After decades of urban sophistication, career hopping, and ambitious cocktail swilling, I traded it all for 11th hour parenthood. Apparently you can’t just hand in your 2 weeks’ notice for this one and there is no vacation..

Today, Thursday is the first annual International Day of the Girl.

Did you just scratch your head and say ‘Uh, what? Tell me what that is again?’

Well, we can forgive you for not having heard of it before as it was only officially declared by the United Nations General Assembly late last year, but I’ll fill you in because you need to know.

“International Day of the Girl seeks to bring awareness to the plight of girls in developing countries,  advocate for girls’ rights, and push for greater gender equality for voiceless girls the world over.”

This year the focus is on ending child marriage.

Apparently 25,000 girls become child brides every day. Some of them are as young as seven years old. In Niger, the rate of child marriage can be as high as 75%.

WHAT?

Three quarters of little girls are married off? Are they kidding?

And here’s another charming nugget for you: In developing countries, nearly half of all those child brides (little girls, remember?) will become young mothers.

I didn’t make this up. These statistics come from Care.org.

These children frequently die in childbirth because their pelvises are not sufficiently developed to carry and deliver a baby, or they develop debilitating fistulas which then cause them to be shunned and discarded by their husbands and families – an effective death sentence.  Girls are regarded as property – they are bought, sold and thrown away at the whim of their husbands.

I can’t even write about this without my blood pressure rising and jumping up to rant at Husband who looks mildly terrified and, after telling me anxiously that he is against gender inequality of all kinds, looks hopefully back at the lecture he is preparing for his students tomorrow.

Goddamn it! Rapists are getting away with unbelievable crimes in France, third world pedophiles are forcing kids into unwanted marriage and motherhood every second of every day, and the GOP thinks it’s better equipped to make decisions on my behalf about what goes on in my uterus because clearly, men are doing such a brilliant job of looking after the ones that are already here, let alone the girls who are going to incubate within them.

We need this day, we need it badly, and we’d better fucking celebrate it hard every year until we’ve made sure every girl everywhere has at least an equal shot at a decent life without fear for her safety and well being, just because she had the misfortune to be born with a vagina.

Happy International Day of the Girl Child

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Before we left Stepford, Eight had always been a popular and confident girl with many friends and a sense of belonging to her community. The year in San Francisco was a challenge for her – we moved her school three times until she finally settled in November, and then, although she mostly felt comfortable there, she definitely felt more wary around the other girls – for good reason, a few of them were quite terrifying – and seemed to have lost her propensity for inserting herself into any group that happened to be having a good time.
She was so excited about returning to Stepford and her old gang, looking forward to seeing her old friends, being at home in her school, and generally fitting in better. However the re-entry has not been quite a smooth as she had hoped. A whole year had passed since she had seen them all, and in that time new friendships and alliances had formed in her absence. It’s easy to see that she feels unsure of her place in 3rd grade. To add to this insecurity she has been rather aggressively pursued and  befriended by an extremely overbearing girl who was not there when Eight left, and I can see that this association is not helping the situation on a number of levels. Now I know one is not supposed to take against children for characteristics and behaviour that is not exactly their fault, and one should be understanding of different backgrounds and abilities, but this particular child rings so many alarm bells for me that I find myself fighting the urge to tell Eight not to be friends with her and having to grit my teeth and smile insincerely when I am forced to address the kid because she is so incredibly annoying.
Interestingly, one of the children I know from Eight’s former 1st grade class, when observing annoying kid harangue Eight for attention and bully her into playing a game, mentioned to me:

“Yeah, she did that to me last year”

I asked what she meant and she said that the girl had selected her to be her friend, pursued her relentlessly and then sort of taken her over in a mad possessive way, alienating her other friends and making her feel guilty for wanting to get away.

My heart sank at this, and did so even further while I was volunteering in the class and annoying kid distinguished herself by being the only one not even to attempt to do her work, but instead spend the hour trying to disrupt the class and talk to other children who were doing geography. She didn’t know which state she lived in (what?) and when pressed, said that she thought Washington DC was another country, right after I had just told her it was the capital of the USA. Sigh. Oh. And she’s a mouth breather who wears t-shirts with*ahem* unsuitable slogans for a prepubescent person.

Alright. I’ll try  to calm down and be rational.

I can clearly see that she has glommed on to Eight because she’s the ‘new’ girl, and is the only one who is not yet sick or wary of her. Eight is reasonably tolerant and willing to see the fun side of annoying kid, but what she doesn’t see is that her own social standing is being devalued by association and the longer she spends with annoyingkid and the less she is able to make forays of her own back into the world of the other girls, the harder it’s going to be.

Eight is nervous of the groups of 4 or 5 girls that  gather in the mornings and at recess. If they don’t openly say ‘hi’ to her, she doesn’t go over and say ‘hi’ to them and insinuate herself which used to be one of her chief skills (it always worked). I can see her trying to work up the courage and just as she does, annoyingkid comes over and scares them off.  It’s very hard to watch and even more worrying, Eight tries to conceal it from me as if it were a personal failing.

I don’t exactly know what, if anything, I can do for her, but I have gotten very busy trying to arrange playdates with girls she used to be friends with in the hope that this will re-open channels. I ache for her, and I am somewhat at a loss – I was always a loner (still am, really) but it’s not something I see her naturally being, nor is it a way of being I would necessarily recommend.

I know that this is the age when friendships become very real, and girls break each other’s hearts on a regular basis with casual indifference. I just can’t bear the thought of my own sweet, funny, interesting girl being wounded by another, although doubtless she could do it herself.

Once I turned 17 I breathed a sigh of relief that I’d never have to go to school again and I’d never have to endure playground politics and the agony it caused me. But I didn’t know that when I had my own children I’d have to go through it all over again. This time, of course, I have the knowledge and maturity to understand the dynamics of what’s happening, but that doesn’t exactly help because I still don’t have the power to stop the pain.

When she bleeds, so do I.

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We are back in Stepford.

The kitchen remodel, which has been total hell in the happening and at least 4 weeks and $15K over budget, is nearly done, the kids are back in school, I have  gone back to dance class and even found some time to write. Our little consultancy has some new jobs coming in plus it is being featured in a magazine which is lovely though it does mean I have to do some actual, um, work – awkward when I have zero childcare and Five gets out of school at 12.15.  All in all, though, things aren’t too bad and I have been very touched by how welcome we have been made to feel by so many people upon our return. There are not really seasons as such in Stepford – it’s uniformly sunny all year round which I have missed, but the shiny new pencils and folders from school and the clean, unsullied lunchboxes gives me a sense that life’s all getting back to normal and that a regular routine will ensue. The magical laziness of summertime is over and I have had to stop eating ice-cream instead of supper every evening.

In other words, it’s what we in our family call “Back on your heads”

This expression comes from a fairly terrible joke we heard about 25 years ago:

A man dies and goes to hell. The devil welcomes him and says he has the choice of three rooms in which to spend the rest of eternity and offers to show them to him in order to make a choice. The first room is blazing hot and full of people crying and sweating as they hack at the walls with pickaxes, fruitlessly mining for nonexistent gems. The second room is hotter still with broken glass on the floor and people sweating and crying, trying to walk across the room with loads of bricks on their backs. The third room, however, is a reasonable temperature and although it is literally waist deep in excrement, everyone in it is standing up drinking cups of tea and chatting. Despite the stench, the man reasons that this is the best option and opts to spend eternity there.
The devil smiles and vanishes and the man finds himself in the middle of the room up to his chest in shit, drinking a cuppa.

“This isn’t too bad” he thinks, “I can live with this”.  

Just then, the devil reappears and says:

“OK everyone, tea break’s over. Back on your heads”

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Last week I went to London and spent a few days in my house. I haven’t been there for nearly 9 years.

It felt VERY ODD and I didn’t like it. In fact, it felt so strange and sad that I decided to leave town a day early and get back home where the lovely task of packing up our entire household awaited me because we are moving back to Stepford on Monday.

So that would be one week from touchdown to moving truck.

During this week of mad packing, Husband and I will be popping over to Oakland to Ikea in order to purchase our new kitchen. The cupboards anyway. The doors have been custom made and are being sent to Stepford separately where they will be painted by some nice men who we don’t really know but have heard are quite good (gulp) and as we speak our builder is ripping the floor and current cupboards out of our house. We’ll stay in an hotel for a couple of days when we first get there , storing our stuff in the garage, and then I will take the kids to my father’s house in Washington DC and leave Husband to grapple with the remaining chaos.

I think this means that when we come back two weeks later it will still look like a building site and nothing will have been finished and none of our furniture unpacked, but I am going to accept that fact in advance and try not to get too stressed in advance. I shall instead go mental at the appropriate time.

I’m already exhausted, on the edge of my nerves, frayed and frazzled and beginning to recognise I have bitten off FAR more than I can reasonably chew, but now it’s all set in motion, there’s no stopping until we’re done.

AGGHHHHHH!

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I’m back in Stepford for a brief trip to consult with our contractor and obtain a building permit for the incredibly exciting NEW KITCHEN AND FLOORS I have been offered as a bribe to return to the tiny wooden shack charming Craftsman cottage we own in Stepford.

I’m staying at our lovely neighbour’s house across the street which is empty while they are in her native Turkey for a month. Their house is huge and only a few years old. They tore down their own tiny wooden shack charming Craftsman cottage and built a giant four-bed/three bath plus office and garage with sweeping American driveway and it all came out of a kit that arrived on a truck one day. We watched it being built over the course of a summer and although it is not exactly my style, I must say that now I’m sitting in its large, ranch-style comfort on one of their squidgy sofas that converts into a Laz-Y-Boy style recliner at the touch of a button, I’m coming around to appreciate the design ethos.
Still, our little house will have a nice, white Shaker kitchen (tiny) and pale, distressed oak floors (luckily, we don’t have much square footage at that price ) and our sofas are naturally squidgy thanks to eight years of small people jumping on them and building forts out of the cushions. Husband has little difficulty reclining on them of an evening and in fact quite often doesn’t make it to bed until the wee hours, having fallen into a deep and satisfying slumber whilst reading an incredibly interesting paper on the theoretical reduction energy of various metals.

It’s just as well we’re redoing all of these things, especially for our current tenants as otherwise they would probably lose their entire deposit  in carpet cleaning fees alone. I went into the house today to do some measuring and I think the word that best sums up the conditions in the house would be squalor.  

It is absolutely disgustingly dirty.

No, not just untidy, though it is that. The house is revoltingly, utterly, completely, mind-bogglingly filthy.

I don’t think they’ve cleaned the bath since we left a year ago (really!) and the carpets are strewn with such layers of dirt that if we weren’t going to replace them anyway, we’d have to replace them. I can’t quite work out what they’ve done – clog dancing over dried cat food, perhaps? The kitchen surfaces might possibly be not vile, but as every counter is covered up to the edge in bottles and cans and plates and odd appliances you wouldn’t know, and they have so much stuff in the house – bags and bags and bags and boxes and odds and ends of things – that I am hard pressed to think where they will put it all when it comes to moving out day in a few weeks’ time.   They’re not students, they’re young(ish) professional people, a man and a woman (not a couple) of about 30 years old, extremely nice and easy to get along with, pay their rent on time, but the FILTH is quite astonishing.  It actually makes me feel quite smug about my somewhat lax housekeeping and by comparison I am the queen of minimalism.  I finished my measuring as quickly as I could, breathing through my mouth so as not to smell the peculiar and very nasty odour in the house and high-tailed it back to the neighbour’s house where dirt is simply not allowed on the property.

One thing that really strikes me now that I’ve been away for a year is how quiet my street is. No traffic noise, little human noise bar the occasional distant power tool – the Ballad of the American Suburban Male – and the pleasant twitter of birds in the many trees. Oh, and the scuffle of skunks and racoons in the evening, the little gobshites, but it’s a measure of how quiet it is around here that you can actually hear them squeak. When we move back there will be much more noise, especially as Five’s best friend is my neighbour’s son, and her three year-old daughter worships Eight, so they all shout across the road to one another but that is a joyful sort of noise. Five got a walkietalkie for his birthday and I think he’ll give one to his friend so they can crackle and hum at one another instead of shouting (I’m not sure that’s better, actually.) And if you listen very carefully you will also hear the sound of Husband snoring on the squidgy sofas whilst still reading that fascinating paper. Listen closer still and you may hear me  opening and closing my new pull-out pantry and swirling water around in the giant single-bowl undermount sink.

Not because I’m actually cooking anything, you understand. But just because I can.

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It’s official. We are heading back to Stepford at the end of the summer.

It’s not my first choice. In fact, it was just me I would not go at all, I’d be on a plane to London, looking forward to living in a proper brick house with multiple rooms/levels that belongs to me and me alone. I’d be planning fabulous dinner parties, new frocks, nights out, afternoons at my club, interesting pursuits and lots of reading books by my much-missed hand-painted Victorian fireplace with a roaring coal (ite) fire in the grate.

But it’s not just me. It’s Husband, who is looking forward to teaching again, to having his ocean-front office with views of frolicking dolphins, and the comfort and security of tenure. It’s the children, who miss their friends, their own house, their lovely school, the easy, familiar life they’ve grown up with. And I have come to appreciate, after much struggling with the concept, that I might need to let go of some of what I want in order to have other things that I also really want. A bit like when Five went on his first Hallowe’en expedition and found himself unable to let go of the sweetie in each hand in order to accept a new one. I already had quite a lot of what I wanted but perhaps couldn’t see it because I was busy thinking about what I was missing. I’m now clearer on how to get the additional important bits that I need without sacrificing the entire scenario – I think they call that “Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Rather apt, don’t you think?

This year away had been good for us, despite its challenges. Husband and I have re-calibrated and re-ordered our priorities and as a result of this I have agreed to return for the greater good of the family with the understanding that a budget will be set aside for me to leave town frequently for work and study, and that we outsource a significant amount of domestic drudgery. I’m ALL DONE with that.

And it’s not all a downer. I’m most definitely looking forward to the weather, our lovely neighbours, loyal friends who stayed in touch and even, amazingly, seemed to miss me. I can’t wait to get back to dance class. I’m a giant wobbly blob after a year of delicious San Francisco food and no exercise beyond walking to the bakery, and no other teacher quite measured up to the Commandant of Hip Hop so in the end I didn’t bother. I am a little afraid of how much I’ve slipped (and how much I’ll huff and puff) but I’m determined to shift my booty back into shape. I am also really excited for Eight to go back to her lovely school and for Five to start Kindergarten there, too. We never knew how good we had it until we experienced the SF public school system and even Eight’s Catholic school, for which we paid a not insignificant sum, was fairly unimpressive. We are not Catholic, so I was not particularly concerned about her religious education beyond keeping up in class, but after seven months of daily R.E. plus preparing in class for the First Communion I was somewhat taken aback to discover how little she’d learned. Shopping for Easter cards, we saw a picture of the Pope:

Seven: Ha ha! Who’s that funny guy in the pointy hat?

Me: Aren’t you supposed to be attending Catholic school?

Seven: what’s HE got to do with it? What a weirdo!

We were also dismayed by the number of movies her 2nd grade teacher showed in class. Not just during rainy recesses, but during actual class time, often instead of the children reading the book that the film was based upon. When we objected, the teacher told us it was fine to skip the book because afterwards they drew Venn diagrams.

Huh?

Husband was unimpressed. He pointed out that he was also a teacher and that he knew for a fact that the only reason to show films is so you can check your email and surf the internet while your students are otherwise occupied. We have since learned that the young lady is getting married this summer so I imagine she got a lot of planning done while the children were watching Godzilla (oh yes, they were!).

Finally, as the golden carrot, we are getting a new kitchen and new floors and the entire house will be repainted. Husband has promised not to venture opinions unless specifically requested, and then only in order for me to pretend to consider and subsequently disregard them.

I think it’s going to work out.

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So! Big girl!

You will remember this birthday, I think. I remember my eighth birthday – we were in Trinidad and it was Carnival. I borrowed a rainbow costume and won 3rd prize in the children’s costume contest with another little girl. Our outfits were not particularly spectacular  but we were so thrilled to be on stage that we danced the wild rumpus and played to the crowd, winning them over with sheer showmanship/glee/desperation.

It’s amazing to see you grown so big and thoughtful, to watch you lost in a book, so utterly absorbed that you can’t hear me asking you questions or repeating instructions for the 33rd time. Unless, of course, I mention ‘doughnut’ in which case your ears prick up immediately, sugar being the medium of telekinesis.

You are still yet small, wanting to be held upon my knee, cuddled and soothed when you feel lost and lonely, yet you are also big, so clever and full of reasoning. I see the baby in you, and I also see the woman you will become. I see how I will lose you bit by bit, how you will grow away from me, as you should, and I hope very much that by the time that natural space comes I will have not made so many mistakes that you won’t want to come back and be close once you have a choice in the matter.

I love you, my sweet, my sour, my delight, my maddening, my charming, my chastening, my exasperating, my exhilarating, my life changing, life affirming, mirroring, illuminating, wonderful, beloved child.

xo

Mum.

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Next week Seven will turn eight and three short weeks after that Four will turn five.

Who sanctioned that?

I’m completely overwhelmed by the sheer physical size of the children these days. Seven is almost too big for me to lift, especially when she decides to become obstinate and throw an eerily teenage temper tantrum, complete with slamming doors and flinging herself, wailing, onto her bed in a fit of self-serving despair. Four has completely lost his babyish chub, except about his darling face, but the body is all wiry toughness. He’s bouncy as a spring and as cheerful as an otter unless you are foolish enough to allow the merest whisper that life, in any form, might not be constant and permanent. He is rendered completely inconsolable by the thought that, say,  dinosaurs are extinct or Jesus died on the cross (his sister is unable to prevent herself from telling and retelling this story in great, gory detail, carefully omitting any mention of the risen again part), and is undone even when he, himself, deliberately stamps on a spider and it becomes incontrovertibly late.

Recently, parenting has become a system of putting out fires and damage limitation.

Four is still very much a little child and I am dreading losing my preschooler to Kindergarten next September. He still says his ‘R’s as “W’s which terribly endearing, and is uncritical and attached to me, thinking me virtually perfect. What’s not to like?

His sister, however, is more complex and mercurial, her emotions more volatile and we have been struggling this year to find a way to help her communicate her feelings without acting them out in a destructive and negatively spiralling way. She is inclined to see a glass half-empty, but on the foolish occasion I suggested this might be the case, she cried

“But the glass doesn’t even have ANYTHING in it EVER so how could it even be HALF EMPTY? Hrruhh!”

and stomped off,  leaving Husband and me slightly at a loss. Four intervened helpfully.

“I love you, Mummy! Can I watch funny animals on the iPhone?”

My boy is resourceful, if not subtle.

Once Seven has entered the slough of despond, attempts to retrieve her are a minefield of rebuffs and false starts. She becomes attached to her misery, tending her nightshade garden of sorrows with lachrymose dedication and regards any offer of an alternate perspective as a vicious trespass and further proof of being profoundly misunderstood.

She sat in the dark and thought dark thoughts.

It’s not that I don’t sympathise. I really do. I quite often feel like that and may or may not have a slightly-exhausting-for-others tendency to see things in black and white. It’s true that I will absolutely hold them (by them, I really mean Husband) responsible for forgetting to give me my supper , but like Mog, I’m also not an entirely reliable witness, though I generally don’t let the truth interfere with my self-pity.

But when Seven is practicing this on me, non-stop, all afternoon, several days per week,  mostly I feel like smacking her. (Which, of course, I don’t.)

The thing is, given that I understand the inner dialogue,  I can usually just about get her back to normal after a bit of effort, and then, BAM, she does something nasty to her brother, or says something rude to me or her dad and I find she’s used up all my ‘nice’ for the day and I end up shouting at her and she runs off again. If/When that happens, I can’t deal with it any more and either ignore her or send Husband. This either goes well or it doesn’t. At least Four wins – he sneaks off with my phone, resigns all my games of Words with Friends and plays Jumpy Horse for a hundred hours while I poke angrily at my computer wishing I was in 1996.

Sigh. So much for being a wonderful mother.

In my recent chats with the career coach, it emerged that, really, I am completely unsuited to domesticity, and not necessarily very good at being with other people for long stretches of time. I do best on my own. I like being solitary. I hate schedules and routine and regularity and I dislike conventions and conventionality. It is an absolute conundrum how I ended up married to someone who is relatively normal, having children and going to Costco every fortnight. On the other hand, I can’t imagine life without them, and I sometimes wonder who I talked to, or how I managed not to be horribly lonely before..  Maybe I was.

Hey! Maybe that’s why I used to smoke spliff all day! *Light bulb moment!* Of course it could also be that I was a musician and there was nobody there to tell me not to. Seemed like a larrf, eh?

If I had had more consistent parenting myself, would I be a better mother or a worse one? Would I be a more relaxed parent because I wouldn’t overthink every experience my children were having, determined it should be better than my own, or would I be more focused and manage things better because I would not be panting so hard, running in circles trying to close the gaps in my understanding and innate knowledge of how to help someone else grow up. I’m still not really there myself. I don’t mean that in a self-serving “Oh, I’m just a big kid at heart” kind of way. I mean it in a “I see some worrying holes in my ability to respond like an adult to situations where I would be served better by a more mature attitude” way. There’s a big difference. If I get upset and feel slighted, I tend to sit in the garden and think dark thoughts..

Perhaps being Mog is hereditary. Poor Seven.

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Sometimes it surprises me that I have been married as long as I have – it will be ten years this summer since I acquired this last husband  and so far it seems to be sticking. I was briefly married before, in my very early youth, to a simple and kind musician who could just about cope with me aged eighteen, but by my early twenties I had completely worn him out with complex emotional drama and he had utterly bored the crap out of me. I spent the next few years having *cough* interludes with all sorts of men, some of whom I’m still friends with today and some of whom were never seen again after I summoned a taxi and sent them home, puzzled and a little hurt into the middle of the dark, London night. Not all of them were charming, of course (see aforementioned taxis) –  almost every modern woman has a list of at least one shag-she’d-prefer-to-forget, but I can’t recall ever being made to feel inadequate because my lady parts were not the right size, shape or level of grooming required for the modern dating world.

I’m told this has changed.

I was having a lovely lunch with a friend who is currently single the other day, and we were talking about what it’s like to meet men once one is past the first (or even second flush) of youth, and I told her I felt really optimistic on her behalf, as I had met three or four attractive single men in our age bracket in just the past few weeks and all seemed to be looking for a partner. Surely this was a good sign! The nice ones weren’t all gone! I would have set her up with one of them but she lives in another town so I suggested online dating, which I don’t have much direct experience of myself, but have heard good things about from others.

My friend gave me a dark look. Did I know what was expected these days?

Of course I don’t really, but I felt that I’d notched up so much experience in the decade prior to my capture marriage that surely that counted for something?

Apparently, it did not. I forsook all others prior to the global mainstream acceptance of internet porn and as such, I was officially old school in the expectations of casual sex department. It had all gone horribly pear shaped (A bit like me, really).

If one is returning to the field of dating from a long absence, and especially if one fancies a roll in the hay with someone under the age of 30 (and who could resist?) , then it’s time to bid farewell to every filament of body hair save your eyebrows because we’re all supposed to have the pudenda of an eight year old. The landing strip, even if you denude your undercarriage, is apparently unacceptable. One lady we know with a trim as described, when she bravely stripped off for a romp with a bloke who had been, ahem, visibly game, commented that her nether ‘do was

“Woah! Retro!”

which as any fule kno is the same as OLD. She reported that he actually wilted at the sight of a few pubes. I’m not sure he was old enough to be having sex, you know. Or maybe he only wanted to have sex with someone else who wasn’t old enough?

Apart from the CREEPY KIDDY factor – are our vajayjays supposed to look like our toddlers’ ?  Should men  be comparing women to children when they’re getting off (where will that end? Newborns?) – it’s depressing to think that here is yet another industry that has been created to deprive women of their money and their dignity, all in the name of being merely acceptable because we are just disgusting in our natural state.
Yes, that’s right. Your pussy is disgusting. It smells, it’s hairy, it bleeds, it’s embarrassing and it unforgivably widens to allow new life to pass into the world  and it might not go back to be small enough for a giant ego’s inadequate little penis to hide in.  (You also need to remember that your entire reason for being alive is to entice someone to want to shag you, and then ask you to make him a sandwich and do his laundry, and you can only achieve this if you have a tiny, hairless vulva with a very small aperture. You can probably cut one off a Barbie doll and nobody will notice the difference, plus it won’t smell like a human being, so that is a plus!)

Next on the list of alarming dating tales, was the expectation of athletic porno sex complete with money shot and running commentary for an invisible audience. This had happened a few times to people we both know, and while it’s actually quite hilarious to think of some poor bloke cluelessly pumping away, shouting

“Come for me, baby!”

while the woman is thinking

“At which point shall I tell him about the magical button, the clitoris?”  /  “Does he know  ‘Deep Throat’ was not a documentary? ”  /  “Are we done yet? My head is about to snap off!” / “Toilet paper, eggs, milk, nail polish remover… Ouch! I bet this is going to give me cystitis..”

It isn’t actually that funny if it’s you on the receiving end.

I decided to ask some of the single men I know (admittedly all over 25) what they thought of dating and sex in the age of pornography. Almost all of them said that they were looking for an emotional connection with a woman, that they wanted a relationship, were through with the casual sex that they had when they were younger, and felt that this was something they had grown out of and could no longer indulge in – it felt shallow and disrespectful to themselves as well as the other person. They also said that within sexual relationships it was more important to them to connect with their partner and make sure they felt like the other person was having a good time, felt close to them and intimacy was a chief motivating factor for having sex at this point in their lives. They were looking for cuddles and someone to hang out with. They each denied – to a man – that they particularly cared how much pubic hair a woman had, in fact they all expressed a preference for at least some to be left visible.

I think this is good news for you ladies out there? Or maybe it’s really boring news?  A third possibility is that they were giving me the story that they think they should to nice respectable married ladies and I totally fell for it.

I might actually have been slightly more entertained and intrigued if they’d said that when they see a beautiful woman all they want to do is make wild passionate love to her and beat their chests like primal beasts,  but possibly none of them fancied me enough to say that.

Still. There is hope.

If you have any scurrilous tales of your own dating experiences, please leave in the comments below.

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