A study in contrasts

I've just spent the evening chatting to a colleague and friend about her new man. She's very happy, and is planning to uproot her life and change her long-established plans to be with someone she first met less than two weeks ago. They have already had sex on several occasions, though this does not surprise me. This friend has always been open about the fact that she likes sex, feels the need for a regular dose to maintain her energy and equilibrium, and is willing to sleep with someone without an emotional attachment or any strings attached, if she is in the mood and thinks she'll have a good time. I envy her confidence and her pragmatism about this area of her life.

Late-night conversations often turn confessional, and I admitted, somewhat shyly, to my lack of experience with physical intimacy. She was surprised. I said I sometimes felt like a freak in this regard, and she asked me a question no-one else I've shared this information with has ever asked me: "Have you ever met someone you wanted to have sex with?" When I think about it, the answer to that is "no". I haven't ever felt that level of connection with someone. Perhaps it can be built (I hope so; Blue Boxer Boy is turning out to be more appealing with every conversation!). Giving this answer, I received the somewhat unexpected response: "Well, then there's no need to feel like a freak. It'll happen when you meet someone you want it to happen with". That this response should be so unlooked-for, and so surprising, seems to me to be a measure of how prurient and crass so many discussions of this sort can be.
In contrast, and to highlight the example, at work yesterday, I overheard a conversation which made me cringe in my chair. Several colleagues were discussing their own love-lives in crude detail, and the comment was made that another colleague present was a virgin (I'm a little surprised, as her ex is a close personal friend of mine, and I certainly believed they had, but perhaps not! The girl in question is also stunningly beautiful, with a fabulous figure, and has no doubt had plenty of opportunity, as well as several long-ish term relationship. Perhaps a little intimidating for her sheer physical beauty, but a genuinely lovely person). This information elicited such a round of not-quite-scorn, and advice of the "just do it with anyone" advice that I felt physically ill on behalf of its' target. This is why I don't often share that information about myself, even with relatively close friends in a typically very open environment. Whatever her reasons, and perhaps she too has simply never met someone she wanted to sleep with, how incredibly sad that she should be made to feel self-conscious and embarrassed about what is, after all, a personal choice, and that those colleagues do not have the insight and maturity of the woman I spoke to this evening, who is clearly comfortable enough with her own sexual choices not to feel the need to judge the choices of others.

Weighty issues

Never tell me fanfiction is not good for something (well, several somethings actually, but let's not go there!). I've just come across a story at the Fire & Ice Archive - a dedicated Ginny Weasley/Draco Malfoy site that I've rather abandoned of late, but have come back to in slight desperation this evening (I have spent over a week doing next to nothing, because there is NOTHING TO DO in this wretched city, and no-one to do anything with anyway, as all my colleagues are off in Europe, lucky people. Grrr). At any rate, this story was the slightly unlikely tale of a Draco Malfoy who has become rather overweight through an unhealthy addiction to sweet things brought about by a crushing and stress-inducing work schedule. Sceptical I was, my friends. Very sceptical. However, as I will read almost anything, and particularly when I am this stultifyingly bored, I read on. Draco hires Ginny as his personal trainer and dietician in an effort to regain his social life and to get in shape for a Celebrity Quidditch Match. On their first meeting in several years, Ginny very quickly pinpoints the real reason for his weight gain - he is lacking in confidence.

I have been thinking a lot over the last few days about the fundamental reasons for my failure, again, and again, and again, to lose significant amount of weight and keep it off. This is not a new subject for me. In fact, I have attempted to figure this out for myself, with close friends and even with a couple of therapists over the years. However, this story made me stop and think. Although I present to the world as a very confident, self-assured person (I've been told on numerous occasions that this is one of the major factors in my 'intimidating' status), the fact remains that I have been trying to deal with low self-esteem for years. After horrendous bullying at my prep school (5-10yrs in the system I grew up in) I contemplated suicide, aged 9, and changed schools as a result, with enormous care and attention going into the choice of my new teacher, whose mandate, I later discovered, read something along the lines of "who cares if she learns anything, just make her feel better about herself". Before anyone panics, I should say that I did not act on it then, nor have I contemplated it with any seriousness since, 'though I suspect I've been walking around as an undiagnosed depressive for a fairly large portion of my life. A new school improved matters slightly on the bullying front, but as discussed in previous posts, I've never really fitted in, and the isolation that causes is pretty damaging over such a long period of time.

It makes no sense for me to have low self-esteem, which I suspect is why so few people have ever picked up on it. See what you expect to see, don't look any deeper! From a purely rational standpoint, I know my many gifts and attributes. However, in my sub-conscious, and the darker recesses of my conscious mind, lurks a much less rational, more instinctive and emotional voice which crawls out to wheedle oleaginously and disrupt my equilibrium. Any new situation, or new group of people causes much more stress and fear than it should, particularly in social or sporting contexts. Although my professional achievements are pretty outstanding for a person of my age and experience, I fight off overwhelming self-doubt virtually every day. My constant need to prove myself, to myself as much as anyone else, probably doesn't help me in seeming less intimidating. Those little girls did more damage than they could possibly comprehend.

I was always large for my age, but not, in looking back, particularly fat, as a child. In a photo taken just before my first day of school, I look older than my four-and-a-half years, but am a pretty normal size, and really only carrying baby fat, as would be normal for a child of that age. A photo taken two years later tells a very different story. Here, I am indubitably the chubby kid, and that continues to be the case from that point forward, although it's not until I'm about twelve or thirteen that chubby really becomes 'fat'. In the two years between the first two photos, what happened? I left my wonderful Montessori pre-school, where my accelerated abilities were handled brilliantly and I was never bored or isolated from the other children, where I was popular, for the first and last time in my life, had wonderful friends and understanding teachers. I went to a school which promised to handle me and my freaky IQ with understanding and enrichment, and which failed mightily to do so. A school which singled me out, then left me to the tender mercies of my classmates - all at least a year older, mostly quite bright, but not in my league, mostly the thin, pretty, and already neurotic daughters of trophy wives and second, or third families. Even at 5, they knew where to hit emotionally to find a vulnerable point.

I don't think it had ever occurred to me to that point to think of myself as physically any different from all the other children around me. Despite being the youngest in the class by a year, I was third-tallest, and it would make sense that I was also rather more solid than many of the very petite little girls around me. Besides which, I 'm fairly sure that I had never heard 'fat' used as a derogatory term until I started school. Within days of starting, mid-year, I was the class outcast. I remember eternally being 'it', being banished from the jungle gym at play-time, and being the subject of a barrage of taunts and teasing from a large group of my school mates. My one friend, still, to this day, my dearest friend, though we see each other very rarely, could not always be there, loathed conflict (she still does!), and aged 5, was hardly equipped to handle being my defence team against an entire class-full of prosecutors (or persecuters, depending on your preferred metaphor!). Add to this level of misery a teacher who, by her own admission, was threatened by this precocious under-age interloper; eternal boredom, as the promised extension and enrichment programme failed to materialise, and a new sibling, who, however much I adored her, must have been a shock to the system of a much-cherished only child, and it's not surprising that things started to go downhill. By the start of my second year, my new teacher was reduced to giving me a sticker for every day I arrived in school looking happy. I was telling very tall, highly imaginative stories to get attention, and my after-school treat had become a neccessity to retrieve me from the inevitable flood of tears at the end of the day. Exhaustion from dealing with the emotional trauma was most easily remedied with a quick sugar-boost, and although my mother had never permitted processed foods, fizzy drinks and the like, my grandmother's shortbread, Mama's very sugary muesli flapjacks and homemade icecream all made admirable substitutes on the way from school to ballet, speech and drama, swimming, piano or french class.

This charming state of affairs continued, more or less, through my primary schooling. Although my classmates grew more civilised as we got older, they also became more adept at hiding the torment they inflicted from teachers and other students who might have intervened. Inevitably, the group that was worst was the 'top' group - 'top' in an academic sense, though they were also mostly the popular girls in the class. In retrospect, I can see that they were probably jealous and intimidated by my intellectual gifts, which left me streets ahead without any effort whatsoever. A class times-table challenge had to be abandoned after I sat at the top of the board without change for over a month, despite numerous challengers. Even then, my accomplishments were such that it must have seemed incredible that I, of all students, should have low self-esteem and depression. At the time, I just knew that they hated me, and that the reason they most often gave was because I was 'fat'.

I don't remember what the catalyst was that pushed me over the edge. I don't remember how it became clear to my mother and my teachers that serious problems were afoot. Either I've blocked them out, and my memories between eight and ten are sketchy at best. I remember going on my first diet - a tupperware container of fruit and cottage cheese for lunch does not help an eight year old blend in, when all the other little girls have packets of crisps, fruit roll-ups and Peanut Butter sandwiches. I remember going to Weight Watchers for the first time. I remember my first real experience of being a star in a non-academic setting, and I remember that I had a lot of 'tonsillitis' - a fact which meant I missed learning about fractions, an omission which haunted my maths career to the bitter end. I remember looking at the rack of knives in our kitchen and thinking how easy it would be. Beyond that, I have no recall.

With this as my background, I think about the weight issues that have plagued me ever since, and examine the facts. Until I was thirteen, I danced up to five days a week, though I was not permitted to sit senior exams, as my teacher knew I would be failed as I walked in the door for not having the right body type. I still have my pointe shoes, dancer's calf muscles, and a love for all varieties of dance that I get to indulge too rarely. I played field-hockey well, though usually in defensive positions (less running). I swam in the summer, skied in the winter and was taught tennis at some point in each year, though I never really progressed, finding it rather dull at the time. I was not an inactive child. Nonetheless, the weight continued to increase. I took to comfort-eating as soon as I could reach the shelves and cupboards where the 'bad' foods were kept. What my mother thought was happenning to the vast quantities of chocolate chips that disappeared, I will never know, though it may have been that the Nanny du jour was doing the shopping. It's extraordinary what a comfort-seeking eater will consume - stale, soggy biscuits, chocolate gone white with age, left-over Hallowe'en sweets from years previous. I stole small coins from my parents' dresser to buy junk from the school tuck shop. Anything to get me through the day. On one occasion, I ate the entire contents of a collection of sweets I was supposed to sell as a fundraising effort for a youth ballet production, and then had to make a sneaky withdrawal from my bank account in order to pay the requisite sum.

Looking at it now, looking at my current behaviour as regards food and exercise, and thinking in terms of self-esteem and confidence, it strikes me that perhaps the reason I have struggled to lose weight is that subconsciously, I don't want to. Having been told repeatedly, for such a long time, that the reason my classmates despised me was because I was 'fat', that 'fatness' became my shield. People didn't like me, not because of who I was, but what I was. Not because they were threatened by my abilities, or my vocabulary. Not because my sudden arrival had disturbed the established pecking order and a fight for social survival in Darwinian terms was inevitable. Not because they simply weren't ever going to be keen on me personally, but because I was fat. Fat became my security blanket, even as it became my greatest vulnerability. It wasn't me they were rejecting. It was my fat.

It's quite a realisation for me, and I think it really is the root answer to a question I have been asking myself for some time. Although I have had related theories before, none of them has been so basic. I don't really fear men - many of my best friends are men - so it can't just be that I hold on to my excess weight as protection from. I am fiercely ambitious, and do want to succeed in my career, as much as the next few years terrify me, so I can't only be subconciously holding myself back from that, not least because 'fat' was an issue for me long before my career was even a blip on the horizon. I need to think about it more, I need to analyse what that means for me on a day to day basis. My relationship with food is much saner and healthier these days, but still suffers from blips, mostly to do with boredom or emotional upheaval. Stress is a big factor too. My formal exercise aversion is something I suspect I will have to be creative about. Gyms, and even more especially, aerobics sessions, will never be for me, and I will always prefer snuggling up with a book or a good movie to going out for the sole purpose of getting sweaty and out of breath. If I could dance my way to fitness, I'd be happy, but my financial resources won't permit that course for quite some time, I fear. However, maybe now I can find the path that's right for me. If not to weight loss, then perhaps to self acceptance. To being happy to be me.

This is a very long post, and a very challenging one for me to have written. It's now stupid o'clock in the morning, and later today I have work to do, so I must away to my rest. Forgive any typos please - I'm too tired to re-read all of this now! If anyone wants to read the FanFic that began my epiphany, the link is http://www.dracoandginny.com/viewstory.php?sid=6401 . Gidge_8, whoever you are, wherever you are, you may just have changed my life. If nothing else, I now have a very good reason for my fanfic addiction, which doesn't have to do with the allure of various sexy vampires, wizards and the odd, sort-of-normal human!

A random thought on the oddities of the English language

Isn't it odd that we speak of 'losing' our virginity. It's not as if it's something that can be found again. I wonder what the terminology is in other languages. Think I must do some research!

Anger, fear, longing, living

Reading back over yesterday's entries, and particularly the latter of the two, I realise how aggressive and angry they sound. It's easy to accept being sad, feeling lonely, even the official 'depression' is a socially acceptable response to feeling that life, in some ways, is passing you by.
Anger seems far less so. But I am angry.

I am angry that I feared my father so much for so long that I am afraid I will never trust easily, and men in particular. I am angry that my mother's precepts of what was ladylike and polite and safe curbed my burgeoning sexuality before I really even had a chance to explore it. I am angry that society has inculcated such a limited idea of female attractiveness and feminine behaviour into my mind, and those of my friends, as much as the minds of the men around me. I am angry that no boy or man has ever had the guts to attempt to break through the public persona to the girl inside. Above all, I am angry at myself - for not being happy with the many blessings I have, for seeming to be unable to deal with the emotional reasons I hang onto my extra weight, which in itself I am sure is more of an obstacle in my own mind than in that of others, for wanting to be extraordinary, and at the same time craving the warmth, support and love of a family I create with one special man, our friends, our families, and, one day, our children. For not being able to make myself understand that these things are not easily compatible, for wanting it all, and for allowing the lack of it to hurt so much.

In less than a month, I will be 27. I have never been asked on a date, I have never been kissed, or kissed anyone else romantically, I have never known what it feels like to be in love and to have that love reciprocated. It has been a very long time since I met a man who really sparked my interest and I worry that I no longer have the ability - that my attraction function has shuit down, permanently. I know how melodramatic much of this sounds, and I despise the weakness in myself that needs these experiences to feel human. I want to love and be loved, not in a familial or platonic sense, I want to feel desire, and to be desired, I want to create children, and a family, with a man I love and who loves me. No, my ovaries aren't giving up quite yet, but I'm so far behind the learning curve on this that I'm not sure I'll ever catch up.

Every year, since I was sixteen or so, I have made the same pledge on my birthday: "This year's the year. This time next year I'll have had my first kiss, I'll have started really living, I will be happy, I won't feel so alone. " This year, I'm not sure I will make that pledge, because my realistic, pragmatic brain is starting to win out over my optimistic, romantic, eternally hopeful heart. Another thing that frightens me. I am angry, I am afraid, I yearn and I exist. And now, it seems, I blog.

And another thing... the set-up cringe

Wow, twice in one day! Just a note about friends trying to set one up. It is almost always cringe-inducing. I have never had a friend attempt a set-up with any sort of subtlety. The last one, at her own wedding, when her thoughts might justifiably have been elsewhere, was positively grotesque. I appreciate what she thought she was doing for me, but, wow, humiliation central.
Added to that the fact of whom she was trying to set me up with,and the cringe factor just increased ten-fold. Shorter than me in stocking-feet by about 4 inches, sweet enough, for lack of any better description, but utterly without personality, charm, charisma or ambition. Halfway decent brain, but hideously dull job, with no outside interests as far as I could tell. I did try to have a conversation with the man, but it was like - actually I don't have a sufficiently impossible simile for the farce that was that attempt at conversation! I love my friend dearly, and I appreciate that she was thinking of me, but if that's honestly the sort of man she can see me with, I'd rather be an utterly disgraceful spinster, preferably with a string of younger gigolos instead of cats!
Dating websites have also come up with some charmers - my best match on one was an unemployed handyman from the far north, who hadn't even completed high school, let alone graduate school, whose hobbies included rap (which I loathe), heavy metal (which I can't stand) and watching football (which bores me to tears).
Yes, I guess I'm just a bit picky for wanting a moderately well-educated man with whom I can have a conversation, whose bald spot I can't see when I look down, and whose tastes in music wouldn't drive me to destroy the stereo.

Asking the right questions?

I said in an earlier post that I would come back to the subject of why the men I find attractive are always the ones who are unlikely to reciprocate that attraction. Is that something I do subconciously because, deep down, my psyche knows that it's safest that way? That choosing the seemingly unattainable to pine for means that I will not have to deal with the terror of exposing myself, physically or emotionally, to an explicit, open rejection? After all, if I can preemptively reject myself on their behalf, all the scary stuff need not happen. Yes, it will probably hurt for a little while - I might cry a bit, write a few more sad poems, eat a bit more chocolate to feel better, but it will be a pain I can handle - have handled before - and not something that will rip away my foundations and submerge me in seas I am unable to sail. (Apparently today is a big figurative-speech day. Bear with me, please!)

The short answer is that I genuinely don't know. I want a reciprocal attraction - I can't even begin to describe how much, yet I am afraid that my subconscious mind is regularly undermining the plans and ideals of my conscious. Then again, I don't recall ever having met any man with whom I have felt an instant, sexual, connection. You know the moment in all the books, the films, the friend's stories - the one where your eyes meet his, and, whether it's admitted or not, all you really want to do is rip his clothes off while he disposes of yours, and get on with the business of mutual ravishment. I don't know if that tells me that I am repressing the urges that lead to that scenario, or that I'm simply meeting the wrong men, and that patience (never my strong suit) must endure. To be clear, I am not talking about an instant mental connection of emotions or intellect - I have several male friends where the instant 'simpatico' was blatant. Of course I want that in a long-term partner, along with a genuine, deep physical attraction. What I am talking about is purely sex, at its most basic. Relationships, I think we can all agree, are complex things, and the sexual part of a couple's interaction, though very important, is only a part of the whole. The urge to procreate, on the other hand, is fundamentally very simple. I am, without doubt, a sexual being. Waiting this long for the actual experience has probably made me even more so. I own various toys and use them regularly, though not a full-size vibrator - somehow I can't quite do the whole "battery-operated toy took my virginity" thing - far too much like a story from a trashy women's magazine! My appetite for smut fiction is prodigious, and wide-ranging, and though I'm not entirely sure whether I've ever had a proper orgasm (God, I love the oh-so-anonymous internet!), I've been giving myself pleasure at least once a day since I first discovered how good it felt to squeeze my legs together tightly pre-puberty. Yes, far too much information, I'm sure, but you get my point! I've even seriously considered hiring a male escort to do the deed, and for educational purposes - I like to know what I'm doing - but lack of funds, and the awareness that women frequently get emotionally attached to their first lover, continues to make that unfeasible. None of this, however, seems to translate into real life experience. Close friends know full well that my mind is a truly filthy one, but the world in general seems to view me as almost asexual. Why, I have no idea. The number of people I have shocked or startled over the years with an off-the-cuff comment or response is really quite amusing. You'd think they'd never heard of the "lady in the drawing room, chef in the kitchen, courtesan in the boudoir" concept. It's a very apt description of yours truly, although the last is only in theory as yet!

I digress. In theory, of the men I find attractive, at least some should reciprocate. In practise, I find this is not so. Men who appeal to me are generally, in many ways, my equals - they are talented, intelligent, charismatic individuals who have either already succeeded, or are well on their way to success in their field. They are usually nice people - I'm not really into 'bad boys' - and generally speaking, socially adept, though not the 'most-popular' type. Mostly, they are good-looking, but rarely in a 'take-your-breath-away' Hollywood manner. Not necessarily slim or particularly muscular. I am objective enough about my own appearance to know that I am also reasonably good-looking. I may be overweight, but I'm told that people don't really see me as a "fat person" - I have a clear jaw line, good bone structure, visible joints and tendons, and a definite hour-glass shape (it's just a bit bigger than I'd like!). I also have beautiful hair and eyes, good skin, good teeth, great posture, and enough sense to know what to wear to make myself look good, ninety-five percent of the time. I am not unattractive, though my body does not conform to the current idea of beauty (Rubens et al would have had a field day with me!). If these men are my equals, why would I assume that none of them would return my interest? Experience aside, what is my rationale?

Some time ago, I was with a friend when we ran into a senior professional contact of some influence. This person remembered my name and the details of our previous meetings, rather to my surprise. My friend, who has had rather more professional exposure and contact with this person, was not recognised. Although not always at this level, it is not at all uncommon for people to remember me, even if I have little or no recollection of having previously met them, or have only a vague memory of having seen the face before. When I expressed my surprise to my friend, she told me that "There's no-one else like you". At the time, I was too astonished by her comment and by the previous encounter to respond. I later thanked her for the enormous compliment she had paid me, and it was a compliment of some magnitude. However, having had time to mull it over, I wonder if it's such a good thing. Professionally, certainly it is. On a personal level. is it too much? Although I have friends now, with one or two exceptions, until University, I was a fairly friendless child. I had companions, but was never easily accepted into a peer group, in fact, I was excluded very efficiently through most of my schooling. I have never been a part of a group of close friends, and attempts to forge such a group from my rather disparate individual friends at Uni and beyond never worked. As I grew older, it became easier to make myself temporarily acceptable in a group, but I have never really felt that I belonged in any of the many groups I have been exposed to. Somehow, there has always been something that kept me separate in some way. Don't get me wrong - I have enjoyed being 'special' or 'different', and have sometimes gone out of my way to highlight the ways in which I am unusual, even though I do not often like the results of this being known. In many ways, I have been rejected by my peers, whether they meant it or not, since I started school at the age of four-and-a-half. As much as I try to be optimistic before meeting a new group of people, I wonder if I subconciously expect to be rejected, either explicitly or implicitly, and whether this carries over into my relations with men I find appealing. As I said in the first paragraph, if I can reject myself, it saves the pain of them doing it for me! Between this, and a family life which could not have avoided making me fairly independent at a young age, have I become too independent, too aloof, so that even when I try to bring the barriers down, their imprint is still there? The cat-who-walked-alone would also be a good description.

I'm not really sure if I have even begun to answer my own questions. In fact, I'm not really sure what the questions should be. An era has come to an end - at the end of last week, I left full-time education after twenty-two years in the system. As yet, I do not have any definite ideas about what the future holds - a rough outline's as good as it gets right now. For the next couple of weeks, at least, I have very little to do, and no-one around to distract me from asking the difficult questions. Perhaps that's a good thing. As lonely as these next few weeks may be, if I manage to analyse some of the things that haunt me, perhaps I will be able to move forward a little less burdened with the baggage of the last 22 years!

A quick note on living vicariously

One of the greatest challenges I face in my day-to-day life is handling the emotions raised when my friends and colleagues bemoan the troubles in their relationships, or alternately, publicly enjoy the pleasure of being part of a pair. Sweet gestures, affectionate touches or words, however small, can rip through the lower abdomen like a scimitar when witnessed repeatedly by a person whose desire to experience such joy is so fierce a longing.
However hard to watch, I find myself seeking out these sights, trawling the fan-fiction sites for tender or angst-ridden relationships to invest in, emotionally and erotically. I advise friends (oh, the irony that I should be so sought-after among my friends for relationship advice!) to pursue men I have found attractive - I have been instrumental in at least three marriages to date. I live my non-existent love life through others - factual and fictional alike - one could almost say I punish myself by seeking out what I do not have, what I long for and sometimes doubt will ever be mine, to hold it in front of my own eyes, just beyond my grasping reach. The masochism I recognise, but I do not know what it is that I am punishing myself for.

It's not me, it's them!

I think that many of my friends and colleagues would find my total lack of experience very, very surprising indeed. My industry is very open about matters sexual, and I can certainly talk the talk - in fact, I'm told I have a genuinely filthy mind (lack of activity allows plenty of time for imagination, evidently!). I've become expert, as I'm sure others in my situation have also, in deflecting attention and direct questions about "my first..." or related topics. I'm highly skilled at feeding misinformation, making suggestive but unrevealing comments, and sometimes flat-out lying about my romantic history or lack of. In fact, due to a misunderstanding of the rules of a drinking game, one group of my colleagues has the impression that I have done some seriously kinky things - that one really was not deliberate on my part! Even most of my closer friends are under the impression that I had a fairly long-term long-distance relationship with someone I met during a summer programme five years ago, but that nothing physical ever happened, due to circumstance and the small matter of the Atlantic Ocean being in the way!

That I have felt the need to pad out a friendship that could, perhaps, have potentially become something else, in order to feel able to maintain my dignity and credibility with my peers says a lot about the expectations of young women. Despite the enormous changes that have happened in women's lives in the last forty years, despite the expectation that women will have careers (although in my social circle, there is still a fair amount of the old 'until the children come along' caveat), our primary function, our first directive in the eyes of the greater world, still seems to be to find the handsome prince and settle down to happily ever after. In order to achieve this, we are supposed to be a virtually impossible concoction of lady-like, yet relaxed and self-assured in our sexuality, pure enough for 'the right one' but experienced enough flirts to attract him in the first place, independent, yet sufficiently 'girly' for a man to feel that we need him to take care of us. It says a lot that, on the fairly rare occasions when I speak to my father, his first question is always, without fail "How's your social life?". Translation: Have you found a boy yet who will take you off my hands? - this despite the fact I have not been 'on his hands' for some time - he having refused to support me in any way since I finished my undergraduate degree, meaning that among the scrabble to pay for four years of grad school, time and money for a social life has been severely limited. Perhaps it's not surprising in a man whose relationship with my mother started to decline when her professional profile and earnings began to eclipse his, despite his own very successful career, and who relished the chance to control her when he sold the company she'd spent 20 years building from beneath her feet when she was ill.

Over the years, I have had conversations with various friends about my seemingly-eternal singledom - more when I was younger, now I tend to keep quiet, and even my best friend/brother-substitute , a man on whom I had a brief but violent crush, which fortunately passed very quickly - no stalker behaviour there! - I am fairly sure assumes that I have "seen some action" in the past, though not in the last five or so years! In the course of these chats, I've heard every cliche in the book. "It'll happen when you least expect it, when you stop looking, when you love yourself, when you put yourself out there more". To each of these I have an eminently logical answer: Having been waiting so long, I live in eternal hope and the blind expectation that love, that special someone, or even just someone, forget the special, is just around the corner. If I'm not looking, I may well just walk straight by, without noticing - and that would be tragic after this long a wait! If I'm so unloveable that no-one else can love me, how on earth am I supposed to love myself - how am I supposed to believe myself to be loveable, when the scientific evidence seems to point the other way?! and if "putting myself out there" means going to bars and clubs, which I generally loathe and where the music is so loud that I can't hear myself think, let alone have a conversation with someone, what possible odds are there of meeting someone I will like in a venue I would normally avoid like the plague? I love dancing, but not at the cost of my future hearing, and not when the music is mostly arrhythmic drumming and bass! The 'intimidating' thing has come up quite frequently, and I have been told to 'loosen up' more times than I care to think, when the term generally implies 'go out, get drunk, sleep with some random pick-up'. Sorry, friends, but that advice isn't going to cut it here, and if that's how you choose to live, then perhaps we don't have so much in common after all. Quite often, I have had the feeling that my confidences have been dismissed, that my feelings of shame, embarrassment, and in a weird way, guilt, over my situation, not to mention my loneliness, are at best a mild irritant, and in no way comprehensible or important to the person I have chosen to share them with.

However, one or two of the friends I have confided in over the years have been genuinely sympathetic, supportive and helpful, even when they were unable to suggest any particular action plan. These are the real friends even if I rarely, or never see them, and talks with them have rendered one or two special gems, which I still hang onto for reassurance. One male friend, not the subject of a crush, told me when I was a rather miserable seventeen-going-on-thirty, that boys, and men, divide women into two groups - those they want to have fun with, and those they wish to marry one day. According to this friend, a somewhat older, very astute type, and not the sort to sugar-coat the pill, even through politeness, I fit firmly into the latter group, and would simply have to wait until the boys my age had grown up enough to start looking for a long-term commitment, rather than another light fling. Although his point is starting to wear a little thin now, with many friends married, engaged or in long-term relationships, it has been echoed, though in different terms, by others. I certainly hope he was right, though it does rather beg the question of whether those of us in the 'marriage' pool ever get to have any fun of our own! To be honest though, short-term flings have little appeal to me, at least not until I have experienced the trust and intimacy of a real relationship. I can see the excitement and passion that intense chemistry might bring to a short liaison, but value more the enduring love I see in the best couples around me.

I don't think my generation's expectations are helped by the portrayals of love, sex and intimacy shown so much in popular media and advertising. In male-oriented media, so often a relationship is shown as brief, passionate, about sex more than trust or intimacy, and prizingthe ability of the male to be physically stronger and more competent than the female - inevitably thin, with cosmetically enhanced cleavage, and improbably high heels and short skirt for trekking through the jungle, running for safety or almost any day-to-day function. Where the target audience is female, relationships are ostensibly more equal, but women are still impossibly beautiful, perfectly groomed, and although competent, generally still in need of a male (either an improbably sensitive, thoughtful metrosexual or an unreconstructed type-A chauvinist) to 'rescue' them from whatever their predicament, preferably with an armful of red roses to boot! How can any of us live up to such an impossible set of standards? And how can we possibly get any sense of how a relationship grows when the attraction, getting-to-know-each-other, trust-developing, intimacy-building is almost always ignored or subverted? Oh, for the days of Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant sparring in 'Bringing up Baby' or the other Hepburn, Audrey, and Gregory Peck, slowly learning each other and falling in love in a way that would leave both changed forever in 'Roman Holiday'.

Being aware of this fairly lethal combination of societal expectations, the unrealistic portrayals of love so prevalent in the popular media, and the generally-accepted truism that girls mature faster than boys (and boys are therefore much slower in being ready for a commitment of any kind) is what keeps me going - what keeps me hoping that perhaps it really isn't me, it's them! Though who, specifically, 'them' is, I'm still not quite sure!

That said, I have my eye on someone new. As per usual, he's unlikely ever to look at me with anything even close to attraction - I think I almost subconciously choose them that way, though that's a subject for another post. He's tall, slim, dark hair, green eyes, clearly intelligent and good at what he does. The cougars are open about finding him attractive - something which clearly makes him very uncomfortable, though he handles it well. Although he fits in well with the 'cool kids' he's fairly quiet, and I think it might take quite a bit to get to know him - again, a trait typical of the men I find attractive - perhaps he should be known as the Handsome Enigma - or Blue Boxer Boy (BBB) since that is apparently his underwear preference - I work behind him mostly and his uniform sits a little low! For once, I will not try to be his friend, though I catch myself using the trademark moves every time - join the group, start chatting, express an interest in what he's doing/reading etc. Unfortunately, I know no other moves to make.

Waiting a long time - a fairly lengthy, rambling introduction

So, I seem to have given in, finally, to the lure of the blog. I've resisted a long time - there is a theme here! To introduce myself, I'm nearly 27, generally regarded as highly talented and highly intelligent - and if I'm honest, although this will sound horribly arrogant, objectively I know that I have been blessed with intellectual gifts and creative talents beyond the average. I'm not bad-looking - natural, slightly uncontrollable golden blonde hair, green/blue eyes (I always insist green, when asked - seems a little less cliche!), tall-ish, for a girl, and somewhat overweight, though still in pretty good proportion. This latter fact is one I have been trying, without notable success, to change for the greater part of my life. I have recently come to the conclusion that this is one battle I would willingly give up fighting - I'm fit, and one of the healthiest people I know - if it were not for the negative implications my weight could have, probably will have, may already have had, on my career, and the negative effect the eternal pressure to be slim has on my self-esteem. I have been the same size, more or less, since I was 12 years old - I still have clothes from then that fit. Diets and exercise have had temporary, fairly minimal effects, but life is too short to live on carrot sticks, and frankly, I have more important and interesting things to do with my life than spend multiple hours every day at the gym in order to be a mere 5-10kg lighter than I currently am. Clearly, nature did not intend me to be slim, so I would settle, very happily, for gently rounded - a UK Size 14 (US 12) would be eminently acceptable. With the sheer size of my ribcage (huge professional advantage!) this may never be achievable, but it's a goal that somewhat obsesses myUK size 18-20 (US 16-18) heart and mind. I'd love to always be able to find clothes that fit, flatter and appeal, and I wouldn't at all mind skipping the lecture every time I go to the doctor for something completely unrelated and they consult their out-dated BMI chart without also looking at me to observe that I carry a lot of muscle, am mesomorphic/endomorphic in frame, with shoulders wider than three-quarters of the men I know, and am patently not obese, whatever the numbers say - grrrr!

Combine these factors - brain, talents, size, with the fact that I am also, in UK parlance, 'posh', and it will come as no surprise to many of you that I am also single. In fact, I have been waiting for my first date, first kiss, first sexual encounter, for a very, very long time. I was a precociously sexually-aware child (probably courtesy of my reading materials - Tess of the d'Urbervilles at 7 and Les Miserables at 8, not to mention the copy of Lace I found in a jumble sale box of books from my prep school aged 10 might have had something to do with it!), and have always been an absolutely hopeless romantic - a fact which would probably surprise any but my closest friends. The world in general tends to view me as pragmatic - about many things, I am. Romance, love, passion - not subjects about which I am the least bit pragmatic. I had my first serious crush, with highly embarrassing results, aged 6. In retrospect, my wildly overactive imagination could have got the much-older, but still very young, boy in question into serious trouble had I been a child of the nineties or noughties, rather than the early eighties, with a mother who knew her little girl pretty well and was not prone to overreacting to six-year old tales of kisses. Frequent, violent crushes continued throughout my childhood and adolescence and well into my early twenties, without my ever really having done anything about any of them, but having acquired huge numbers of male friends - some of whom, I suspect I exhibited stalkerish tendencies about at first. I have an astonishing ability to turn any man I find attractive into my friend, at which point, any hope of them ever finding me attractive in return generally seems to fade beyond recall. My mother was probably very pleased with this throughout my teens - I was a very easy teenager in the worrying-social-behavious stakes. Mama's mantra regarding boys was always "Be friends first - boys are meant to be friends". It seems I learnt the lesson well.

My profession probably hasn't helped - long apprenticeships (yes, still waiting on a professional level too - about six years to go), high ambitions, a lot of individual study time, unsurmountable egos and a very high percentage of gay men doth not a good boyfriend-meeting arena make. Conversely, with short, intense work periods, frequently-changing colleagues, lots of travel and pseudo-passion on all sides, a short-term affair at the very least, should, one would think, have been possible. I don't think it's ever even been on offer to me, though I know of mutliple liasons between my colleagues.
Various friends have told me that I am intimidating to men (that really helps the self-esteem!), that I should act less intelligently, or that I should just go out, get drunk and sleep with anyone who'll have me in order to "get it over with". Some of these people I consider to be close friends, though clearly they don't know me too well. I don't see the point in dumbing-down - it's not an act I'd be able to keep up for long, and I really don't understand what is intimidating about a woman enjoying a discussion and contributing her opinion or knowledge. In fact, that's something I find very attractive in a man, so why not the other way around? Besides, isn't the point that he likes you for yourself? Or am I being ludicrously naive and romantic? As for the other suggestion, well, we've already established that I'm a hopeless romantic, I rarely drink enough to be more than pleasantly relaxed, and having waited this long, my first kiss and my first experience of sex had damn well better be worth it! Somehow, I don't see that happening with some random pick-up. Not to mention that I suspect I will have trouble enough removing my clothes for someone I like and trust, let alone a complete stranger. The fear of rejection - explicit or otherwise - is strong in this one.
Maybe the problem is that the chemistry has just never been there. Yes, I have found many boys and men attractive - typically the ones I can almost guarantee will never find me sexually appealing. My 'type' if you can call it that, is charismatic, intelligent, talented in their field, usually tall and at least moderately good-looking, and therefore generally have more or less their pick of a very willing female population(It always puzzles me how many highly intelligent men pick girlfriends of intelligence so markedly less than their own - the conversation, or lack of, must be stultifying). As far as I am aware, none of the men I have found attractive over the last twenty years has ever returned my interest. If they have, they've done a very good job of hiding it and chemistry of a sexual nature presumably requires reciprocity.

Wow, I can see why they say this is addictive! It's like a therapy session between me and my laptop. All the thoughts that generally get bottled up day to day can come spilling out uncensored, with the wonderful boon of anonymity thrown into the mix! If anyone reads this, great - I started writing because I read another blog that reassured me that I was not the only late-twenties virgin around (it starts to get embarrassing after about 22/23, unless it's a deliberate choice. Lack of opportunity somehow implies freak-status, at least in my own head) - if I can offer that reassurance to anyone else, I'm pleased. If no-one reads it, that's equally fine - it's just me and Dr. Vaio!