BBH confessions. A topic I dont share about very often...

So, maybe I'm not so good at relationships.

I dont mean all relationships. I'm pretty good at being a family member among family members. I have incredible girlfriends, the best you can imagine for real. And everywhere I go I make friends easily. I am social, I enjoy people, I enjoy getting to know them and hear about them and understand a little about their funny intricacies like why they like ketchup on popcorn or cant fall asleep if they watch horror movies before bed or about that miserable time that the neighbor hit a squirrel and how all these years later in the fall they buy seed just to see the squirrels gnarl away and get fat fat fat. I think people are so cool, you know? Every person has this universe of life inside them so ready to unfold. I've said it before: I fall in love a little with everyone that I know.

Which could in fact be the reason I have such a god damn time with the men.

Or boys. At my age, 33, it's a relative term.

I had someone tell me last night that he wanted to see if we could just kick it, just hang out and watch tv instead of making out all night. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? (Yea yea I'm 33 and I still make out. O goddess bless, may it continue!!)

And therein, the problem. I am too passionate about everyone, everything. I get too bored, too settled, too without the fire of newness to keep me alive inside...and baby, I'm ready to roll....

I wrote a poem once, when I lived in Oregon. The first line I was 16 my vagina ready to swallow the world. A little context people: they say young grrrls confuse sex for love. It's true, I did, but what I really believe I was busy learning about was sex for power. I dont know what's gotten in to me today to write so blatantly about this, especially now that my blog's back up on facebook for crying the fuck out loud, but hey. Past is past. I didn't sleep with a lot of guys, dont mis-read me here. What I am saying is that I was fascinated, and still am, by the twinkle concept. The life inside that brimmed out of people, and sexuality was it's easiest means of translation. Slippery kissing in the August heat outside of houseparty air and breath all mixed up as one big heat, styrofoam Eddie's cup full of pink wine and sprite. Sneaking out the basement and getting picked up by my high school sweetheart to go to the church parking lot and get in the back of his jeep. Kissing Kevin for the first time after nights and nights of all that thick context in the air. Allure and mystery rolled in to one, and the more it stays permanently uncatchable, the more fun.

I never wanted to be a man-eater I for real was just trying to live my life, to learn and be in the moment and have fun...

When you're young like that and a woman it's possible to be naive to the identity issues this can cause, the societal blame and shame people are going to expect you to carry. That kind of thing stores up, and it did for me, too. I demonized myself, loathed who I'd been as a young woman because of someone else's idea that it was wrong. When I got clean I had this backlog of guilt for my behavior, for my sexuality, for being passionate which does not mean the same thing as sexual, but for also being sexually alive, an organic and healthy, rhythmically wild and open creature. I got this new idea that commitment was the only "right" way and further, that love and marriage were the only "right" natural next steps. I twisted and contorted myself in to said form.

Six-years. I was in a six year relationship (marriage-free, he couldn't have that discussion and the truth is, for reasons I didn't then understand, neither could I) that ended because despite the fact that he was kind, funny, adorable, loyal, hard-working AND that we had lots in common, the last year and a half of life that I spent with him I was stuck in a low-grade depression. It colored everything I did. In hindsight, maybe I looked too much for him to fix me, looked too much for satisfaction in my own life through him and when those expectations didn't pan out I got harder and harder on him and on myself. Who knows? It's not escaped my awareness that I am hard to please. But a person can fall deep and forever trying to exhume what often should just lie still and let settle, so after a while I gained great peace in the fact that the freedom of leaving, regardless how bloody and painful it was, lightened me in ways I needed the same way one needs and takes for granted air.

There were other factors that led to our end, too. Emotional affair is a term that's come up lately in several conversations the past few days and the general consensus was that this can be worse than the real thing. Yea, so I had one of those. It's hard to say how that starts, where the line gets blurred between love-connection and friend. It's risky business, for sure, but perhaps this, this line blur is the one best illustrating the heart of my relationship commotion...as said: I. Dig. People. The fact that a single little glimmer of originality in someone's spirit can hook me on to them is in direct contrast to the idea that there is one, and one only, man out there for me. Not to say that there's not, and not, by any means at all, to say that I dont crave that. The soul mate... Sometimes I crave it so bad that it is a physical ache. But I've been there! I know how the whole fall in love make a life together thing works. There are a million little moments, a million and a half that you get the chance to look the other way...and or to re-take the chance of re-committing to your love, to the power of the connection that you initially had with the person. You have to make choices, again and again day after day that confirm the chance you're willing to take. To confirm the decision to stay connected. That fire dies, it can die. It dies slowly long work shift after shift and dinner in front of the tv. It dies quickly over a miscommunication when you finally try to talk but the words come out wrong and too late. It dies and so too does the passion for your self, for your very life, go with it. Maybe some people are contented, maybe lots are, with companionship and small talk. But that's not me, will never be. I am hungry, you know? Voraciously. It's part of my nature, how and who I am and fighting it only brings misery. I also know that love, love between partners, boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife or any other coupling one has can be flamed again, it can be fanned, rekindled and grown. There are choices, there are and I know this, I know about it, I believe in it. But for real, last week two of my cousins, TWO MORE OF MY twenty-something cousins got engaged. And all I can think is it will take a special man, a hell of a man, match the size and strength of my passion and spirit, to be big and bold and broad enough, not to mention mature enough, to recognize and make those choices again and again, year after year, with me.

So until then, society, what the hell's so wrong with a girl just having some fun, going dancing, and wanting to make out a lot in front of the TV?