Life Lessons Learned

The restaurant I went to last week, Vin Tabla, offers wines in tastes, glasses, or bottles. But more on that later.

When I meet someone new, I want to focus on him, on the potential in that relationship. I don't want to date five guys at a time. Remember, I have no hormones. I can't keep all the facts straight!

When I meet someone new and all indicators are a good match and lotsa possibilities, I hide my profile. I don't want someone else pinging me and diverting my attention. I want to see if this one's a go and explore it, view all facets of the relationship. Then, down the road, if it's not working, I will move out of that arrangement and find another.

I don't easily quit something I've started. I want to give the other party in the relationship the benefit of the doubt. I'm a kind, caring, loving person and am a terrific support mechanism. To me, to quit too quickly would be to risk throwing away something wonderful, but also would belie my view of myself as a terrific support person. A care-er.

At 57, I find that I'm less and less resilient with each relationship attempted and lost or discarded. I find something; I open my heart and walk in, fearless. Maybe this goes back to my pre-law school view of life as black or white, one or zero. Either explore a relationship with me or leave me the hell alone. But that then rejects the possibility of having a lovely time getting to know each other and then growing into something even more wonderful. Hmmm. Maybe I've never done that before.

Maybe the history of my love life has been a series of roller coasters.

The ones and zeros right now are "romantic" or "platonic". Frank and I started at romantic and moved to platonic. When I'm exploring romance with a man, I don't want to be one of many; I want to be one of one. But if the relationship is platonic, I don't have any entitlements, any claim on the territory, so that anxiety dissipates.

I'm perfectly happy being one of the fillies in Frank's stable, and I tease him relentlessly. A couple of the women that he hangs out with protest loudly when "filly" is applied to them. One in particular, a professor, is a woman he feels a very strong connection to and for whom he would release all the fillies from the stable and tell them to go find other homes. But she doesn't want a relationship with him. She wants him to take her to dinner and she wants his advice about houses and his help with things electrical or horticultural and she wants to ride in his cute little car. But she doesn't want a relationship. And she doesn't want to be a "filly." C'mon! It's a one or a zero. It's romantic or platonic. Isn't it?

Bringing the discussion back to Vin Tabla, I want a man who wants a glass of me, not a tasting of me along with five or eight other bottles. I don't want to sit on the sideline, waiting my turn for him to order a glass of me and, a year or so from now, a bottle of me.

If you want to personify the bottles of wine, the tasting is a competition to see who will win the opportunity to be selected for the next glass. To the best of my knowledge, women aren't into competition. It's only the men who want to compete and win. I just want to win by default and skip the whole competition nonsense.

Yet again, the Little Adoptee rears her ugly head. I want to be special. I want the farmer to say to Babe, "That'll do, Pig. That'll do."

But it occurs to me that just being selected for a taste should say to me that I'm special. After all, look at all the women who didn't even make it to the tasting!