Ladies, You Might Be Desperate If….

The sport I took up for a guy....

I’ll admit it.  I’ve done a few crazy things for men.  Like pretending to enjoy watching a boyfriend participate in some bizarre World War I re-enactment that actually involved mud and trenches but really looked like a bunch of grown men playing dress-up in the great outdoors.

Then there was the boyfriend who tried to teach me fly fishing.  (Why I agreed I’ll never know, as I consider standing in a stream or at lake’s edge with a fishing pole about as exciting as watching paint dry.) But I tried it nevertheless. I wasn’t at it five minutes before I had my line tangled in a crabapple tree.

And I must not fail to include hanging out in the pit at a race track, the dirt from the track flying so thick that it later took two showers to get all the grit out of my ears and several flossings to get it out of my teeth. Not to mention the two beer guzzling guys who walked past me, saying, “Dude, I bet we’ll find some hot women here tonight.”  (I should probably mention my S.O. at the time was a race car driver, not a spectator, which basically means he did not own a T-shirt with a Confederate flag on it with the sleeve rolled up on one side to show off the tattoo of his mother’s first name.)

True, I’m not very P.C.  I can’t help it.  I call it like I see it.

Which is why I feel compelled to point out that I quickly learned we should all have our limits. Mine was one re-enactment and two dirt track races. (I liked the second guy better.)  And I’m inclined to think, now that I’m older and wiser, that my limits might be even more stringent these days.  A guy would have to be Mr. Wonderful for sure to get me to bungee jump off a bridge in New Zealand. Basically, he’d half to be flawless.  And I’m still not sure I’d do it.

So I kind of wonder why women do so many crazy things for men. Are we really that desperate?  So desperate to hold their interest and affection that we take up their crazy hobbies or at least stand on the sidelines watching them with enough regularity that we start to look a little bit…well…desperate.

Learning archery in the Ozarks

It hit home with me the second (and last) race I attended.  Somehow I had convinced myself I was being supportive by spending a lovely spring weekend driving God knows how many hours through central North Carolina (the armpit of the state, in my opinion, with all its look-alike cities, interstates, and giant junk outlets) to the dirt track in Gastonia in a really big pick-up towing a sprint car (which if you don’t know what that is, ladies, it’s the one with the really big rear wheels and the Orville Wright-esque roof that makes it looks like a cross between an airplane and a go-cart).  I spent most of the day in the pit sitting on a tailgate reading a biography of William Faulkner for an article I was writing while the wives and girlfriends of the other race car drivers dished out elaborate buffets of fried chicken and biscuits, tested all their video recording equipment, and began climbing up on the roofs of their S.O.’s six-figure price tag towing vehicles to see if they could videotape the races from there. When race time rolled around, each one of those ladies lined up alongside her husband’s car, his helmet in hand like a squire waiting to tend to a knight.  That was the point at which I started to feel weird and decided the so-called fine line between being supportive and being pathetic was actually not so fine after all.

After that episode, I showed my support by not raising hell on the weekends my boyfriend decided to spend at the track and stayed home where there were much more interesting things to do than fawn over a weekend warrior race car driver.

But I’m not alone in having made some ridiculous efforts to impress a man with my supportiveness.  A friend of a friend who was planning a romantic getaway to Hawaii with her fiancé recently relented when he suggested they go camping in Utah instead…in a Winnebago…a very old Winnebago.  Driving cross-country for three days, camping for five, then driving back.  And in the interim, their meals would be tuna out of a can and the romance would be lovemaking in the back of a van.  Sure, it’s a little reminiscent of the teenage years in a way, but who wants to make out in a stinky van at age 40?  I’m personally all for the luxury hotel mattress.

I’m sure the lady in question is, too, so why won’t she admit it, hold firm, and buy those plane tickets to Hawaii?

Yeah, you guessed it.  For some reason, she feels that in order to hang onto the guy she has to sacrifice her sanity…and her precious vacation time.  You might be desperate if you do this, ladies.

The view from my kayak along Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Another friend of mine has an even more interesting track record.  In the course of her relationship career, she has purchased a bass boat, a motorcycle, and a kayak. She still has the kayak, and I think she actually uses it, but the bass boat and the motorcycle have long since hit the pavement.  I’m not even sure she actually ever got on the motorcycle.  The purchase, I think, was a gesture of intent.

And apparently good intentions work, as she did marry the guy.  He goes duck hunting and motorcycling without her these days, much to her relief, no doubt.

Women may claim that men, once married, suddenly forget how to cook, dance, and kiss, but women are guilty, too.  Our “tactics of desperation,” as I like to call them, suddenly cease once we feel we have the guy cornered. We magically lose interest in skeet shooting, football, and black lingerie.  (Well, some of us do anyway.  Personally, I would never want to be caught in Grandma panties by an EMT following a traumatic car accident, and I do know a woman who makes cupcakes with her husband’s picked team’s logo emblazoned in the frosting for the Super Bowl each year.)

A friend of mine actually asked me to write this post after deciding a couple of her women friends were acting a little too “desperate.”  At the time, I agreed with her that there are just some things you don’t do for a man, any man.

But then I got to thinking about it and, pathetic Super Bowl cupcakes aside, all this stretching of ourselves beyond normal limits isn’t necessarily a bad thing, not always.  Sometimes acts of desperation turn out all right.  I would never have discovered a love of sea kayaking had my former husband not goaded me into trying it out off a sandy beach in St. Croix.  Nor would I have learned how to shoot had a boyfriend not introduced me to the sport more than a decade ago and enticed me to at least learn how to blast a rabid skunk…or a rabid neighbor…if I needed to.  And frankly, I think if I’d been permitted a spin around the racetrack (instead of standing on the sidelines), I might have found that a little bit more interesting, too.

This is not to say I’m encouraging acts of female desperation, which seem to be most common in the unknowing years of the early 20s and the “oh, my god, I am never gonna get married unless I take up skydiving with this guy” years post 40.  It’s okay to get your feet wet in something new, just so long as you’re not sacrificing your own sense of self to do so or stretching limits that you’ve put in place for very good reasons. Moving in with an S.O. who owns 12 indoor dogs when you are a stickler for cleanliness is not likely to do anything for expanding your horizons or enhancing your relationship. This is a guy it’s even questionable whether or not you should be dating him much less marrying him (I mean does he ever show up without dog hair on his pants?).  Nor should you drink tuna water in the back of a Winnebago if every part of your being is screaming for a relaxing, luxurious getaway on a Pacific beach. Resentment isn’t something you want to cultivate in a relationship either.

But you do want to cultivate growth.

Rest assured, however, the line between growing and being desperate is very thick and very black.  You can’t miss it.

Growth feels like a rush.  Desperation feels like anxiety.  (Given how few men are willing to learn ballroom dancing and yoga, however, I’m guessing they feel a lot more anxiety about trying new things than we do.)

I’ve found as I grow older, I don’t really need the goading of a romantic partner to incline me to try something new…unless it’s squid.  Not really inclined to try that on my own, though I did recently eat some wild boar. I’ll gladly make a vain attempt at doing yoga on a paddleboard in the Tennessee River or see how much I can embarrass myself on an archery range in the Ozarks just because I can (and because an editor is paying me to do it).  It seems appropriate, once mid-life starts its heavy approach, to be up for anything.

With a couple of exceptions….

I still don’t plan to bungee jump off the New River Bridge anytime soon.  Nor will I go ZORBing.  Something about intentionally cramming one’s self into a rubber ball and then having someone push it down a hill at breakneck speed just seems…well…stupid.  And I really don’t feel either activity is going to promote any personal or spiritual growth…unless we’re talking a very quick trip to heaven.

But there are definitely experiences that you shouldn’t pass up. Years ago when a friend of mine went horseback riding in the snow in Iceland with her boyfriend, I thought she had lost her mind. Today she’s married to the guy and has, with his encouragement, hit five continents in the last decade and a half. Talk about “desperation” paying off.  Maybe fly fishing isn’t your thing. But I bet, even if it’s not, that standing in the middle of the Madison River in northwestern Wyoming with a moose grazing nearby and the Rockies rising in the distance has the potential to float your boat…even if next time you come armed with a camera instead of a fishing rod.

Circle the Wagons: The Powerful Love of Women

Sarah and I--friends since birth

Sarah and I have been best friends on and off again for three decades. So closely did we grow up together, our mothers trading back and forth sleepovers and marching band pick-ups, that we are perhaps as close as sisters, closer perhaps. When life separated us for several years and we fell out of touch, it was that sisterly, almost clairvoyant love that drew us back together again.

I had suffered a devastating break-up. Sarah e-mailed me the day after the split. Only, we had not been in touch for around five years. To this day, we both believe she had somehow, across time and space, sensed my need of her. And our lives have been thus for years, one of us walking in just as the other is about to break.

This is no ordinary connection.  That is not to say, however, that it is uncommon. Women, at least those among us brave enough to love fully, have an uncanny ability, so it would seem, for knowing just when to circle the wagons.

I have not always benefited from this love. Raised to be independent and distrusting of others, I was always reluctant as a girl and as a young woman to lead myself into vulnerability, particularly the vulnerability that comes of the deeply connected relationships that women often share.

It is no small surprise to me that men resist this kind of all-encompassing love. Some think it is smothering. And it can be. Women learn, over time, not to call on too many friends at once in times of crisis, or they will be overwhelmed with attention. How many nights have I found myself fielding phone calls and texts from half a dozen concerned females all at once after announcing to them some recent family tragedy?  Even worse though is when, in recognition of this, I share a crisis with only one or two to be chastised later by the others for not letting them in to offer succor.

Susannah and I: friends and troublemakers

Circling the wagons is something of a professional calling for us, and it transcends the intimate relationships of tried and true friends, those who have followed us through high school and college, through marriage and divorce, childbirth and death of parents.

I belong to a community dance troupe made up of girls and women ranging in age from six to 60. Every week we engage in what we refer to as “group therapy”—a couple of hours of pulse-pounding dance accompanied by excessive tom-foolery. This is where we (the adult women anyway) let go, beyond the eyes of spouses who may know nothing of this side of us—the practical jokes, the tongue-in-cheek commentary on marriage, sex, and child raising, the posturing in front of dance studio mirrors, the banter over who has the curviest figure, the thickest thighs, the most perfect hair. We are so wild at times that new members to the group often aren’t quite sure what to make of us at first, but we convert them eventually to this gathering of “footloose” women. Here we are girls again, more than girls…because most of us were never confident enough, brave enough to be so ridiculous and fun when we were younger.

But this is also a space of deep camaraderie. When one among us lost a foster child back to her biological mother, we circled her with embraces, then turned her tears to laughter. When we prep for performances, mothers and daughters gather to braid each other’s hair, mend dance shoes with duct tape, and coax one another out of nervousness. Here we find the space to be members of a family where expectations are much lower, where we all recognize the staggering responsibilities of work, marriage, and motherhood, and give one another leave to be silly, irresponsible, and mindless…if only for an hour or two.

My dancing friends on "weird sock day"

I do not know what I would do without these women…any of them…from my most intimate friends to the women with whom I dance each week. They fill my life with laughter, and they prop me up when I am too worn down to stand.

They have been there for me when my family has not been. And they have done all this unconditionally.

Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering why, what it is I have done to deserve the love and kindness of all these women, feeling the powerful blessing of knowing there is this invisible circle of support around me always.

When I feel I have erred foolishly in this life, I turn to my old college friend, Susannah, from whom I know I will always get a refreshingly honest and straightforward assessment of the situation…in addition to ice cream or cheesecake. Yet when I fail to take her sound advice and find myself in a fix, I never fear abandonment. “Friends are not the people who are there only when you do things right,” she tells me on a regular basis.

Retail therapy in Venice with Dorothy

Yet I often wonder how many of us know this, how many of us are brave enough to test the true depth of our friendships, to be who we are without fear among the people we love. It is no easy thing. We are all guilty of holding back, playing games, pretending all is well…even among those closest to us, fearful of the depth and vulnerability we might discover should we let go…and fearful, too, of finding nothing, no depth, no connection, no unconditional love.

Humans are social creatures, and abandonment is one of our greatest primal fears.

It is one reason we are so lucky to be women. It is easy for us to look at men and their easy friendships with other men, their perception of “depth” as an intense conversation about politics, and their ability to compartmentalize pain and fear and envy them. And it is so easy for us to be angry with them, too, for failing to connect with us as our women friends do.

A friend of mine said to me recently, “I cannot help being angry with my husband because he does not know me as well as my best friend does.”

This is not so much a failing in the guy. It’s a failing in expectation. He does not know how, most likely, to know that woman as her best friend does. It is outside his comfort zone to go so deep, as it is with most men. They don’t live in a world of women the way we do. They cannot count on their male friends to protect their weaknesses, honor their strengths, and be there for them no matter the errors they make. It is not the way men are socialized, and it is why they need us so much more than we need them. For most men, it is their wives who serve as their only emotional centers, the only place where they can freely be themselves.

Imagine having only one person who offers you safety. Imagine having none.

New partners in crime in Savannah

I made a new friend recently, as I often do on travels, and as we walked back to our lodgings one evening, discovering, after only a couple of days’ acquaintance that we had much in common, including a similar painful life experience, she said to me with a laugh, “Can I marry you?”

I understood the message behind the joke. Because it took me a long time to stop looking to romantic partners to provide the kind of emotional depth and support that female friends do. I will not over-generalize and say that men cannot provide it. But it is rare to find such a man. As a rule, they retreat into their caves when hurting, confused, or troubled; whereas, women sound the alarm, ask for aid, and let the wagons circle. And when those wagons lock around us in times of trouble, there is no getting through until the danger has passed, chased away by the arrows of shared and recognized grief and the awareness that, with friends, just about anything is survivable.

“Mind-Fuck For Girls”: Why I Don’t Believe in Fairytales…or Do I?

Coral, gold, and gemstones on Ponte Vecchio

Last Saturday I promised my four-year-old daughter movie and pizza night if she behaved herself all day while I caught up on work in the office.  I don’t know as I would go so far as to call my daughter “girly.”  She hates baby dolls, loves cars, trucks, trains and LEGOs and is especially fond of getting as dirty as possible when outdoors, but she also has a fondness for all things Barbie and princess.  I’m okay with Barbie, and I’m actually okay with princesses, too, as long as we’re just talking about dressing up in a fabulous gown and looking beautiful for the day.

But there is a point at which my tolerance runs a little thin. Heidi persistently asks for Disney princess or Barbie princess movies–you know the ones where the girl finds her “one true love” and lives “happily ever after.”  And much though I’d like to pretend my efforts to make her strong, independent, and choosy are overriding all this falderal, I know they’re not.

I still try though and resisted Heidi’s begging for yet another Barbie princess movie last weekend and chose instead the movie Enchanted. You may have seen it. It’s a little bit of an anti-fairytale with the otherworldly princess rejecting Prince Charming in favor of an imperfect marriage to a New York divorce lawyer. It still has the flavor of happily ever after, but it’s a slightly better twisting of reality.

Heidi loved it, and she even got it when the princess fought the dragon instead of the divorce lawyer. But still, it wasn’t perfect. Because the princess fails, and both she and her lover are saved by a chipmunk. Women are still not allowed to save themselves in fairytales.

A friend of mind calls Disney princess “mind-fuck for girls.” I think that’s an apt description.

Rare is the woman, no matter how intelligent, who does not suffer to some degree from a childhood of fairytale mind-fucking. I always thought it had bypassed me.  Instead of browsing through catalogs at pictures of stunning wedding gowns as a pre-adolescent girl, I was cutting out pictures of my dream house…which I did eventually build, by the way. It seemed to me, even when I was quite young, that I had a much better chance of building the perfect house than of finding the perfect man.

You can control the construction of a house. Love is something else entirely. It runs where it wants to without asking anyone’s permission in advance. And most men are not prepared to be Prince Charming. They didn’t grow up watching princess movies. So there’s an emotional disconnect between boys and girls right from the get-go. My preschooler recognizes it already. She told me in the car one day, “Boys are stupid, Mommy.” I nodded, for there was much truth in this statement. And then she continued, “Daddy is a boy, so Daddy must be stupid.”

I laughed aloud, as I often do when profundity on a grand scale comes out of Heidi’s mouth. One of my girlfriends told me Heidi is far more advanced than we ever were as girls if she already gets the idea that guys don’t get us.

Even though my parents raised me not too put too much credence in fairytales and to make my own way in the world without relying on anyone else to make it for me, they apparently did not protect me enough. Because I still grew up believing that maybe, just maybe, I would fall in love with my best friend and live happily ever after.

A Better View than the Jewelry: the Riverscape from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy

It didn’t happen. Not for lack of trying. I think, like so many women (especially young ones), I did my best to cram romantic partners into my personal visions of Prince Charming. And the poor men could not help but fail. My former husband had no idea I actually wanted to be proposed to at the lovely overlook where we first watched the sunset on Skyline Drive. I honestly don’t remember exactly anymore how he asked, it was so unmemorable. Others were worse. Like the boyfriend who foolishly told me he’d bought me a diamond just out of the blue with no indication beforehand that marriage was even on the table. I told him he better pay off his college loans and credit card debt before he dared show me the thing. Thank heaven for that caveat. We broke up long before he had his finances in order, and I was saved from what probably would have been a disastrous marriage.

So I don’t have a romantic proposal story about being carried off on a white horse into the sunset to pass onto my daughter. But then my mother didn’t have one to pass onto me either. She got her engagement ring in the mail. (My dad was in the Air Force in Texas at the time.)

And maybe these anti-fairytales are better anyway. For what pain women suffer in believing that a man will sweep them off their feet one day and love and cherish them forever after. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, mind you. But it’s rare. In my 36 years, I’ve encountered only one such couple. They were in their 50s when I met them, working at a museum where I had a part-time job during grad school. They’d been married 30 years. Every day at the end of work, that man would come into the gift shop where his wife worked, scoop her up off her feet, and kiss her. And she would giggle like a young bride. It was amazing to watch. Everyone in that museum shop would turn to look, no matter how many times we had seen it. And we all longed to be so lucky.

Because a lot of it is luck in the end, isn’t it?  Chances are Mr. Right is out there for you.  But chances are he lives on the other side of the country or maybe halfway across the world. He may not even speak the same language as you. How do you find him? That man whose personality is so magnetic that you’ll forgive him a thousand times for failing to put his socks in the hamper or for failing to pick the kids up on time? (Because you know the reason you’re really mad at your husband about his sloppiness and forgetfulness is because you’re mad at him for not being Prince Charming, right?) He’s not your match, and both of you know it, so you spar over the kids’ grades, whose turn it is to do the grocery shopping, why his mother is coming over again, and what to do on the weekend that everyone will enjoy.

Most of us settle for Mr. Half-Right. Or maybe even Mr. One-Quarter-Right because we know that our chances of finding the true Mr. Right are very slim. And someone told us somewhere, likely in a fairytale, that we have to get married, have kids, and pretend to live happily ever after with our “one true love.”

I’d like to think I’m over it. Sometimes I think I am. I’m a realist at least 85 percent of the time. I know men and women often don’t speak the same language, that they have wholly different expectations, that neither gender can be expected to read the other’s mind. I know that 90 percent of the time when a man hurts me, frustrates me, makes me crazy, he really has no idea he’s doing it.

But then something will inspire me to start believing in fairytales again…or at least make me want to believe. It happened most recently last November when Dorothy and I were in Florence, Italy, walking the famous Ponte Vecchio. In case you don’t know, it’s a famous bridge spanning the Fiume Arno that is lined with shops selling gold and silver jewelry. I’ve never been much into jewelry. Once when my former spouse suggested he should update my engagement ring, get me something with a bigger diamond, I told him if he had that much money, I would be far happier with a fantastic vacation or a piece of land. (I never got the diamond, by the way, or a vacation, or a new piece of real estate.) But something about this romantic 1345 bridge in Florence, overlooking the river, with its shops of jewelry and the couples hand-in-hand walking across it gave me a little regretful thrill.

“Wouldn’t it be grand to get proposed to on this bridge?” I suddenly said to Dorothy. “And then go into one of these shops and pick out your ring?”

Dorothy, like me, is something of a cynic about love, but even she had to agree. Yes, that would indeed be fantastic. And so we stood there a moment in between all the glistening shops, looking out over the water and the city, daydreaming about something that was long gone for both of us. And I think we felt a little foolish that we even had such a girlish daydream—two business-owning women who had paid for their own trips to Italy and gone unaccompanied by husbands or lovers.

The “mind-fuck for girls,” as my friend called it, apparently outlasts education, prosperity, experience, even divorce. Which really leads me to wonder what it’s all about, why we can’t let go. Is it something like the “Hope” of Pandora’s Box? Does the idea that the “one true love” is out there somewhere keep us trudging onward in the most hopeless of circumstances, enduring the string of dates with men who are not “the one,” sifting through them all, wondering, and wondering if Prince Charming is ever going to show up? Do we really go through all of this thinking we’re going to be the rare and lucky woman who truly lands Mr. Right??

Maybe.

I know there have been times in my life when I have wanted to shout like Charlotte in Sex and the City, “I’m 35! Where is he?!”

I remember watching a friend of mine walk down the aisle a few years ago. And if anyone had been through the relationship ringer, she was it. I remembered her lamenting during her days as a single, dating woman, “I’m exhausted by it. I am exhausted by dating men, none of whom are right. I just want to give up.” But one day, years later, she walked down the aisle arm-in-arm with the man she believed to be “the one,” and the beaming smile on her face gave me hope for a moment.

Maybe this will be it, I thought. Maybe she really found him, and they’re going to be in love forever. She’ll prove it’s possible. I even told her so.  “Make me believe,” I urged her.

But that’s not how it happened. Her husband is not picking her up into his arms at the end of every workday and planting an “oh, my god, I am so in love with you” kiss on her lips. The question is though: does he need to be?

And I’m afraid the answer might actually be “yes.”

But do I say that because I’ve been mind-fucked, too?

Probably.

But I do know two women who found love in their 60s…finally. And at least one of them is quite madly in love. I think of her sometimes when I start feeling hopeless. I remind myself there is always that five percent or less chance that something magical might indeed cross my path one day.

Crazier things have happened.

It never crossed my mind, for example, when I was the child of hard-working parents just barely getting by at times that I would one day enjoy the luxury of standing on the Ponte Vecchio looking at diamonds and coral pendants and perhaps, more importantly, looking across the centuries-old architecture of the city where Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci once lived.

I bought a ring for myself that day. It was not a diamond. It was not even expensive. I bought it from the jeweler on the bridge with only a few dozen pieces in his window. He told me he was able to sell the same pieces as his neighbors so much cheaper because of his low overhead. I slipped it on my finger, pulled my leather gloves back over my hands, and proceeded on my way to the Galleria degli Ufizzi to look at the original paintings of Botticelli, Raphael, and El Greco, something I also would never have imagined being able to do on a typical writer’s salary.

It did not occur to me until later that I had done my best to live out my fairytale thus far. And perhaps that simple gold filigree band was something of a self-engagement ring for me, not on the scale of the famous right-hand diamond. My fairytale is not quite that big, not yet. And I suspect if it ever gets that big, I’ll be buying more land with mountain vistas or maybe checking out Antarctica, not frittering money away on diamonds. Who knows?  That is the beauty of it, too. The not knowing what’s around the next bend.

In the tale of Pandora’s box, humanity is saved by hope. But hope is not sitting on a windowsill wishing for Prince Charming to come dashing around the corner. Hope is active. It is work. It is believing…and doing…and being…even when the evidence suggests that the game will not end as you would like. It’s still worth a bold attempt. Don’t leave it to princes and chipmunks to save you. That’s great if one comes along and gives you a lift. But try lifting yourself first.

Confessions of a Former Workaholic: My Multi-Step Program for “Getting a Life”

“That is what entrepreneurs do: they pair imagination with action and move boldly and often joyfully in the direction of a vision only they can see.” –Meg Cadoux Hirshberg

Heidi, age 1 1/2, growing up in the home office

When one of my editors at SUCCESS  magazine asked me to review Meg Cadoux Hirshberg’s new book, For Better or For Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families, I really had no idea what I was getting into.  I’ve read some life-changing books as a result of my work as a reviewer, but this one wasn’t so much life-changing as life-enlightening.  I literally spent the first 20 pages or so weeping.

In case you only know Hirshberg as a columnist for Inc. Magazine, let me enlighten you. She is also the wife of Stonyfield Farm yogurt founder Gary Hirshberg, the man who singlehandedly swept Meg and their three children through almost a decade of chaos because of his pursuit of a dream—to bring organic yogurt to the world. (Yes, they’re still married.)

What got me weeping over Hirshberg’s book was how hard it hit home, as in hit me right in the gut with all the not so polite things I’ve done to the people I was supposed to love while building a career as a writer. Granted, I’m no Gary Hirshberg and never will be. I have only one employee and a handful of sometime freelance designers and writers who work when I need them (or when I can afford them).  But the smallness of my entrepreneurial ventures belies the brutality of my pursuit of them.

I came by my workaholism honestly enough.  It’s in the family bloodline.  Both of my grandfathers were entrepreneurs, as were their fathers before them. My dad and my uncle were small business owners, too.  And none of us have ever stood authority well.  It’s just plain safer for us to be self-employed.  So I don’t think it was really any great surprise to anyone (regardless of how crazy they thought I was) when I decided to dump life in the corporate world to pursue a career as a freelance writer. And, at the time, I was young and single.  There’s really nothing wrong with being a workaholic in those circumstances because the only person you’re going to hurt is yourself.

But in walked my husband-to-be about two years into this grand venture of mine.  You would have thought, when he asked me to marry him, and I replied matter-of-factly, “Okay, but realize my work will always come first,” that he would have taken a quick hike for the hills.  Why he didn’t I’ll never know.  I can only guess that he perhaps did not believe me.

"On assignment" with Mommy at Antietam National Battlefield

All was well the first few years.  He was in the military, was overseas through much of the early years of our marriage, and I continued on with my work and my life, almost as if I was still single.  I worked 80-hour weeks, stayed up till the wee hours of the morning, fielded phone calls from West Coast and overseas clients, publicists, and reporters at all hours of the night. I lived and breathed my work.  It was like a drug to me.  I admit it: I inhaled.  And as my income doubled year after year after year, the addiction grew ever stronger. But it really wasn’t the money, as many an entrepreneur will tell you. It was the adrenaline rush of getting up every day to do something I truly loved doing and being able to pay the bills doing it.

Work-life balance was not something I worried about.  And it didn’t even really occur to me that I needed any such balance until I became pregnant five years ago.  That was the beginning of the wake-up call.  I started to feel I might have a bit of a problem on my hands when doing phone conferences with mock enthusiasm while trying to stem my nausea by sucking on ginger candy and drinking peppermint tea. Then a month-long bout of bronchitis hit.  But still I plowed through, grateful for that first pregnancy advantage of not really showing, at least not until I hit eight months.  I told no one, fearful clients and publishers would drop me if they knew I was expecting, figuring I would be one of those mothers who gave up her career after childbirth.

At six months, I installed fence line on my farm alone in the heat of summer, shoveled gravel on a flood torn driveway, kept hiking and practicing yoga up until (I kid you not) the very day I went into labor.  And yes, I took off early that day, at 4 p.m., because I felt a little funny.  Once I realized I was having contractions, ever the perfectionist, I got in the shower, shaved my legs while timing the contractions with a stopwatch, and had my husband (who had scheduled a brief leave around my due date) drive me to the hospital at the close of the workday.  I was in labor for 31 hours, and 72 hours later was back at my desk again, trying to schedule interviews around my newborn daughter’s nursing schedule.

The perks of being the travel writer's daughter: luxury hotel living

Within three months, despite the foresight I had exercised in hiring an assistant, I was half crazy from trying to do it all without missing a beat.  My husband was overseas, my business was running at tilt neck speed, and I was discovering that, despite the admonitions from the home nurse who came to visit after Heidi was born, that spending 12 hours a day breastfeeding as a self-employed mother on deadline was just not feasible.

“You realize if you keep this up, you are going to kill yourself,” my doula told me about two months after Heidi’s birth.

Yep, I realized it.  The workaholic was going to have to give some ground.

My retreat from super woman to the woman who admitted that having it all was slightly impossible began with hiring a babysitter, giving up breastfeeding, and asking for help, including a desperate phone call to a neighbor late one night after having been awake three days straight with my daughter who was suffering from the diaper rash case from hell.  That was the night I briefly and seriously considered leaving my daughter in a basket on someone’s doorstep and driving my car into a tree.  Sleep deprivation does that to a person.  My neighbor arrived in 10 minutes with a steaming hot supper of lamb, rice, and homemade muffins, rocked my little one to sleep, and told me I could go take a shower.  A shower!  A shower without setting Heidi outside the glass shower door in her bouncy seat so I could watch her all the while.  A real, self-indulgent steaming hot shower!

So this was motherhood….

I was overworked and under-prepared.  And I thought relief would come when my husband retired from the military eight months after our daughter was born.  And it did to some degree.  Finally there was someone with whom to share the late night feedings, someone who could take morning duty and let me sleep in once in awhile.  And it worked…for awhile.

Hiking through Milam Gap with contributing outdoors editor "Mommy"

But you see, my husband had forgotten that pre-marriage admonition that work comes first, and like Meg Hirshberg and countless other entrepreneurs’ spouses, he began to feel like the stepchild to some half-mad person’s crazy dream.  He didn’t understand why, when he would come into my office, I would shoo him away with a wave of my hand while on the phone, act disgruntled when he interrupted my train of thought while writing an article, or fail to fully appreciate the lunch he brought me in the middle of the day because he had learned I would just keep working and forget all the body’s basic needs in the process.  I was aggravated that he expected me to stop and chat with him when I passed through the kitchen on the way from the office to the bathroom.  I had two minutes before my next phone call after all.  For him, however, it was rejection on a grand scale.  It never occurred to him that he enjoyed this access to me only because my office was connected to my home.  I resented the fact that he took advantage of the access, threatened many times to rent office space in town to get away from all the interruptions.

When the ever evolving media world began to demand my time 24-7, and I realized I was going to have to do a better job of being on call at night, on vacation, everywhere, I broke down and bought a Blackberry.  Now everyone could reach me by phone and e-mail all the time.  I’d never miss an assignment or contract opportunity again.  It also meant that while my husband and daughter played in the waves on the beach, I was answering e-mails.  I was relatively okay with this.  I was, after all, sitting on a nearly vacant beach with the sun going down behind me, my toes pressed into wet sand.  But my spouse didn’t quite see it that way.  Every time my phone went off (and it went off pretty much constantly), he would grumble.  I tried to soothe him by saying, “it’s the sound of money, dear, remember that.”

He threatened to heave my smartphone out the car window.  Meanwhile, I saw the Blackberry, among other things, as an investment not just in my business but in my family’s future—pay off the mortgage, send Heidi to college, take fantastic family vacations, enjoy a superb retirement.

Like the Hirshbergs, we were misinterpreting each other left and right.  I felt my space as a businessperson was being disrespected.  He thought his role as caregiver to two thankless females was being taken for granted.

No one was going to win this battle because, in the end, both of us were wrong.

But I was wrong first, and I knew it.  Because the reality is if you put work before everything else, including your own sanity, you will, eventually, crash and burn, and you might even take a few onlookers with you.

I realized I needed an intervention.  And it started with closing my office door, even though it was right there next to the kitchen, at 5 p.m.  Sometimes I could hear the phone ringing, but I learned to ignore it (with a few relapses involving me tiptoeing into the office to check my voicemail “just in case”).  I programmed my Blackberry so that my most crucial editors and clients had their own individual ring tones, as did my closest friends.  Unless I heard those ring tones, if I was on vacation, playing with my daughter, sitting in a whirlpool bath, I ignored the persistent “bling, bling, bling.”  Sometimes I even dared to turn the sound off completely.

A moment of silliness at Dukes Creek Falls while on assignment for Disney's FamilyFun

Then I began taking dance classes, taking on cardio combined with camaraderie.  In the last four years, the women I have met in those classes have become like a second family to me, as have their daughters to my daughter.  Twice a week, I pummel my stress with intense dancing and laughter, and I do not pick up my phone.  In fact, I cannot even hear it in the midst of the music and tom foolery.

I’ve still not learned to turn off the phone when on vacation.  I don’t really feel I can. As a writer, my business is me.  But I check it less.  I sometimes even turn it off completely at night or at least put it on “silent.”  I keep it tucked away in my purse when out with friends, generally cut if off completely between 5:30 and 7:30 each weeknight, the two hours I try to devote to Heidi with attention undivided.

But I am not cured, by any means.

I realize that having arrived as a writer has won me some space from my business.  Most of my editors will wait for me.  They will not give up and hand assignments to someone else just because I don’t answer their e-mails in two minutes.  I am close enough to the best of them that they respect my time when I say I’m going on vacation and do not bother me.  Some even admonish me when they see me responding to work e-mails on weekends.  And because I’m not engaged so much in business building these days as business maintaining, it’s not a tragedy if I do indeed miss some project because my phone was turned off.

I don’t know as my husband ever really understood the Siren Song that lured me (and continues to lure me) to work sometimes ridiculous hours and to travel as often as twice a month to places ranging from the wilds of Alaska to the islands of the Pacific.  He learned, after a time, to accept it all, perhaps gave into the role of second or third best.  My daughter, on the other hand, has grown up in the throes of the business, understands, even at age four, many of the strange complexities of her mother’s life.  “When I am big, will you take me on adventures with you?” she asks.  “When do we get to go on an airplane together again?”  For her, my world is one of excitement. And she longs to join in on the fun.

This is not to say, however, the road with her has not been rocky.  Through a strange twist of circumstance, my business was at its most demanding level in the years surrounding her birth.  She was three years old before I felt I had bonded with her.  And sometimes she still cries when I work on Saturdays, out of necessity to meet Monday morning news deadlines, and leave her to play with her LEGOs and Thomas the Train alone.  But on some level, because she has grown up with it, she gets its.

As I hurry to prepare for a morning meeting, she stands like a soldier next to the shower, my skirt in hand, ready to hand it over once I’ve pulled on my pantyhose.  My phone goes off, and she grabs it, rushes it to me like a trained personal assistant, watches as I scroll through e-mails, then takes it back, and scrolls through them herself.

Have I brought her into some ill landscape where deadlines reign supreme?  Perhaps.  Only time will tell.  But on some level, she knows, since she was born into the world of the entrepreneur, that life and work, for me, conjoin and separate like waves pressing the beach.  It’s all jumbled together at times. And that is, in the end, what makes my world so incredibly lovely—that my work and my life are one.  I do not watch the clock, live for Fridays at 5 p.m., or dread Monday mornings like an Egyptian plague.  No, I catch the wake of a ship with my kayak and ride it as the sun settles, being at one and the same time at work and at play.  I will write about this afternoon on Lake Superior with a storm drifting in, but I will also remember it as a moment of living—living my life and living my dream…and teaching my daughter, by example, the art of working, not for money, but for love.

I have a life now, separate from work.  But it took me many years to get it.  And I often wonder, as I lie awake at night thinking about the week’s deadlines, if I’d have it had I not finally figured out how to fit 80 hours of work into 25 or 30.  Am I really cured after all?  Or has success just dampened my thirst?

It is, perhaps, hard to say, but I do know that if work demanded of me now what it demanded of me years ago–to give up (or at least set aside for a time) the people I loved most in the world, the leisure time I had envisioned all this work earning me to begin with, or the freedom to live my life on my own terms–I’d be a damn sight less inclined to take it on.  Because while I do indeed work for love, I also work for a living.  And right now, I’m pretty darn busy living.

In Search of the All-Purpose V-Day Gift for Men….

That dreaded holiday is approaching again.  No, not Mother’s Day, though I think Valentine’s Day has got to run a close second.  Who hates Valentine’s Day more than a single girl without a date?  A woman who has been married more than two years….

And here’s why.  It’s not because we don’t like a bouquet of red roses, guys.  They’re very pretty and all, even if they are all dead within a week, less if you decide to get the day-after-Valentine’s-Day special at Kroger (um, yeah, I’ve gotten those).  There is something admittedly symbolic and decadent about that particular standby gift, if you even bother to get it, which a surprising number of long-term significant others don’t.  Some of them don’t even bring chocolate.  And if you aren’t smart enough to know there is some consolation for a girl in chocolate, you have no business dating or being married.

You see, we dread this holiday because we resent the fact that it’s so darn easy for the guys. Unfairly so.  Order the roses from the florist and maybe add in some artisan chocolates too boot.  Bam.  You’re done.

Meanwhile, we’ve been sweating bullets for at least a month in advance, scouring all the “what to buy your guy for V-Day web sites,” floored in some way that a silver whiskey flask or a progressive alarm clock are considered romantic gifts…or something he’d even want.  How many times does he hit the snooze button in the morning anyway?  And would a progressive alarm clock change that for him?  And do you really see him standing there pouring his favorite malt into the tiny hole in the top of that flask?  That’s the kind of OCD stuff high maintenance women engage in…minus the flask.  They’re trying to figure out how not to spill that French martini in the perfectly lovely (but top-heavy) glass they just bought for it.

But where, ladies, is the all-purpose V-Day gift for guys???  Where is our dozen red roses and a box of chocolates equivalent?

I’m fearful it doesn’t exist because, being the research-intensive journalist that I am, I’ve been doing some homework on this subject at the behest of female acquaintances.  Now, I haven’t done anything quite on the scale of the Gallup poll (But who answers those surveys anyway?  That’s right—little old ladies with too much time on their hands—not exactly an accurate cross-section of America), but I have been polling.  And the unfortunate reality is that no two women seem to have the same answer, and most of them have about a dozen “this gift might be a good one if you can afford it” suggestions that don’t even begin to offer the ease and convenience of red roses.

The first person to whom I turned my polling was my oldest and dearest friend Sarah.  I knew given the fact that she is married to a chef who has a number of high level hobbies we women don’t understand (like duck hunting and motorcycling…or something along those lines) that she would have to have some good suggestions.  This woman has been through the gift giving ringer.  As I recall, her husband once requested a very special duck hunting backpack, the only kind of duck hunting backpack with which he could properly engage in the sport, that cost a mere $180 bucks.  (And they wonder why we have to buy our purses at TJ Maxx.)

Her top all-purpose male V-Day gift suggestion was a pair of Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones. “Men adore these damn things,” she told me, “probably because they can’t hear their wives bitching at them while they’re wearing them.” A mere $300, ladies, to enable your S.O. to do what he already does so well—ignore you.

Another female friend I posed the “all-purpose male V-Day gift” question to pursed her lips, shook her head, and then said, “Food and sex.  Those are the only things I can think of.”

But that’s better perhaps than what fellow contributor Susannah offered up, which was “Do we still exchange gifts after 13 years of marriage?”  She never really answered the question exactly, but I’m guessing it was likely “no” after the tirade she gave me on men and flowers.

She did provide one likely suggestion though: “How about I don’t criticize him for 24 hours?”  A nice intangible gift that keeps on giving…at least for a day.  It would probably outlast a box of chocolates now that I think about it.

But still, I’ve not come any closer to fulfilling my quest.  Suggestions of super light kayak paddles, ATV outings, and super-duper hiking boots abound.  But we all know, as we’ve all been there, that we’ll purchase the wrong thing no matter how much research we engage in.  I tried for years to comprehend my former spouse’s hobbies in an effort to give the perfect gifts.  I’m pretty sure I failed every time.  I finally just gave up and stuck gift cards to Advance Auto and Bass Pro Shops in his Valentines. Not much thought going into that, but then exactly how much thought is going into the roses?  That’s if you even get roses…or a card.  I’ve gone plenty of years without either.

So maybe it is back to the old standby.  No, not the Victoria’s Secret gift card for him (though it will do in a pinch).  I’m talking sex.  As a friend of mine said with a shrug, “Sex is easy, but it’s always well-received.  I never get any complaints, and it’s the gift that gives back.”

Maybe so.  Some guys will do the laundry for it.  A few will even mow the grass.

And heck, don’t we have enough to worry about without having to come up with a V-Day gift he won’t return the very next day or stuff into his closet behind all those shirts you’ve given him over the years that really bring out his eyes but which he says are far too feminine?  (And since when is forest green a feminine color?)

But you know, there is some small and wicked part of me that just once would like to see men go through the retail gymnastics that we do for them.  How do they get off so easy?  Flowers, chocolate, a nice bottle of wine, sweet smelling lotion, a pretty necklace—and we smile and tell them how much we love their thoughtfulness.  Is it thoughtful?  How much thought did they put into it?  And maybe we are just too darn easy to please.  Um yeah, you read that correctly.  Women are very easy to please in the gift giving department, at least those who’ve been around the block a few times are.  We’ve decreased our expectations to the point that if a guy even remembers Valentine’s Day, much less gives us flowers, we think he’s king of the hill.

I’m not the only female though that longs to see them sweat as much as we do.

After much puzzling on this whole subject of what to buy the men in our lives, Sarah finally said we needed to start demanding more ourselves, give them a taste of what it’s like to search frantically for the gift that tells them that not only do we love them but we understand them, we get them.

Do they do this for us?

And then inspiration hit Sarah like a bolt of lightning from above, as she came up with a scenario for the women blighted by too much painstaking shopping at Brooktone and Cabella’s to try in an effort to give the men in our lives a taste of what we go through for love of them:

Do you have an iPod?  I think you should ask for an engraved one and ask him to make you a playlist that best reflects you and your relationship. Actually, get him to make several playlists that symbolize your time together….  Now that will get him thinking!  And doing something besides buying roses or chocolate…

Although I think you should ask for Shari’s Berries, too….

“He’s Not a Jerk, But He Is a Man”

It is a problem I often discuss with fellow contributor and mother Susannah Herrada—the dearth of material on this blog on motherhood.  We promise to cover this subject and do occasionally, but, as Susannah says, “Men and sex are so much more fun to talk about.”  I don’t know as “fun” is the appropriate word.  “Intriguing” might be a more accurate word and less likely to get me in dutch with the opposing gender than other descriptors that come to mind.

Not that I don’t like men.  I love them.  That’s the problem.

If I wasn’t so fond of them, I could avoid a lot of grief in this life.  Because it can be grief-inducing to love that which we do not understand.  If you’re a woman anyway.  I don’t think most men understand us either, but they don’t get very wound up about it.  They just shake their heads, shrug, and go treat their confusion with an alcoholic beverage or two.

I’m not sure at what point it was in my life that men really began to confuse me.  When I was a child, my dad was one of my fondest playmates, I was the only girl among a host of boys at my babysitter’s, and I loved LEGOs, Hot Wheels, and playing Soviets vs. Americans (as opposed to cowboys and Indians) with the boys.  I could leap off a brick wall, crawl through a ditch in a make-believe war zone, and take prisoners in a tomato cage with the best of them.  And when I hit high school, I found guys were much more interesting conversationalists than the typical adolescent girl who seemed to me far too wound up for my taste in spending the vast majority of her waking hours trying to figure out how to be attractive to the opposite sex when it seemed quite simple to me—just talk to them.  Having a great rack will only get you so far.  At some point you have to do something else besides look cute.

Or so I thought.

But somewhere after college and a couple of relationships that ended on sour notes for reasons I could not explain at the time and maybe after I had a baby, I started to lose my preference for men as friends.  It was almost as if, overnight, they became creatures who were completely out of touch with my reality and had absolutely no understanding of what I needed or wanted.

I found instead that in order to get what I required in the form of support and understanding, I needed to go to my women friends.  Because in the wake of the rush of teenage hormones and love gone wrong, the women had suddenly become smart again, and somehow the men I had so admired became a little bit stupid…at least in a few critical areas…one being human relationships.

They remain great consorts for debating whether or not the Fed is doing the right thing by keeping interest rates low or for discussing why we should care anymore about Newt Gingrich’s purported request for “open marriage” than we do about the stains on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.  Which sort of brings me to the point of this whole discussion.

And that is, are men really the jerks they so often appear to be?  Because while I really don’t give a crap who sleeps with whom or who is doing what on whose dress, the one thing that does bug me is when men lie.  Not just about sex but about all kinds of things.

When I suggested to a friend recently that I felt I was being lied to by a man, she responded somewhat glibly, “I’m not really sure if you can call it lying when they don’t really know they’re lying.”

You mean Bill Clinton really didn’t believe fellatio was sex?  And Newt Gingrich didn’t really realize he had no friends who could guarantee he did not make a request to his wife for open marriage?

Yep, on some level, that’s about right, ladies.  Their minds are a little bit different than ours.  Because as my friend went onto say, “They are lying to themselves, and they don’t really know it, so you can’t really get mad at them for lying to you.”

“Well,” I replied, still in a huff of discontent at some recent offense by a male friend, “I still think he’s a jerk.”

“No,” my friend rejoined, “he’s not a jerk, but he is a man.”

We women complain at length about this phenomenon of “being a man.”  We criticize their seeming contentedness with life as long as they have access to good food, warm beds, sufficient sleep, sufficient sex, a television, a drawer full or two of electronic gadgets, and a well-stocked liquor cabinet or fridge of beer, depending on which type of man you happen to choose.  But don’t we have some responsibility here?  I mean, we raised them.  Or our mother’s generation did anyway.  And then we went and married them, and if that isn’t an acknowledgment of acceptance, I don’t know what is.

Some of us can claim ignorance because we married young, back before we really understood what men were all about.  It’s like when you watch one of those reality TV shows on brides.  (Forgive me for not knowing the names of these things, but I don’t have a television, so I get a glimpse of popular culture only in hotel rooms.)  You’ll see the fresh and lovely 20-something bride, trying on her sequined, strapless gown, her mother arranging a veil over her delicate shoulders, and she oozes at the camera: “Jason is my best friend.  Marrying him is a dream come true.”

Yes, please hold the vomit if you can.

It’s not that I’m cynical.  I really do like men, especially the ones I don’t have to pick up after.  But I am a realist.  And I’m pretty certain if you ask any woman 35 and older if her husband is her best friend, she’ll give you a look of complete incredulity and say something like, “Are you kidding?  My 13-year-old daughter is a better friend than he is.”

And that’s because not only do mothers and society as a whole not train men to have the slightest idea how to be friends (Men’s idea of consolation in a crisis goes something like this, “Aw, that really sucks, Dave, that your wife walked out on you.  But hey, at least she won’t get after you about poker night anymore, huh?  So, how about a round of golf?  You up for it?”), their wives and girlfriends don’t give much attention to it either.  After we discover that the whole intensive listening, commiseration, hugging, and kissing away of tears that we experienced in the throes of early romance was all a grand ploy to get us between the sheets permanently, maybe with a few nice hot dinners thrown in, we become bitter and, well, give up.

We think these men are dreadful creatures for wanting no more from us than that and then for giving so little in return.

I’m loathe to report this, but we do bear some responsibility here, ladies.  Here’s a case in point: A male colleague of mine, after perusing this blog with some interest and not a little bit of offense, recounted to me how he was sitting in front of the TV one night watching the news while his wife folded laundry in the adjacent room.  After some time had passed, she called out, “How is it that I have folded four loads of laundry, and you are just sitting there watching TV?”

Not about to take this imbedded criticism sitting down, my male colleague retorted to his wife, “As I recall, when we first married and I helped with the laundry, you constantly criticized the way I did it until I just quit.”

Is this sounding familiar to any of you?

My disgruntled male colleague continued his story. “’I told her,’ he said, ‘do you want the laundry folded, or do you want it done your way?’” And he huffed a little at me, the surrogate demanding female, and said, “Because I’m just going to wad up my underwear.”

I’m listening to him all the while and nodding a bit.  I’m getting it.  I really am.

He’s not finished with his tirade against women though. “My wife irons the sheets,” he persists. “Who irons their sheets?!  She got that from her mother, but she’s way better than her mother. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t have chosen her.”

And I find myself a little bit heartened by the seeming backhanded compliment he has given his beloved who does all the family’s laundry and carefully irons everyone’s bed linens. He loves her.  I heard it in his voice.  Nevermind that his wife has apparently not been through the ringer yet enough to do as a much more experienced friend of mine has done….

The friend to whom I am referring recently moved in with her fiancé.  And to her delight and surprise, she has discovered the man vacuums.  And he doesn’t just vacuum.  He vacuums without being asked to vacuum.  “The first time he turned on the vacuum cleaner,” she said, “my jaw dropped.”

Her jaw more than dropped actually.  She said the minute he began moving that sucker across the living room floor, she said to herself, I’m gonna marry that man.

Just between us, she admitted he doesn’t vacuum the way she would vacuum, if she indeed ever vacuumed, which she hasn’t because she’s always had a housekeeper, but the woman is no dummy.  She is keeping her lips carefully sealed, remembering to be thankful for the fact that “by god, the man has initiative” and who the hell cares if all he wants in return is sex and a steaming hot slice of lasagna?

Because that really is what it’s all about, isn’t it?  It’s not that we’re angry at men because all they want is food and sex (or whatever other seemingly simplistic pleasure it is). We’re angry at them because they don’t acknowledge what those needs actually represent—that sex is the only way they know how to relate to us in many instances, and our provision of a hot meal is how they know (whether they admit it or not) they are loved and cared for, and they need our emotional sustenance as much, if not more, than we need theirs.  (After all, their best buddy isn’t going to sit up with them all night and listen to them bemoan the loss of their mother, but we will…if they ask.  They probably won’t ask, at least not the way we would ask, but pay attention the next time your S.O. comes home from the most hellacious day at work ever.  And notice how it changes his mood entirely if you give him physical attention.  Deny it, and you have just verified, unintentionally most likely, that his boss is right—he is an idiot.)

It’s true they have a lot of trouble speaking our language.  But we are just as guilty of not speaking theirs.

This is not to say one should forgive the behavior of jerks.  Some men really are jerks and probably intend to be.  Like the guy I ran into on assignment not too long ago who began chatting with me at a cocktail party following a launch event.  We discovered to our mutual delight we both had wicked senses of humor, and I even forgave him for leaning into me a little too hard after he’d had a few drinks, particularly since it sounded as if, from his chit-chat, he’d been recently divorced and wasn’t quite over it.

However, I was to discover a few weeks later when he “friended” me on Facebook that yes, he was divorced all right, but also recently remarried, as in remarried four months before he started coming onto me in what I thought at the time was a relatively harmless gesture of flirting from a discarded man massaging his damaged ego.  No matter how I turned that one over in my head, the guy was a jerk.

But chances are actually reasonably good that the guy you’re with isn’t, at least not to the degree you think.  Give him a break, and let him wad up his underwear if he wants to.  And as for the guys, if you happen to be reading this, I’ll let you in on a secret a female colleague told me once: “The thing men don’t realize is that we’d forgive a lot more of their dirty socks on the floor, their muddy footprints across the porcelain tile, and the fact that they sit in front of the TV while we’re cooking dinner if they could just reignite the romance they spoiled us with before we married.”

The Five Types of Men…a Woman Needs

It started as these conversations often do—about half a dozen women (this time a gathering mostly of writers and editors) circled around a table, satiated from an over large dinner they never would have gulped down with such relish in front of their husbands and boyfriends, ever so perfectly relaxed after two glasses of wine each, some starting on the third. And while the topic of men can hardly be avoided at a table of women (men are one of our favorite subjects, you know), there is something especially dangerous about a table full of women writers accompanied by wine.

It began innocently enough.  The oldest among us, a talkative brunette from Alabama, mid-50s, was addressing the subject of the life changing effects of serious illness.  “When I had cancer, it was the first time in my life my husband really took care of me, really worried about me.” She paused, bit her lip.  “He was scared.  It was really nice.”

We were not shocked by this.  We nodded.  We understood exactly the phenomenon of the unappreciated wife, taken for granted like a La-Z-Boy recliner or Monday night football.  One among us asked, “How long have you been married?”

“30 years,” the Alabama writer replied.

Some of us gasped.

“It hasn’t been easy,” she went on.  “There were many times I thought of leaving him, just wanted to give up.”

“Then how did you stay married 30 years?” I asked, leaning in for her imminent wisdom.

“The way you avoid divorce for 30 years,” she said, “is to stay married.  It will eventually get better.”

Yes, I thought to myself, all you have to do is acquire some frightening and potentially fatal disease.  Then your husband will suddenly appreciate you.

“You know,” the middle-aged brunette continued a bit wistfully, “I always dreamed of having a man who would listen to my problems and be there for me.”

A couple of us shot her hard and disbelieving looks.  Really?  She’s over 50, and she still holds onto this pipe dream?

The outdoors editor from Mississippi with her deadpan, never crack a smile humor (if indeed it was humor) said suddenly and firmly, “The guy who will listen to your problems and be there for you—that’s your dad.”

We all nodded vigorously in agreement, and the ever hopeful cancer survivor looked a little bit disappointed, perhaps wondering if her husband’s newfound love and admiration would dissipate like her cancer cells after chemo.

One can’t be too critical of her, however.  Even the most experienced, cynical, and worn out wife among us cannot help but admit that occasionally we do dream of the perfect man. Why do housewives read Harlequin romances?  Why do the more worldly seek Jane Austen?  Because on some level, we still want to believe in those ridiculous fairytale romances of our youth, nevermind that every time my daughter tells me she wants to be Cinderella or Snow White, I cringe.

What we have to realize, however, ladies, is that the perfect man does not exist, at least not in one person.  But you have a couple of choices for addressing this problem.  You can accept that he does not exist and settle for one of the five or so types of men available, or you can complicate your life extremely (or maybe make it better—who knows?) by finding different men to fulfill your five different needs.

At the risk of over-generalizing (and I’m sure my male friends and colleagues will set me straight on this, as they always do), here’s what’s out there:

1)      The Man’s Man

The benefits: He can change the oil in your car, catch dinner with a fishing pole or shoot it, too, if need be (just in case the apocalypse comes), and he can carry all your luggage on vacation (though, be advised, because he is a “man’s man,” he will complain about it loudly). Whatever is broken, he can fix it (except your heart, I’m afraid to report).  And while he doesn’t do laundry, he’s a powerhouse at yard work, home repair, vehicle maintenance, and generally pretty good as well at holding his alcohol.

The drawbacks: Monday night football or some other equally annoying habit that leaves you wondering why he prefers pigskin to yours.  Rough hands and a complete lack of foreplay awareness.  Zero help around the house and substantial contributions to your workload—i.e., he drops double the number of stinky socks on the floor than the other four male types. He can boil water, but that’s about it when it comes to helping in the kitchen.  He’ll do dishes if you promise him “you know what” afterwards.

Advice from the experts: Don’t marry a man just because he can fix your car; you can always hire someone to do this.

2)      The Sugar Daddy

The benefits: If living in the lap of luxury is your highest priority, this is the man for you. He will give you everything your heart desires—a beautiful house, a luxury car, vacations to exotic and expensive destinations, all the clothes, jewelry, and shoes(!) you could desire. He will make you feel like a queen (albeit a lonely one).

The drawbacks: To finance all this luxury generally requires long hours, lots of traveling, and very little interaction with the life at home. He will be an absentee lover, husband, and father.

Advice from the experts: If you go this route, make sure you have a “rabbit” and/or a pool boy handy.

3)      The Helpmate

The benefits: On first glance, this guy seems like a dream come true.  He knows how to cook (in fact, he might even be a gourmet chef!), he does his own laundry and yours, too (and he even knows to wash your silk panties on the cold and delicate cycle).  He’ll help you clean the house, professing to be a true 21^st century kind of guy and a feminist to boot.  He’ll change diapers.  He’ll go to all the kids’ soccer games (and he won’t get in a fist fight with the opposing team’s head coach like the no. 1 variety might). In fact, he’s a major conflict avoider.  He avoids conflict with you; he avoids conflict with your mother; and he avoids conflict with the guy who just pinched your behind in the grocery store checkout line.

The drawbacks: If you want a guy who will clean the house, he’s perfect. If you want a guy who knows how to clean the clock of a rude offender, he’s not it.  And while you will love all the help around the house, you can only stand so much apron wearing before you start to feel like you just married your grandmother.

Advice from the experts: You’ll never have a dust bunny under the bed again, but who cares when you’re not doing anything in bed but sleeping?

4)      The Big Kid

The benefits: No doubt about it.  This is the most fun guy on the block.  He has a wild sense of humor, he kayaks, he skis, he loves snowball and pillow fights. And once you have kids, he’ll keep them entertained through the preparation of a five-course dinner, leaving you undisturbed in the kitchen.  He loves to please, loves to have fun, knows how to make you laugh when you’re completely sober, and has an uncanny understanding of what makes kids tick, which actually makes him a pretty great father.

The drawbacks: After awhile, you get tired of being the only adult in the house.

Advice from the experts: He’s loads of fun on vacation, but realize that when you have a late meeting, he thinks Cheeseburger in Paradise is a healthy option for dinner with the kids.

5)      The Lover

The benefits: This is the rarest breed of man, the one who knows how to talk to women (though the jury is out on whether he comes by this skill naturally or has acquired it as a result of experience, having grown up with six sisters and a domineering mother).  He knows exactly what to say to make you feel beautiful, sexy, loved, and admired, and he has equal skill in the physical manifestation of his admiration. He will stop at nothing to make you happy. (Be warned, however, many men put on a good show of being “the lover” in those early days of romance and pursuit; rare is the man who can sustain this personality type after the ring has been locked around your finger.)

The drawbacks: It’s very difficult to distinguish “the lover” from “the player” (which is one of several subcategories of “the jerk”—see below).

Advice from the experts: Proceed with caution. He can rock your world, but because he’s so darn good at it, you will live in a constant state of paranoia, wondering if, deep down, he’s actually “the player.”

Chances are, your S.O. is one of the above.  At least I hope he is.  Because there is a sixth type—“the jerk.”  The jerk comes in many forms, from the guy who expects to be waited on hand and foot as if he is Henry VIII with the wealth and power to attract six wives even after one has been beheaded, to the delusional “I’m a good man, and you damn well better respect me” type that plays computer games all day, ignores the kids, and only likes you because you make his life delightfully comfortable. (Yum, please pass some more of that butter coconut pie before I go take a 12-hour nap.)  If you happen to have “the jerk” in your midst, do a favor for womankind and dump him, please.

Your man, if you are lucky, might also be a combination of several of the above.  If he contains the characteristics of all five, you may actually have a woman on your hands.  Check his pants.

Because ultimately, if it’s a man you desire, you’re going to have to sacrifice something and stop envying your lesbian friends.  (In reality, their lives aren’t so great either.  Just stop and imagine for a moment what it would be like to live with a copy of yourself.)

Or, if you can figure out some way to do it that is legal, find five men who meet all of your needs.  Good luck with that one, by the way.  I think you’ll have better luck finding a pair of Manolo Blahniks on sale at the mall.

Sex and Chocolate: Why Variety and Frequency Really Do Matter

Enjoying one of many varieties of the "sweet stuff"

Here’s what woke me up in the middle of the night a few days ago.  Call it a dream, or a maybe a vision.  Heck, some men out there might go so far as to think it’s a message from above for all women.

Here’s how the tale unfolded:  Dressed in way too much tulle, I was standing at the altar, beaming at my husband-to-be.  Though the rest of the details were a bit fuzzy, the wrinkles, sagging, and cellulite which have encroached on my body over the past 13 years were all magically erased.  As I stood there radiating with every promise of the perfect life to come, I naively repeated the traditional wedding vows.  The strange thing was that this time, my wedding vows were a little different than I remembered from the first go-round.  There was a line inserted which went something like this: “And I promise to love, cherish, and eat only Hershey’s original chocolate bars for as long as we both shall live.”

Seemed odd.  Promising to devote myself to only one type of chocolate?  A bit restrictive perhaps?

It quickly dawned on me that with such vows, the only chocolate I’d be eating for the rest of my married life would be rectangular bars stamped with “Hershey’s.”  This strange vow dictated that no Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers, or even a Hershey’s Kiss would pass my lips for the rest of my married days if I was to remain faithful to my husband.  And it went without saying that I’d have to abstain from my quest for the perfect square of dark chocolate.  No other brand or type of chocolate forever and ever, Amen.

That brief foray into an imaginary world was a bit disturbing to me.  I like chocolate.  I like different kinds of chocolate.  I experience a physiological response when I see chocolate.  My mouth waters when I smell warm chocolate chip cookies.  My eyes lustfully graze over the offerings of chocolate at the check-out, particularly at the better grocery stores which source a diverse selection of quality bars.   I even look forward to savoring a square of dark chocolate every morning.  No offense to Hershey’s, but the thought that I would be restricted to only a mediocre chocolate bar for the rest of my life seemed like quite a sacrifice.

Maybe I have a problem.  Then again, maybe at some level, it’s human nature to feel like that.

And now, I’ll take this opportunity to suggest that perhaps women’s connection to chocolate can provide a glimpse of what it’s like on the other side of the bed.  Albeit a weak analogy, I think there’s a little bit in here for all of us women.

Essentially, what your husband said when he stood at that altar was that he was going to eat only Hershey’s Bars for the rest of his life.  Perhaps you consider yourself more like a sassy Snickers bar or a sophisticated hand-painted artisan chocolate.  Either way, you get the point.  Eating only one type of candy for the rest of one’s life would get kind of monotonous.  Especially when he really likes chocolate and there’s a lot of chocolate out there.  Now whether or not he’d even have the chance to taste all that chocolate out there is another blog post altogether.  But back to the chocolate analogy– in some cases, adding to the depressing situation would be a strict frequency limitation: begrudging tastes only once or twice a month.

I’m no expert on men, but I imagine it’s not always easy for them to remain faithful.  It’s no secret that just like it’s more common for women to have eating disorders/body image distortion/weight gain, many men struggle with sexual issues at varying levels.  Even if he doesn’t act on his desires, lust is there nagging in his mind.  Just look at the wealthy and powerful.  Those men can write their own ticket in this department.  And look at what a mess they make.  Men who have remained faithful are akin to a woman who hasn’t gained an extra 15 pounds over her last 10 years of wedded bliss (eating too much chocolate, no doubt).  Therefore, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that a woman’s food issues could be akin to a man’s sex drive.  From a survival of the species angle, this makes sense.  In most species, males procreate, sometimes with multiple females, while females are responsible for care and feeding of the young.  Sex for men.  Food for women.  Maybe we’re just not as evolved as we think we are.

Momentum, monogamy, and creativity are tough to keep up.  I’ve failed miserably at all of these at different points in my marriage. There are days that I don’t feel creative.  There are nights that I watch the elapsing clock in the wee small hours of the morning, wondering if we’ve got what it takes to keep going.  (Of course, starting those mornings with a good piece of dark chocolate does make it all seem a little easier.)

Finally, here’s a tricky one to put out there.

We have to put out a little more.  We’re all they’ve got.

You’re his Hershey’s bar.  And just like I eat chocolate on a pretty regular basis, he’d probably be glad for a bit more action.  An occasional reluctant nod in his direction is not enough.

I know—he doesn’t deserve it.  You’re annoyed that he made a snarky comment when you asked him to put his dirty socks in the basket, totally messed up your last anniversary and apologized only after you pitched a fit, worked late all week and then went to poker night, didn’t help put the kids to bed or bring the trash cans in.  And then when he did unload the dishwasher that one time, he expected his reward should be you on your knees thanking him.  There’s never a lack of legitimate reasons to say no.  And there are lots of blogs about men behaving badly and needing denial discipline.  Sometimes it’s the only behavior modification tool we have.  And it goes without saying that a woman should never put herself in a compromising situation where she’s disrespected, abused, or used.  But I’m not talking about dysfunctional, unhealthy relationships or about exhausted women who work full-time with three children under the age of four.

For the rest of us in stable, healthy relationships, I’m merely putting it out there that instead of examining sex as a pawn, a means of manipulation, or a punishment, realize we’re all in this together.

Maybe I’ve taken this whole analogy a bit too far, but it comes down to this: Men love sex.  Women love chocolate (or food in general).  Both are arguably biological drives.  I’m not suggesting that we all need to have sex on a trampoline (that actually came up in the conversation at about 11:30 p.m. one girls’ night with a few too many French Martinis).  And as it goes with chocolate, we don’t always need to be having peak culinary experiences.  (Though I’d never be one to rule out edible body chocolate if the opportunity arose).

My point is merely that we may all have a bit more in common than we realize.  Monotony and denial are our enemies.

Finally, if you made a terrible mistake and made your faithful promises to chocolate dipped sweet and sour gummy worms, Butterfingers, or those waxy white chocolate bunnies you can pick up for a dollar around Easter, my musings are null and void.  I’m so sorry.   It’ll take more than some high quality chocolate every day to solve your problems.

And to my single sisters—let this be a lesson to choose your candy wisely.  Consider an upfront, solid version with few artificial colors or flavors.   Look for honest packaging with clear labels so you know what you’re  getting.   Most importantly, make sure your candy is sourced in a way that aligns with your values and moral code and that it can adapt to a multitude of combinations, while remaining classic and steadfast for a lifetime.

Let Me Act Like I Know What I’m Doing Here

“Perfect isn’t that interesting to watch. In fact, it can be both boring and exhausting. What we like to see is human.” –Frances Cole Jones

In a book I had to review recently, the author wrote, and not necessarily with contempt, that social media has made us all exhibitionists and opened the way for everyone to make public confessionals.  There is truth in this.  And the result is a lot of noise in a world already overflowing with information.

When I asked some women friends and acquaintances to help contribute to this blog, they balked (even the two who are currently contributing).  The idea of flinging their personal lives onto the Internet for their parents, their friends, their neighbors to read…and judge…seemed a little bit scary.  “What if I offend someone?  What if I make someone mad?”  Of course, having been a journalist and columnist for many years, I know that stirring up the pot is often the whole point.  If you’re not offending someone or making someone mad at least some of the time, you probably don’t stand for much, and you’re probably not making much of a difference in anyone’s life either.

But is it all, in the end, just self-serving and self-magnifying noise?  Well, it depends.  There is a place for the public confessional.  I think of Brooke Shields’ book Down Came the Rain, where she talked about her own struggle with postpartum depression.  I think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which chronicled her trials with recovering from divorce, lost love, and daring to love again.  I think of Isabel Gillies’ It Happens Every Day, where she acknowledged her own responsibility in her ex-husband’s extramarital affair.  And I think of Youngme Moon’s Difference, where she talked about the day she decided to stop teaching the way everyone else was teaching and how it changed her life and the lives of her students.  These books fit the category of public confessional, and how glad am I these women confessed.

Their confessions have made me (and others, too, no doubt) feel less alone on this journey called life.  And they have taught me new ways of thinking about and approaching my own existence.  Knowing someone else has tried and failed and tried again…differently…gives me hope in moments when hope seems hard to come by.

Some of my friends and acquaintances will be surprised–those who think I limit myself to great, dead literary authors like William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Elizabeth Gaskell.  But all these books, literary fiction and popular memoir, have something critical in common.  Perhaps no one can set a scene like Thomas Hardy.  And perhaps no one can jar our senses with “hit that nail on the head” meaning like Faulkner.  But they are, in the end, all public confessionals–cutting open the writer’s view of the heart of life, whether achieved through fact or fiction.  And these confessionals change us.

So let me confess….

I started this blog because I realized I had it too good in some ways.

Trained by experience to establish rapport with sources by finding that rock of shared experience that would make them trust me, I have been the recipient of more than a few confessionals over the years.  And what I discovered from that and from the tools of journalism that I have transferred over to my relationships with friends and colleagues is that everyone has a story, many stories most likely, that they are dying to tell, need to tell.  They are just waiting for the audience…the audience that often never comes.  They want someone to walk into their lives who gives a damn, really, honestly gives a damn.  Because life is hard, and life is scary, and isolation is the surest path to eternal torment.

I have received confessionals on a scale far deeper than any Catholic priest’s.  And it has not, as you might imagine, given me a front row seat to the hidden melodrama of people’s lives. Rather, having that window into people’s souls has given me a window into my own.  It has given me the courage to acknowledge my own failures, learn from them, and pass the lessons on.

The assistant instructor at the dance studio where I take lessons twice a week often remarks when teaching choreography she has just learned herself, “Let me act like I know what I’m doing here.”  And we chuckle with some relief, glad perhaps to know that someone else is “winging it” besides ourselves.

I can recall having done the same as a young Humanities professor, teaching the history of early Western Culture, a subject well outside my area of expertise, a subject in which I struggled to stay a step ahead of my students.  They thought I was the expert.  How wrong they were.  Yet I never let on that I had about as much expertise in the origins of Islam as the Walmart greeter.

But I grew up, as many of us do, with the idea that perfection is the goal.  After all, the Bible (a centerpiece of western culture whether you are Christian or not) enjoins us to “be perfect as thy Father in heaven is perfect.”  I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but this world we live in is far from perfect, and if you think God created it, then I guess you also have to figure He wasn’t perfect or that He was intentionally imperfect.  So I think it’s probably perfectly okay and well within your rights if you are religious to perform imperfectly in this world.  It might even be you were meant to do so.

That’s not an easy idea to get used to, however.  Some of my most well-educated and seemingly level-headed friends still strive for perfection, still attempt to hide imperfection even from the people they love most in the world.  How many times have you watched yourself go through the motions of cheerfulness when you did not truly feel it?  How many times have you told your boss you can handle that project, no problem, when on the inside you’re terrified that you have no idea what you’re doing?

We all lie to each other…and sometimes to ourselves for the sake of civility.  But where does civility stop and honesty begin?  It is a difficult question.

I have a lifetime of experience in “acting like I know what I’m doing here.”  I write articles that people trust to be accurate and true even when I myself am sleep deprived and pulling through with the aid of caffeine alone.  I write columns that are supposed to inspire people to get off their rears and do something with their lives even when I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m doing with mine half the time.  A friend of mine remarked to me not long after I’d returned from three consecutive trips that had me zooming through seven different time zones in the course of a month, “I wish I could live your life for a day.”

Really? 

Perhaps it looks grand from where she is sitting.  From where I am sitting, it often looks downright ridiculous.

There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when I felt some not entirely sane obligation to offer the appearance at least of the perfect life.  I thought that, by virtue of the fact I had followed a childhood dream to fruition, it was my duty to inspire others to do the same—to make it look rewarding and wonderful to follow one’s heart.  And it is.  But not all the time.  Not by a long stretch.  Sometimes I feel like I am hanging onto my dreams with a tiny piece of thread that is slowly fraying.

We all feel that way, of course, at one time or another.  But rarely will you find a person willing to admit it, unless you are interviewing her for an article on overcoming doubt.  Most of us, for the most part, still hide behind our carefully constructed and often ridiculously transparent veils of perfection.

An acquaintance of mine said this is necessary, that we cannot bare our souls to the world.  What an awkward place it would be.  He has a point.  You know those people on Facebook who announce to the world when they’re having a nervous breakdown?  Yep, that’s a little creepy, I have to acknowledge.  I’ve “unfriended” a few of those.  It can be uncomfortable, at times, to have a front row seat to imperfection.

But maybe that’s only because we are not used to it.  My jury is still out on that.

And though I’ve never given much heed to New Year’s resolutions, I might give it a go this year.  My new purpose in life will be to be an inspiration, not by being perfect, but by being human…and being very good at it.

How I found Room in my Life for his ‘Model-Upgrade’ Affair

To be a bit catty, I’m often shocked at who people pick as their lovers. You do have to wonder why someone like Peter Cook would cheat on Christie Brinkley. What were you thinking, Pete? You had the woman that every man (and, truth be told, quite a handful of woman) would put on the top of their ‘list.’ How is it that stars who are married to super models have affairs with frumpy women?

And let’s not discriminate here–women are just as guilty.  On our forays into the cheating hearts club, it’s not unusual for us to pick tubby men with receding hairlines.  They’re nice guys, of course, but lack a little in the looks department.

The reality is that the idea of the object of one’s lust always being a visual ‘model-upgrade’ is a deeply held myth, perpetuated by the big screen.  In Hollywood, the ‘other woman,’ whether prostitute, prom queen, or housewife, is always shamelessly hot.  But we all know in real life, we lie in bed at night with our partner, pondering a friend’s recent marriage demise, and admit to the darkness, “I can’t believe he wrecked his marriage to fool around with her.”

Obviously there’s more than physical appearance that motivates a philanderer.  Neglect, loss of a dream, being locked in an emotional wasteland, lack of appreciation….  Everyone can claim his or her own fill-in-the-blank rationale.  But since volumes have been written examining these less-than-superficial reasons, I’ll revel in the shallow red-light.  If you’re going to have an affair, don’t go for a fixer-upper when choosing a lover.

And this is where my story begins its twisted cord.  The wandering heart in my household took my advice and went for a ‘model upgrade.’

In my case, it was simply that unmet needs and building tensions undermined what was a previously pleasurable shared experience.  I remember how it used to be when my husband and I spent hours doing things together. Some of my fondest memories center around the adventures and misadventures of our road trips: reading West with the Night on a road trip to Maine, waking before dawn to skirt the I-95 traffic to Florida, a New Years’ trip to Asheville to camp in a snowstorm.

I think it’s the hours traveling together that have always been particularly special to me. I’d sit in the passenger seat, map on my lap, camera in hand, bag of snacks at my feet, and love in my heart. My number one job was to navigate, though I catered, photographed, and helped my husband to stay awake on those long, late night drives. I thought I was an all-around chipper travel companion, commenting on the scenery, anticipating our next stop, and reading informative quips from the travel book.

But as the years passed, things began to deteriorate. I joke that we have our best fights in the car, but it’s not always so funny. Though we also have our deepest talks in the car, we seem to have our most intense arguments, too, often tipped off by my navigational skills (or lack thereof). Although I’d like to blame him for his impatience or pin ‘fear of making mistakes’ on his psyche, I know that I have a severe deficiency in ‘map reading.’

It starts out simply. He asks me something like, “Is this our exit?”

I answer, “I think so.”

He retorts, “Are you sure?”

I start to panic, as we have a few hundred feet left, and say “Yeah, take it, on the right. Take it. I think that’s it. Just take it.”

He says, “What? You ‘think.’ What exit number were we supposed to get off on?”

The exit passes; we miss it. I tell him he doesn’t listen to me. I confirm that it was the correct exit. He says I didn’t seem like I was sure. Then I spiral down to tangentially pinning every emotion, insecurity, and quibble we’ve ever had in our marriage to this one interchange. For the next hour, I go on and on and end in a hyperventilating mess, forcing me to completely re-do my make-up before we knock on the door of his roommate from school that we’ve been driving in the car for seven hours to see.

Perhaps I have conjured up a bit of sympathy for him at this point.  No wonder he looked other places to get his needs met.  Who wouldn’t–married to a catastrophizing woman like me.  I would drive anyone crazy.   I will be the first to admit that we all, including me, have space for improvement.  Nonetheless, like any wife will say, I was still shocked to find him in the company of another.

And here continues the sad tale of how it all crumbled in my hands.  How he showed complete disregard for my feelings, practically flaunting her in my face.  It was as if he wanted to get caught. As I came out to the car one day, I could see her silhouette through the front windshield. She was trim and, well, obviously well-endowed. Not being one to go down without a fight, I confronted the situation.

I was immediately struck by how sexy her voice was. Even in an awkward situation such as this, she maintained a steady, confident voice. It was as if she was completely unthreatened by me, knowing she had nothing to prove. Her quiet calm was in great contrast to my escalating panic.

My husband said his friend Peter had a woman like her that spoke to him in French. I merely raised my eyebrow at this. As if Peter’s behavior would excuse my husband’s cheating heart.

After a snarky comment, I went back into the house, making sure the front door slammed. I felt old, worn out, and replaced. As you can imagine, lots of soul searching occurred.  As time went on though, I began to think about the situation in a more level-headed manner. I like to think of myself as a relatively progressive woman and recognize that I am not able to meet all of my husband’s needs. Though you may not agree with me, I resigned my initial fury and told him that there may be room for all of us in this marriage.

Blame it on the prevalence of shows like Big Love, but I was ready to find space for this other woman (and her sultry voice) in our lives. I soon could see why he had such an attraction to her. She was confident without being bossy.  She never cowered to a mumble when being challenged.  And she maintained a rare quality in a woman:  even when it was obvious that no one was taking her advice, she  refrained from escalating her tone to a painfully squeaky pitch, as she repeated herself for the third time.   She was an endless font of patient information.

And even better, she is amazingly low-maintenance.  Not only is she willing to hang on the windshield for hours with a mere suction cup, but she considerately displays a polite warning if she’s running low on energy.  Now how’s that for an unusual quality in a woman?

Now she goes with us everywhere.  Whether we’re fearlessly flying down Route 66 or meandering through narrow streets in Arcos de la Frontera in Spain, we always include her in our plans.  And our marriage is actually better for having her as a part of it.  Although we struggle in many ways to keep technology from overwhelming our lives—too much TV, texting at the dinner table, cell phone calls on date night—we’ve found that relieving me of my navigational duties has freed us to find more joy in the journey.  I can’t meet all of my husband’s needs, as it would be foolhardy to expect him to meet all of mine. Where we fall short, we can always depend on friends, a bit of wine, and a ‘model up-grade’ now and again.

And I’m not threatened in the least by her trim figure or confident voice.

After all, she sleeps in the glovebox.  I’ve still got the bed….