If You Wanna Be My Luvaaaaa

For the modern woman, dating can be such a quagmire. What are the rules? When do I declare my undying love? When do we have sex?

When you are in, shall we say, a dry patch...there's only one way out of it, and that is to get you a little sumthin' sumthin'.

Now, if you're looking for Mr. Right, you are not allowed to give him any sugar right away. You have to wait and you have to get to know each other. It's a fact.

But you will spontaneously combust if you don't have your engine tuned up. Therefore, you have to get your lube job elsewhere.

So, basically, you need to separate "Potential Mr. Right" and "The Mechanic", if you know what I mean. They each have their skills and abilities, but they must not be considered for the same ....job.

You wouldn't go to the hair dressers to buy eggs, would you?

So the rules are different for Mr. Mechanic and for Mr. Right.

Mr. Right:
- No sex for three months
- No declarations of love before you have sex
- No talk of marriage, co-habitation, key exchange in the first year

Mr. Mechanic
- Have sex, lot's of sex
- Do not inquire as to his health or well-being
- Do not ask any questions that are designed to get to know him better
-Chose him purely on his physical attributes. But, in a particularly lonnnngggg dry spell,prepare to invest in paper bags that are roughly head-sized

And finally, for variety, purchase a vibrator, whip up a tiny suit for it on your sewing machine and introduce him to all of your friends as your new luvvaaaaa....

It's Not You, It's Me

You’ve met a man and he’s simply dreamy. You’ve been seeing each other for a little while now and things are going really well. So far, he seems to tick quite a few of your boxes. Let’s face it, though, you’re not 21 anymore.

You’ve had to whittle most of those “must haves” on the list down to a few basic hygiene requirements and a criminal record check.

You’re past the “Will he call?” stage. Oh, he called all right. You are having hot sex all of the time. You are a veritable sex machine. You spend every single waking moment together. When you’re not together, having hot sex, you’re talking together on the phone. For hours.Usually about how hot the sex is.

You think he may be “THE ONE”.

You know you shouldn’t, but in a slow moment at work, you doodle your first name and his last name together on a piece of paper. Upon threat of death you would never admit it, but you have pictured that walk down the isle. You see that off-white-off the-shoulder dress as clearly as you see your own increasingly lined reflection in the mirror.

So when you see him tonight and the first words out of his mouth are, “We have to talk”, you try not to get too excited. You immediately picture him asking if he can leave his toothbrush in your bathroom, a pair of his knickers in your underwear drawer and maybe, just maybe, he wants to exchange house keys.

But you know in your heart of hearts that “we need to talk” is never a good thing. Ever. It’s always, always, always the door that opens into Dumpsville. You’ve been here before, you know what it looks like. You’re intimately familiar with the terrain. The roads in Dumpsville are all paved with broken hearts.

Mostly yours.

And sure enough, he tells you his tale of woe, ending with the classic “It’s not you, it’s me”.

The different variations of “It’s not you, it’s me” include such gems as:

“I’m just at a point in my life where I need more space”
Translate: You suffocate me

“I’m not at a point in my life where I can make a commitment”
Translate: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free

“I’m not good enough for you, you deserve better”
Translate: I was only ever here for the sex. It was never going to be anything else for me. Now that you’re getting so serious, I’m outta here

“I just don’t know what I want right now”
Translate: I’m bored and I’m off to find a new conquest

So, unless you plan to get thee to a nunnery, dig out that vibrator, get in a supply of wine and chocolate, and start calling all of those girlfriends that you ignored because you were so caught up in your new, whirlwind relationship. Have a good cry, rail against the injustice of it all and sing,“I Will Survive” at the top of your lungs repeatedly.

Because you will.

Survive.

You will eventually pack your bags and move out of Dumpsville. You’ll get a new home in Independence Land.
Your address will be something like,

Ms. I. Value Myself
123 I Am A Strong Beautiful Woman Street
I Respect Myself,
Independence Land
H0N RME

And should Mr. “It’s Not You, It’s Me” ever darken your door again, he would find himself most unwelcome.

Because you are no longer going to settle for anyone other than Mr. “I Love You Just The Way You Are”.

The Great Divide

How did this happen?

I woke up one day, and I was middle-aged. I am on the other side of the hill, and going down fast. My ass landed at the bottom of the hill over a decade ago and my boobs are joining them as we speak.

When you hang around with people who are your own age or older, you don’t really realise so acutely that middle age is upon you. Your friends all come from the same era or earlier, so they have lived through their own era, and likely yours as well. They know how, in your heart and in your mind, that disco still lives. They understand the cultural significance of shoulder pads. They get it when you say, “The 90’s sucked, man”.

In your day, musicians in music videos were fully clothed and did not simulate sex for 2.5 minutes in the name of their art. They sang their song and made awkward dance movements, end of story. Occasionally, creative songsters tried for more artistic interpretations of their masterpieces, and this usually involved psychedelic colours and strobe lighting.

I’m astonished to say that, in my day, there were no computers in school, no cell phones, no ipods or touch pods or pods of any kind. No laptops, notebooks, no PDA’s. No printers, no fax machines. You get what I’m saying? No technology, baby. We communicated by written or spoken word. Someone talked, we listened. We considered our response and replied in kind.

So where am I going with this? I’m going to the workplace. Throughout my long and illustrious career, I have generally worked with people who were similar in age to myself. As I got older, so did my clients. As I aged, I moved away from working with youth to working with older people. Somewhere along the way, a rather large rift opened up in the universe. A great divide was created and I didn’t even know it was there. I’m talking about working with younger people.

OH MY GOD!!!!!

What’s happened out there? Was there some sort of biological chemical warfare that only affected young people and no one told me about it? Did I miss the news that day? Did it infect them through their cell phones? Whatever it was, it seemed to affect their attention span. They can’t keep focused any longer than a gnat can. They’re BORED . They need constant stimulation and can only follow the “no cell phone in training” rule for 10 minutes. Training lasts 6 weeks. You could see them twitching, it was actually quite funny. They’ve actually given up hiding their cell phones under the table and text openly now.

But the worst is the ignorance. In my day (here we go again), we were taught to respect people in authority, like instructors for example. It’s not rocket science. If the instructor asks you to do something, you do it. If they are talking, you are not.

Nope.

Apparently not. This must be an old person’s philosophy. I need to “get with it” quickly. Is it now rude to be respectful? Is it respectful to be rude? Have the tables really turned that much?

What caused this chasm deep in the earth’s crust, I wonder? With the youngsters on one side and me on the other. Does it really matter? I’m not sure that I care. Face it, I’m too old to give a damn.

At this point, I just need to survive it.

Perhaps along the way, the youngsters and I will find a way to build a bridge across that great divide and live together in harmony.

If not, I hear I can always work from home.