I Guess Men are Not the Enemy (Not All of Them Anyhow)

In my last post I talked about a drunken call that could have ended it all with my new beau. Stressing about timing and babies and financial considerations, while drunk, with a guy you’ve been dating for two months, is not the best way to proceed in a relationship.

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Despite knowing that it was way too early for this discussion, I still got really frustrated in the days afterward that I had to have these stresses, and that my dude didn’t. This is a common frustration for me. That women have an end date on their fertility, and guys will just never be able to really understand what that’s like. It’s undoubtedly unfair, but it is, of course, biology. Can I really blame a guy for not getting this or having the amount of empathy I would appreciate? Holding onto this constant anger at guys having basically won the biological lottery doesn’t put me in a positive mindset for building a relationship with one. That burning resentment that’s sitting just below the surface, just waiting for the right amount of alcohol to release into another drunken call or a passive-aggressive attitude, is hurting me and my chances of seeing the good in any man I’m dating.

I needed to get some different perspectives. More productive perspectives. So I read another book by Evan Marc Katz, the only dating “guru” that I regularly revisit. It wasn’t cheap, but he talks to me like all things are possible and I have control over the whole situation and that sort of makes it worth it.

Optimism Has a Time and Place

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Evan goes through a series of steps you need to take to be in a place where you are ready for love. And each step has a series of very helpful activities to support them.

Step 1: Let Go of Your Past.

The guy who disappeared. The guy who treated you like shit. Guess what? He’s not your husband. Move on! Tough love man. Sometimes you need it. If a guy isn’t showing you behaviors that indicate he wants to be your boyfriend (gives you breadcrumbs, does everything on his schedule, etc.) let him go! So you can let the right guy in.

He also lays out some harsh facts around the time you should spend dating if you truly think having a relationship is an important end game for you. I love what he says at the end of the chapter: Instead of spending year after year, hoping to meet a man who fulfills a magical wish list that you think will make you happy, reverse the order: Go out with a bunch of guys. See who makes you happy. When you find a guy who does, you can forget your list, once and for all.

Step 2: Set Realistic Expectations:

My favorite and totally helpful quote from the book is that, in dating, you need to employ the mindset of being a “short term pessimist and a long term optimist.” I’ve been putting so much pressure on every individual date and would go home in tears when I realized there wasn’t going to be a second date. Or more so that I didn’t even want one. I would either feel rejected or hopeless about ever finding love.

But this idea of maintaining hope that love will happen, while not putting the pressure on any one date to be that great love, puts you in the right mindset to relax and enjoy and really figure out if you like the guy before you start weighing everything against your list. And wondering if that annoying way he eats on the first date is something you’re going to have to put up with for the next 30 years. Chill out! It’s just a date!

Step 3: Overcome Negativity:

This section talks about the pretty standard activities to overcome negativity in life (and he breaks it down for dating): gratitude, cultivating optimism, avoiding overthinking and social comparison, practicing acts of kindness, nurturing social relationships, developing strategies for coping, learning to forgive, increasing flow (experiences where one is absorbed in activity), savoring life’s joys, committing to your goals, practicing religion and taking care of your body through physical activity.

This was also the chapter where he had a section called “You Hate Men? That’s HOT!” and it was actually really helpful for someone to remind me that not all men are awful.

Step 4: Defeat Your Fear of Failure,

Fear lies at the root of most problems in life. This section talks a lot about how you will have failures and rejections and that’s perfectly okay. Everyone who’s really successful at anything in life has had their fair share of failure and it’s not the end of the world. In fact it may be the thing that brings you closer to ultimate success.

Step 5: Reframe your False Beliefs

This section is great for re-framing some core beliefs you have about love and dating. He talks about common beliefs and debunks them and has a pretty cool exercise on confirmation bias (i.e. thinking all men are awful and looking for examples of that result).

Step 6: Carry Yourself with Confidence

Confidence is key. This section has a “10 reasons you’re great” exercise.

Step 7: Take Action Now

Some tips on how to break out of your comfort zone and date more.

We’re all in this together

This book was positive and empowering and made me feel even a little bit excited about dating. I will say I started this book when I was moving towards my July timeline of deciding whether or not I was going to be a single mom (since abandoned timeline as a result of COVID), and was giving myself 6 more months to sort of date intensely and see where it went. So it was really important that I not drag baggage from the past, or negative views, into this whole process. I needed to enter that period with a feeling and energy of hope.

I was in line waiting for a concert while reading this book, and I saw a group of young guys. One of them had clearly brought his new girlfriend to meet his friends. She was young and stunning, with a sexy accent, and I felt so much anger at first. Anger that my time to be the young fertile woman had passed. Angry that these men would not have to worry about these things, possibly ever, and that they probably saw me as an old hag. I could feel a sneer form on my face and my body shift to an aggressive stance.

But then I remembered the book, and how men were not the enemy, and I just plastered a smile on my face and decided to approach everyone that night with a calm and happy demeanor. Guess what? People smiled back. I felt connected. I was in no way an old hag. I was just a girl seeing an amazing band at par with anyone else in this collective experience. The shift in my confidence and feeling of belonging was immediate and intense.

So we really do attract the energy we put out. Which extends to how we think about other people. If I can relax a little and see men as potential partners and not the enemy, well then maybe I have a chance. And maybe this nice guy I’m dating has a chance as well.

Drunken Phone Calls During Quarantine are Never a Good Idea

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Well it’s week seven of my hermit life, and every day/week is starting to feel the same. New patterns are starting to develop and the thought of a time before seems either like a distant memory or a dream. They always say it takes about 21 days to cement a new habit, but what about an entirely new life? It seems to have a similar trajectory as I find my new routines familiar, despite everything still feeling a bit off (which is also starting to become a bit of a consistent feeling). It’s like we’ve all entered into autopilot in this collective grief period, and I can tell it’s going to take some time to re-adjust to life as we knew it.

Last week the government in my province started talking about opening things up, and it sent my anxiety skyrocketing to the point where I felt I might have developed some agoraphobic inclinations. My mind went immediately to a familiar pattern of panic. You see, over the last few weeks I’ve been giving myself a bit of a break from thinking bout all of the really hard stuff. I’d relaxed on my goal of deciding whether or not to be a single mom by July because it felt unfair to myself to continue with this arbitrary timeline (like I need the pressure of any additional timelines beyond what biology has gifted us ladies with). I was meditating, and trying to just settle in and enjoy time spent with my “quarantine boyfriend” without thinking of all the faults, the what-ifs, the future. Self-compassion was the name of the game and getting out of all of this in one piece.

Time to face the music?

But that self-imposed Zen break came to a crashing halt the minute they talked about the opening the province up. Immediately my mind went back to all of the things I would have been spending my time figuring out over the last month and a half.  Because the fact is, that while the world has felt like it’s paused a bit, we’re going to emerge at the end of this (if there is an end in sight) and time will have passed. For lots of people, they can make it up. The time, the money eventually, the defined waistline. But for someone running up against a biological clock, that time is gone, forever. The government in my province will still only pay for IVF up to a certain point, and I will have to make a decision with even less time remaining (and less time to actively put plans in place).

For the Love of God, Don’t Dial Drunk

These panicked thoughts all came to a head one drunken night last week. It’s probably not the best time to be drinking, but it also feels like the only way to get through a Zoom call sometimes. I had just gotten off a call with three friends, who are about my age, and the conversation had turned to talk of fertility, as it usually does. One of my friends is fully pregnant, another has been trying unsuccessfully for years, and the other is married to someone who wants kids, but they haven’t done anything about it. So it’s a huge elephant in their condo. And I spent the call wishing that I was at least on one of those tracks (there goes that pesky comparison). My breath became shallow, nausea crept up and my head started to throb from lack of oxygen. Standard anxiety. I could feel the panic of not moving forward on anything. I mean I just want to make a decision and be done with it. But even if I did right now, fertility clinics are closed and it’s dangerous to date a bunch of people to find the right one, so once again stuck.

My thoughts crashed in on me and turned to my current quarantine boyfriend. And I started to overanalyze, psychoanalyze, think of everything that’s wrong or could go wrong with him or us, obsess over all of the what-ifs, catastrophize. And I of course (being a little drunk) thought that it would be a good time to call him.

Does anyone ever recover from a serious case of drunk texts or calls? Let me remind you that I’ve been dating this guy for a very short period of time, and I called him questioning his finances, and when he’d be ready to have a kid, and putting the weight of all of my drunken thoughts on his decidedly sober state.

And I must say that he took it like a champ. He was really quite calm about it all and that infuriated me to the point where I had to end the call…by hanging up. Not very mature behavior but nonetheless. Being the nice guy that he is, he did all the right things. Asked if I was okay the next day, offered to come over, but still couldn’t offer me the answers to my (totally ridiculous) questions. We had a big talk about it and I had understandably shaken him up. Honestly, if he were a lesser guy or even just less invested in us, he would have probably ghosted. But we ended up having a good heart to heart and seem to be on somewhat stable ground again.

Breathe, Chill, and Carry on.

But my panic is still there. And I’m constantly having to remind myself to just take things moment by moment. To breathe and calm my nervous system, and start thinking of those alternate thoughts such as “it doesn’t have to be one or the other” (the dating this guy or having a kid). There are still lots of options that my logical brain can consider when I get out of panic or drunken thinking.

Until then I need to remind myself constantly that I am not alone. That we are all in this together.

And we will all get through it…together.