spiced meat doesn’t do wonders for someone’s breath I asked him to take some courtesy measures. He said, “I’ll have to run by home then.” Great, he wasn’t planning on doing this in the first place that’s reassuring. I don’t think it’s too much to expect someone that you’ve never met to have good oral hygiene when making out is on the horizon. Once he arrived home he said he was freshening up a bit. Given that his house wasn’t one of his intended stops before coming over what kind of disrepair was this guy in before he went to tidy up?

I found out soon enough once we got into the light. He showed up in a shirt that I’m pretty sure was wrinkled and stained and not in a designer clothing kind of way. He was scruffy which I had expected, but it was unkempt.

His conversation wasn’t any better. He had photography listed as a hobby so I was trying to chat him up on that but it wasn’t working. I showed him a few of my pictures, but still nothing. He actually showed disinterest in any conversation. He seemed put off that I didn’t want to swallow his dick as soon as we walked in the door. Was I reading him wrong? Of course not, but at the time I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

We sat down at my behest and started talking. Oh wait, did I say we? I meant me. He put his hand on my leg and his other hand down his pants. Classy right? As an aside, I’ll also be hosting a seminar on how to find all the good men. In case anything happened (which at this point seemed pretty fucking slim to none) I initiated the STI conversation. He withdrew his hand (both of them) and dejectedly said it was a buzzkill to talk about it, but he was clean.

Whelp! That pretty much does it for me. At this point I was at a loss of what to say but I wasn’t about to have sex with whatever this was in front of me. I started by saying that I’m not sure I want to do anything. His reply is that if I’m not sure I want to do anything physical then that means I don’t. It’s the most he had said in my presence and he was right. I said that while I was in the mood earlier that I just wasn’t feeling it currently. He immediately got up and walked out.

He was there for 5 minutes total. If he hadn’t been so impatient and actually entered into a conversation maybe I could have seen that he was a nice guy and given him a shot or made out or something, but of course when someone storms out after they find out you’re not going to have sex with them you can rest assured that they weren’t a nice guy.

I waited for what was inevitable. I knew I would be bombarded by angry vitriolic messages that would hinge on his insecurities and demonstrate his true nature. Basically, I was about to receive confirmation that I made the right choice. Like clockwork they came streaming in. He said I wasn’t genuine, my photography was shitty, I look older than my photo (it’s about 2 months old and only adjusted for color), basically he attacked anything and everything he knew about me.

I told him that it was my mistake because we should have met somewhere first to gauge our attraction and that it just wasn’t there for me. The insults kept streaming in after that, something about how I wasn’t attractive either, but I don’t even really know what was said. I blocked him. There wasn’t much point in having my phone light up all night to keep me on edge about messages I wasn’t going to read. I had done what I needed to do and his meltdown was his own problem. I don’t owe anybody sex. I don’t care if I do meet someone on the skeeziest hookup app there is and talk about sex till we’re blue in the – uh . . . face. If at any time I (or someone else) says no then that’s definitive.

My take away from this is that I should always meet someone out for a drink first to gauge who they are and my level of attraction as much as possible. This goes for hookups too. I should probably only select guys from my narrow band of interest. I hate to be like this and I wish my attraction was more varied, but it’s not apparently. Also, and this is key, I should probably delete my Grindr profile and the app. For now though it still remains on my phone beckoning me to reach out and find Mr. Wrong.

Info Transgender People Wish You Knew

The article below is called Eight Things Transgender People Do Not Owe You and it’s a call to check our cisgenderedness (BOOM! new word right there fuckers) at the door (okay perhaps cispriviledge works better). Every time I see an article like this I prepare myself to be educated on what I’m doing wrong. I’m not perfect, but I try my damnest to be a better person each day than what I was before. Luckily, I haven’t made any of these transgressions but I’ve come perilously close to a few of these.

If you have made these mistakes it’s okay to feel regret about it, just make sure to focus that remorse correctly. Regret alone accomplishes nothing. Instead use it to guide your future actions or apologize for something you may have said in error.

http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/trans-people-dont-owe-you/

Getting Dumped, Kind Of: A story of honesty

For those of you who don’t know I’m currently choosing to date non- monogamously. For some of you this probably sounds great because I can have multiple partners. This is technically true, but it hasn’t really worked out that way for more than a week or two at a time. This brings me to the other part of being non-monogamous, that you may not have considered, which is that I end up getting dumped more often.

This just happened to me ten minutes ago (at least at the time of this writing). Here’s the skinny: I met someone online and reading her profile was like reading my own in many ways so I reached out to her and we clicked. On our date it was awesome. We met with a long hug. We laughed and shared intimate moments of our existence with one another such as how she doesn’t share her phone number with people until she can trust them. When I moved closer to her just for the sake of it she closed the gap, kissed me and then told me how great it was. Later upon kissing her neck she moaned. The night was over in a flash, but we had talked for 6 hours. When I walked her to her car we held hands and kissed goodbye.

I sent her a message later that night with my phone number. I told her that she didn’t have to use it until she was ready and that we could use the dating app until that moment arrived. She replied with a text telling me that I had beat her to it.

I was in, or so I thought. The day before our next date she sent me a text to say that our distance was an issue (20 miles) and that a relationship she had with a guy in the same town as me hadn’t worked for that reason. I called bullshit (in my head) on both fronts and decided to remove that excuse. I knew she wanted out and that I wasn’t going to change her mind; so be it, but I wanted to know the truth. I told her if that was all there is to it I could be the one to come see her each time. Of course, such a one-sided solution is not a tenable situation for any relationship, but I was just gambling and cutting through her fake answer.

It worked. “To be honest,” she said, (for the second time) “I was trying to make it easier by saying that. I’m just not feeling it.”

I told her I accepted that and thanked her for being honest. Just knowing the real reason helped me to put most of the situation behind me immediately. I don’t know what to make of everything else that happened, but now that I have the truth, somehow I don’t have to.

Make A Good First Impression

http://www.sparkol.com/engage/make-any-stranger-your-bff-with-our-first-impressions-masterclass/?_sacid=BlgWebvidSeaFacAD1511txt+StrangerBFFHL1

I think there’s some good crossovers here for the dating world.

My Tips

Here’s one of my tips and it falls under the category of confidence: Make the first thing your date sees be your smile. I’ve started dates with and without a smile and the one’s that begin with a big grin go down better without a doubt.

Here’s the kicker though; the secret of a good smile isn’t in your mouth or teeth. It’s in your eyes. I know because I had a date compliment me on my smile. I thanked her and told her that I had been self-conscious about my teeth until recently. She said, “It’s not your teeth it’s your eyes.” Of course! Think about when you smile in the mirror. Yes you see your mouth and teeth, but most of your gaze goes to your eyes. It made so much sense to me that I felt silly for not having realized it earlier. She was a fucking genius!

The good news is that you can stop worrying about that imperfect smile you think you have because it doesn’t matter near as much as the story your eyes tell. The bad news is a forced smile looks fake because your eyes aren’t on board so the only way to get this right is to practice.

You have to really feel your smile radiating from your inner self through every part of your expression. I always imagine myself responding to something funny my date says and then laughing. I usually do this in the shower. Don’t ask me why it’s just where I do a lot of my thinking (not that kind of thinking, get your head out of the gutter). After you do this for awhile you can move on to using a mirror. Just make sure to pick out something positive about what you see and keep building on that as you go along.

The more you do it the easier it becomes and trust me when I say that the first time someone tells you that you have a beautiful smile that it will make you want to smile even more. It’s a viscous circle and it’s pretty fucking awesome.

 

A Middle Finger Salute to Valentine’s Day

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Everyone by now knows the story of St. Valentine. He created a bad name for himself peddling heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and greeting cards with sappy sayings on them. The final straw came when he did “a diamond is a girl’s’ best friend” commercial and he was beheaded. Those Romans might have been cocky, but they didn’t mess around.

For the first time in 21 years I’m experiencing Valentine’s Day as a single person and I’m absolutely fucking thrilled about the idea. Can you say stress free? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being in love and doing things for my partner. I’ve done more candlelight dinners than I can count. I’ve read heartfelt poems with tears streaming down my face and willfully performed a host of other gestures that would be worthy of happening on February 14th. The kicker is that very few of them have occurred on that day. I’ve just done whatever, whenever I’ve desired.

I have also been lucky that my past partners haven’t been too hung up on the day as a way to define a relationship. Even so, Valentine’s day has always been an uneasy fit for me; a forced gesture that if not fulfilled, society seems to insist, renders all of my other relationship qualities and occurrences meaningless.

dead_cupid-13240
It was a home invasion officer!

To me Valentine’s Day feels like the dis-ingenuousness of a window dressing or an election campaign. It’s mainly subterfuge and not representative of my real world experiences with my loved one’s. There’s a tendency of not just trying to prove the worth of my relationship on this one day, but to prove it against other people’s relationships as well. “Did you hear what Jim did for Brenda on Valentine’s Day? He jumped out of a plane with only white doves slowing his descent and a banner trailing behind him professing his love while he sang a song he wrote with Coldplay (because not everything can be A-list).”

I think this day can be whatever we want it to be. We each have to make our own way in this life, but for fucks sake people, let’s not get carried away. Remember that this day has been created for you by a greedy corporate class. At it’s core Valentine’s Day is a way to commoditize our emotions and sell them back to us in the form of products and services. If corporations have to use your insecurities to get what they want (your money and loyalty) then they’re cool with that. Hell, those slimy bastards went to college and studied hard so they could learn to do that very thing.

My hope is that you don’t wait for a single day throughout the year to tell those close to you how you feel (or to judge the state of your relationship). Tell them now, show them often and say fuck you to the commodity based holiday calendar.

For those of you, like me, who are single on this day. Count your blessings. Maybe you want to date someone or maybe you don’t but realize that there is a certain freedom in being free from the rat race of consumerism. Besides, if you feel left out you could always take up celebrating Christmas.

So with all the smarmy sarcasm I can muster, “Hey Fucker! Won’t you be my Valentine?”

A Word On Marriage and Divorce

Marriage

I’ll just let this story speak for itself because no matter how much I wear a dress I can never fully appreciate what women have been taught about what a marriage proposal is supposed to mean. I did find the idea that a marriage is not an accomplishment thought provoking though.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natalie-brooke/getting-married-is-not-an-accomplishment_b_9189828.html

 

Divorce

You should read this even if you’re happily involved with someone else. I wish I had this information earlier. This article basically talks about how divorce can be a positive thing and I totally agree. I love the idea of fighting for a marriage or a relationship, but not every battle ends as you would like.

For me my first marriage is most applicable to this article. I was chastised once by my first wife for considering divorce as one of all the possible outcomes for a relationship. She said I was preparing for divorce if I thought that. I developed a fear of bringing up ways that our relationship wasn’t functioning because of this.

To make a long story slightly less long, it’s pretty easy to see how a real or perceived inability to address relationship problems results in a non-functioning partnership, and so it was.

I went for maybe 4 or 5 years hoping that things would get better. They didn’t. One day I had an epiphany which let me see how bad things had become and I also realized that I couldn’t go on like this anymore. I was exhausted and done. Truly done. I had been trying so much by myself that I didn’t want to lift a finger for that relationship anymore. Perhaps that is horrible to say, but it was true. Once I was to that point of realization divorce was the only reasonable choice.

When I awoke the next morning after making my decision I felt so light and unencumbered. I knew divorce would turn my entire world upside down, and so it did, but it was also liberating (for both of us I imagine).

It’s for this reason that I can completely relate to what’s being said in the statements compiled in this article.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/whatever-you-do-dont-say-divorce-is-not-an-option_us_56b90119e4b01d80b24768f6?

Moments In Dating: The Hitler conundrum

An OK Cupid question: Are some human lives worth more than others?

My answer: No

My explanation: Philosophically, which is where my mind always goes, worth is a construct of our minds and not an objective reality.

Practically speaking, probably. I mean, if I had Hitler and a nice grandmother in front of me and one of them had to be shot, then I’d give the gun to the grandmother and let her kill Hitler. No freebies.

Does Dating Someone “Older” Make For A Better Partner?

The answer of course, is yes which is why you should totally contact me. All joking aside, I think it just depends on what you want in a partner.

Older Women

http://www.mode.com/stories/the-perks-of-dating-an-older-woman/11787561

Articles like this have to make a fair amount of generalizations and of course some of these will be just as erroneous as they are correct. People are highly varied and our lives have all crafted us differently (and thank goodness for that).

I would have to say that generally I prefer to date women that are approximate to my age, which is around 40 (possibly older as well, I’ll let you know if it ever happens). I find that women around that age range are far more open and straightforward in their communication. This means that we can both be completely honest with one another in situations that would probably facilitate a argument or self-doubt with a younger person.

However, I also tend to attract the more mature individuals from younger age brackets and I’ve had some wonderfully open and communicative experiences with them as well. So it may just be that this is the type of person that I attract across the board. Like I said, generalizations aren’t 100 percent accurate.

Older Men

http://stylecaster.com/dating-older-men/

So while I’ve done a few graphic things with older guys, I’ve never actually dated one. However, I have been the older guy who was married to someone 17 years my junior.

No, I wasn’t going through a midlife crises. I was actually the most self-actualized that I had ever been during that relationship. Although, I did get a kick out of saying that I married her because I couldn’t afford a Corvette. Yup, I make awkward jokes even in person. However, in so many ways it was the best relationship I’ve been in, but I digress.

I think this article makes a lot of good points that I feel are probably true. I feel like there is a lot of overlap between both of these articles.

What do you think?

I actually want to open this up to everyone who has dated someone with 10 years or greater age difference. What are your thoughts about this experience (positive and negative)?

 

The Most Important Link I’ll Ever Post

Sometimes you do something that stands out as significant. Granted, I’m only sharing a link; it’s a small gesture. However, in today’s political climate where women are being systematically disenfranchised when it comes to their bodies and reproductive choices this information needs to be out there in as many places as possible.

So if reproductive options are being limited in your area, and they are, then you need to check out this link if you’re considering abortion as one of your options.

https://www.womenonweb.org/en/i-need-an-abortion

 

Also check out these bad asses:

http://www.womenonwaves.org/