Well, I Don’t Think It Was the Pubic Hair

I don’t quite know why I’m crying tonight. I’m having a hard time breathing. Suddenly I’m put in mind of something I read while trying to look for information on the internet the other day. It was something to the effect of depression being when your problems exceed your resources for coping with them.

This feels weird. I originally put up this blog to write about politics, society and related subjects. Somehow, it’s turning into some weird document of my ongoing breakdown.

So, after about two years of hibernation and dodging my problems, I’ve started trying to tackle some of the underlying causes. They’re not going to improve on their own, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, coming out of hibernation also causes emotional volatility. After all, I went into hiding for a reason.

What are my tangible problems? Nothing terribly original, I’m afraid. My career’s in the crapper, I’m living in a town where I know almost no one, I have no social life, no love life, I’ve gained weight and I feel unattractive. Unfortunately, all these things interact with one another, so fixing one without working on the others goes no where. Without a decent, steady job no one wants to date you.

Most recently, the loneliness has really been getting under my skin. So I set out to change that. I put an ad up on Craigslist. It wasn’t as crazy as what I said the other day, but it was still crazy enough that it got flagged and taken down. I looked at the rules for Craigslist and couldn’t figure out which one I’d broken. Nothing said that desperate, depressed people were barred from looking for a significant other. In the meantime, it was put back up. I guess the moderators there came to the same conclusion. Quite a few men wrote, concerned that I wouldn’t get the sort of responses I wanted. Well, I got hundreds. After a while I couldn’t keep up with them, so I only read the first hundred or so. The vast majority were actually quite nice. On average, the responses were no more rude than when I’ve put up nice, socially acceptable ads.

I wrote back to several people who for some reason or another struck me as promising, generally that meant near my age and seeming to share some sort of interest. I struck up a short exchange with one man. He phoned and we agreed to meet.

My ad had made it clear that I was lonely and looking for company, that I would be open for more but that I wasn’t expecting more. It was getting towards dinner time and I thought about suggesting a bite to eat, but I didn’t want to come off like I was expecting a man to buy me dinner or jump through a million hoops, so I suggested a pub that is located between his place and mine and threw a couple handfuls of nuts in my mouth.

We had a really nice time. We talked while sitting at the bar for at least an hour, maybe two, then we went to his place. When I got home that night, I realized that for well over two years I hadn’t had a long, in-depth, ambling conversation with anyone other than my sister and my mother. I thought to myself, no wonder I’m going nuts. That’s just not healthy. I also thought back and remembered one point in the evening when I was shirtless and draped over his lap. We were talking and while we were talking he was fondling my breasts. It’s funny because it’s hard to say whether I’m uncomfortable with my body or not. With some men I am, and I want the lights out before taking off my clothes, and with some men, I’m not. I took it as a good sign that I was feeling so comfortable with him. I feel slightly uncomfortable talking about someone else, so I’m leaving out details, but I felt we had a lot to talk about. In any case, he drove me home and said he hoped to see me again soon.

He contacted me. Because I’ve always been told that men are afraid of clingy women, I would have never contacted him first. I made it clear that I wanted to see him again and any more would have felt too pushy.

Tonight, by coincidence, we were meeting around dinner time again and I thought of asking if he wanted to eat together, but again I was afraid of being too demanding and made myself an early dinner. I’m just always so afraid of being one of those demanding women. Admittedly, he wasn’t feeling well when I arrived and things seemed slightly awkward all night. The previous time, we didn’t engage in vaginal penetration and I was eager to get him inside me. When we were fully undressed and lying on his bed I tried to kiss him and he pulled away. He said it was too intimate. That made me really uncomfortable. Establishing intimacy was part of the point of wanting to kiss him. Then he said that he felt that we didn’t have enough of an emotional history between the two of us to have sex. Since I’d already performed fellatio on him the first night and had been licking and fondling him earlier in the evening, this struck me as odd. The first night seemed fine to me and we had even less of an emotional history then. In order to alleviate the awkwardness, I asked if he wanted to talk about it and we spent some time talking about his ex-girlfriend. Then he commented that he had to get up to go to work in a few hours. I got up and put my clothes on and I was crying as I was leaving. He made no move to comfort me or even ask why I was upset. He seemed to think that the crying came on suddenly, but it had been building up ever since he refused to kiss me. He walked me to my car. I asked him for a hug before getting in and leaving and I can’t help wondering if he would have done or said anything at all if I hadn’t asked.

I have no idea if he wants to see me again. I’m not sure I want to see him again if he does.

A decade ago, or even five or six years ago, this would have been no big deal. It would be just one date that went awry. Maybe there would be a little bit of a puzzle about what was different between the first night and the second. But I don’t have the emotional resilience that I did then. I’m not sure if I feel like taking a chance and writing to any of the other men who wrote to me, and I’m not sure when I’ll feel like going on a date again. I’m unlikely to meet someone by chance since I haven’t in several years.

So, I’ve been crying and I’m not exactly sure why. It feels like a rejection, but not a big crushing rejection, more like a slow grinding away. I feel like I’m running out of resources. I don’t have the emotional resources to engage in normal dating. Maybe I should put the ad up in the casual encounters section and just have one night stands and not even hope for anything more.

Towards the end, he said something about his attitudes towards sex changing, but I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. It’s hard these days to find someone who is open and excepting about a woman being a sexual person outside of marriage without being treated badly.

I don’t know that I ever want to marry again. I don’t want live the rest of my life without intimate contact with another human being. I have the distinct feeling of drowning and being unable to breathe.