Breaking Up Is Hard To Do.

People claim to have amicable break-ups, but I don't buy it.

From even the briefest...what shall we call them?...encounters, a rejection is a rejection. Only the most metaphysically organized and ego-free individual can take this:

Sorry, but I don't want to see you again. 

...and honestly reply...

Whatever you think is best. Thanks for the opportunity though! 

...and mean it.

Mild resentment is the least emotion a dumpee is likely to feel, homicidal mania the most. Hopefully we avoid the latter.

The wider question is just how we got to this point. Serial dating by definition leads to serial break-ups. Break-ups should be like the collapse of a small enterprise - they're good in that you know what doesn't work, so  you can improve next time. Each subsequent business will build upon the failures of the past, but relationships don't quite work that way because each time we're dealing with a new individual. We have to do the heavy-lifting from scratch.

What multiple dating should do is hone our choice of potential partner. Sadly, the forces that motivate us to seek 'the one' are more ingrained than lessons from the immediate past. We tend to be driven by instinct and childhood biases than the more recent fact of adult experience.

Hell. Not much positivity there.



Bottoms Up, Drifters.

Hamburger Helper

 Priyanka Chopra.

Alcohol is to dating as Hamburger Helper is to ground meat - it stretches slim pickin's into something more substantial. Booze/Helper won't change the underlying person/protein, but it will fill out the gaps in your character/meat quality. Think of it this way - would  you prefer a short date of complete honesty in a white room with two chairs and a table, or a couple of hours of low-level banter in a pub?

The meat equivalent would be one small portion of raw beef as against a big gooey cheeseburger. We know which one is more unadulterated - so to speak - but are early dates better if consumed raw? Like eggs, meat and first dates, warnings against consuming them uncooked exist for good reason.

It's not a costless bargain, this one. Your self/patty will suffer from the dilution, a little at first, but more if you over-indulge. The burger that's mostly Helper won't be re-ordered, coz it's all bulk filler and no taste. Likewise, a completely plastered plating probably has you scraped into that person's scrap bin forever. The idea is to have your date want to taste you on more dates.

 However, if you can find the optimum mix, you're on the way to making the best of the date/meal. My buzz peaks at around 1.7 martinis, knowledge that's quite hard come-by. At that point I'm still mostly sober, but loose enough to lose the usual dating inhibitions. That is the aim, by the way, to overcome nerves or other social inhibitors that get in the way. These problems are born of overthinking, and the best way to circumvent thinking that I know of is a good stiff drink or two.

But be smart and order food with your drinks. I'd suggest tapas-sized steak carpaccio and frites.





Bottoms Up Buzzed Bollywood Beauties.

Wedding Night Sex

 Photo hat-tip: Miss Licious.

Somewhere, in blogland or a trashy newspaper, I read that fewer than fifty percent of couples have sex on their wedding night. That seems about right. Conventional weddings are awful, stressful things, non-conducive to relaxed (or even frenzied) lovemaking. Emotional and physical exhaustion ruin desire.

But let's say you've practised abstinence. It's your wedding night, and high time for a thorough seeing-too. For God knows how long you've both restricted yourselves, and now your rules allow for...well, anything, I guess. Where do you start?

 Where would you start? It must be like being locked overnight in your favourite store, able to take anything you want. Presumably masturbation is allowed if you're pre-maritally abstinent towards your beloved, so holding back the reservoir wouldn't be too overwhelming. I guess the whole point is having penis in vagina, so the quickest way to make that happen would be the first order of business.

I wonder how many folks are disappointed at that first time? Wouldn't that be a sinking feeling, discovering that after all that delayed gratification, you'd hitched yourself to a dud bash?

Still, it must be quite a moment, that first time, outcome notwithstanding.



Miss Miz's favourite link. SFW

Bottoms Up, Newlyweds.

Here's how to find your wedding-day limousine.

Why is Breaking Up Hard to Do? Wrestling With the Break-Up Monster.

Breaking up is hard to do. Only sociopaths and terminal masochists fail to find some kind of emotional turmoil when they want out. Detaching from another person is one of those life downsides we can only suffer through.

Sometimes it's a relief. When the inner voice whispers that the best option is termination, the pain of the act is tempered with guilty triumph. Afterwards, that is. Once the words are out there, the air is cleaner. One regains peripheral vision. Still and all, pinches of regret and dashes of sadness will adhere. We're meant to be with people, after all, and de-gluing feels like a step back.

Part of the reason break-ups are uncomfortable is that most of us aren't good at it. Facing someone with a parting can generate a vortex of emotion for which we're ill practiced and poorly prepared. Airline pilots spend time in simulators dealing with the kinds of horrid failures and tricky scenarios that are hardly ever seen in real life. But if the worst does occur, they have the confidence to deal.

Leaving a relationship isn't like that. We never know how the other person will react. We might even not know how we'll react. It takes time to build trust and confidence with another person; tearing all that hard work down can be utterly dispiriting. And yet it must be done. To avoid personal Titanic sinkings, we have to protect ourselves from bad relationships, slow down the ship, and head to warmer waters. Sometimes drifting for a while is the right course. Better that than having Hollywood remake your life as a tragedy.

So how can we get better at break-ups? One way might be to do it more often. I'm more and more amazed at how people cling to relationships that any outside observer can see don't work. We - humans - seem to think that the other person will magically stop the damaging/annoying/frustrating whatever that leads us to dissatisfaction. We hang in there on a hope and a whisper...a strategy that never works.

Western legal justice begins with the premise that a person is innocent until proven guilty. When we're talking about criminality and jail time I guess that makes sense. But should the same premise pertain when the worst that can happen is that we are without a regular Friday night date?




Bottoms Up, Heartbreakers.

Friends With Benefits

Her: I thought you wanted to be my boyfriend?

Wombat: I do.

Her: When?

Wombat: Not right now.


Expectations kill relationships. They're the rocks that wreck super-tankers and sailing boats alike. No relationship is safe from them, and no chart shows them all. GPS works perfectly most of the time, but without knowledge of where not to go, metre-accuracy will only tell you precisely where you ran aground.

The ocean called "Friends With Benefits" is one with an unusually jagged coastline. As enticing as the concept appears, I fear most of us compartmentalize the 'friends' and the 'benefits' as if they can be. Like a watercolour Venn Diagram in the rain, those two can only bleed into each other with potentially messy results. Art is rarely the outcome.

Doc30ty highlights my point in her post. [link] Her male FWB half clearly didn't include exclusivity in his mental image of FWB. His thinking was more Benefits with a Friend, dare I say an expectation at variance with that of our beloved Doc30ty.

There are three ways to find a FWB relationship:

Friends first -> add benefits.

Simultaneous creation of friendship including benefits.

Beneficiaries first -> add friendship.

Is one way better than another? That's not for me to decide. What experience tells me is that my expectations will differ from my lady friend's, and the problem with that is that we both think there won't be any complications arising therefrom.

This is the temptation of the FWB deal: the simplicity of it appeals mightily, but it's impossible for any of us to not expect stuff beyond the raw acronym. We set sail in light winds and smooth seas but wake that night to the sound of crashing waves on gnarly rocks.



Bottoms Up, Landlubbers!



Diagram from here [link]

Edited for tense and incorrect plurals, as well as overuse of 'variance' - the usual thesaurus of Wombat idiocies.

She's Into Superstition.

Me, I'm a Taurean.

That makes me:

Patient and reliable
Warmhearted and loving
Persistent and determined
Placid and security loving

On the dark side that makes me:

Jealous and possessive
Resentful and inflexible
Self-indulgent and greedy


Some kind of package, eh?

Astrology is a truly clever invention, because it preys upon our need to know. I want to know how the world views me; I want to know how I fit; it's fascinating to predict the future; it's comforting to know I'm better off with a Virgo than an Aquarian.

The fact that astrologists, palm-readers, psychics, seers, taroists and sundry other future-gazers can still make a living shows how desperately we are - we need to know anything about ourselves we don't already know. Fear of the unknown, especially the future, is a vestige of our less knowledgeable past.

But not knowing the future is a problem only if you think it is. Imagine if you had a printout of the course of your life from now until the hour of your death; would that make the days between now and then less stressful?

See, I think that remaining calm in the face of chaos and the randomness of the universe is the great adventure. If you accept the unknown, you don't resent what happens, and if you can stay flexible and philosophic, you don't mind what happens.

That's why I would think carefully about a girlfriend with a heavy astrology or tarot habit - it strikes me as slightly nutty. But that's because I'm a Taurus, and we can be judgmental.



Bottoms Up, Stargazers.




Mrs Ann's sandwich board from here [link]

It's not me, it's you.

Much to my cost, I have been a relationship equivocator. I have, in the past, been the one to say maybe when I really meant NO. Even when women have handed me an out - do you think this is working? - the words in my head, the right words, the accurate words, didn't form. Instead, I have avoided the disagreement, and attempted to smooth over the problem.

I do not know where this avoidance behaviour comes from. There must be something deep-seated in those of us who work this way, because I know it's almost always injurious. For us, and the other party.

There is no logic in trying not to offend the other person. If they are upset at something we know or feel, it's their problem. Not communicating our heart and mind only delays the inevitable. And in the meantime, the truth will always - ALWAYS - squeeze its way out of us in some form or another.

In the universal sense, the truth is always better than a cowering lie. Trying to massage the message to make someone else feel something is equivalent to pushing the proverbial piece of string. It never works.

She doesn't like you Part 1, She doesn't like you Part 3, She doesn't like you Part 4.