I am wearing form-fitting pants today, and so got checked out a bit downtown. Subtly, of course, because this is a town where men know women are more likely to yell at them for being creepy.
It was nice to be checked out a little. Lately, I’ve been dressing down to avoid it, but today I figured I’d spruce up a little and see what happened. I’ve been kind of wanting to give up on the whole romance thing, but I’m somehow still attracted to men. Not enough to want to actually do anything about it, but enough to be puzzled. Hormones are a crazy thing.
I was looking for something in my Dropbox and came across a copy of an email I sent to my old pal Brian Henderson back in 1995, a year after I’d moved to NYC. Here’s an excerpt:
Actually, I was very cute that day, if I do say so myself. I was even wearing stockings and low heels, which shouldn’t have been a problem. Unfortunately, we had that little snowstorm that night. Again, not a problem, really. Except that I was so cute that day that I ended up sleeping with one of the cast members in the play I’m SMing (not S&Ming, though.) So, the next morning I had to walk home through freezing rain and really cold puddles. I tell ya, it’s not easy being a loose woman.
Reading this reminded me that my hormones are not actually all that strong anymore. Not compared to my hormones in my peak fertility years. I remember who that guy was. He had a great rent-controlled apartment that had been his aunts or something. It was huge and very Seventies.
He made it into my stand-up act (6:19), as the guy who said, “Jen, it was casual.” He was part of my tight ten. The clip I linked to is from 1998. I was still talking about him three years later. Well, not him specifically. The bit was really about my sadness, the loneliness I felt dating in NYC. There’s a line I had that didn’t make it into this performance: “with men, it’s not the reeling them in I have a problem with, it’s the clubbing them and getting them into the freezer.”
I was used to student life in the Boston area, where you’d have sex and then just kind of hang out all the time. NYC was the land of one night stands. I tried to pretend for a while that I could enjoy that, but it was not to be. I was a Charlotte through and through.
I still am. When I was looking at those attractive guys today, all I could think about were the ways in which I’d probably eventually find him annoying. Or what he’d find annoying about me. I thought about the eventual dimming of the spark, the pulling away, the painful breakup.
In 1995, I had nine years to go before I got married and had a kid. Now it’s been twenty-two years since I did that. Dating and relationships and sex are still just as confounding, if not more so. When you’re young, you think you’ll have things figured out when you're older. When you’re older, you know you probably never will.
CAROLINE'S!!!