One of the problems with being a female nerd is that when your fifteen minutes of fame are coming up, you may not realize it's happening. Or that it's happening for the right reasons.
When I came back from Spain in October of 2012, I ended up hearing from four different guys from my past, people I had worked with, or gone to school with. I figured it was because they were welcoming me back, not realizing that they'd each marked me as fresh meat to be hit upon.
There was the guy from Rhode Island who drove up in the middle of a snowstorm even though I said five or six times but I didn't think he should. He also talked incessantly about having a girlfriend in Montreal, although he never mentioned her by name.
There was the guy who took me out to lunch and talked non-stop until the moment when he declared that he'd never kiss anyone who'd ever eaten octopus. Given that I had spent so much eating Spanish seafood, I fessed up and got out.
There was the guy who had been married to an acquaintance of mine from Madrid, who I'd have long chats with on Skype, who talked about moving to Ottawa, and who disappeared until his Facebook page showed back up with a ton of wedding photos.
The absolute kicker for me was the guy who I'd had a crush on in school, had flirted with to no avail (so I assumed that he wasn't interested). Four months after I got back, he spent half an hour telling me that he'd loved me back then, how much he wished he could have been with me, except that he was really concerned about what his friends would say, and that's the reason why he never made a move. (If you've ever been on the receiving end of that line, you know how much of an insult it is, no matter how much time has gone by.)
It was not the welcome home I was expecting. And in each one of those interactions, I had a pretty clear idea of what the guys would have gotten out of it, but I didn't - still don't - see what I would have gotten out of it, to say nothing of how a “we” could have been built out of it. None of those guys lived near me. Only one of them was clearly, 100% legally divorced when the interactions started. None of them showed interest in friendship; it was all about the fishing expedition.
Like I said: being fresh meat after you've been a non-option for so long is WEIRD. And not a little insulting.
Anyway. Cut to November, 2020. My buddy Jon, who lives in the UK and is happily married and would never do such a thing, started giving me music recommendations so that I could spice up my playlists. Jon and I have fairly similar tastes in music, so he suggested the California group The Donnas. I downloaded “Spend the Night” and started browsing through the titles, and happened upon "Too Bad About Your Girl":
I listened to it once. I listened to it twice.
And then I thought to myself, Hold my goddamn latte, and got a pen and blasted out “Too Bad About Your Wife” in fifteen minutes flat.
I realized this afternoon that one of the issues that I face working entirely on my own is that I don't have anyone to pump the brakes on some of my ideas. There's no one to hold me back, or even to arch an eyebrow in my direction and say, “Are you sure that you're not taking it too far with that one?” With THIS one, I wouldn't have cared. I rolled all four of those guys up into one, thought about their poor wives (if applicable), and let loose. It was therapeutic. It's been crazy to find out that I'm not the only woman in this situation. And I think it makes one hell of a rock song.
Note: Don't get me wrong - I'm still up for romance and being involved with someone! But not at any cost. Especially when it benefits him more than it benefits US.