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.