Oh that I were a man; I would eat his heart in the marketplace

Because I am still on a waiting list for a therapist, and also because like...I don't know, I've never tried to utilize therapy to work out my Dan Baggage...I am occasionally bombarded with recollections about my relationship with Dan that tug at the back of my brain until I deal with them. I recalled something a few days ago that I couldn't quite stop thinking about, and I think it came relatively full circle this morning as I was making myself some Sola toast. 

Early into the dating period with Dan, we were chatting and assigning numeric value came up. As in, assigning numeric value to your partner's attractiveness. Or anybody's attractiveness, really. We went on this tangent for a little bit, rating certain things, certain celebrities, you know...the kind of small talk that fends off real intimacy, but FEELS like closeness. Being naturally curious, I asked Dan what my number was. This felt like a relatively safe question, since we had been seeing each other for a couple of months now. Logic sort of demands that if someone is with you, they must find you attractive, right? So you're at least a 5? At least a 5. You can pretty safely put yourself into the mid-range with any given person who has signed on to fucking you with a modicum of regularity. 

So when Dan responded with some version of, "Oh, I can't tell you that", I thought he was just playing coy. And I think he was, in the moment. Withholding information was Dan's favorite way to flirt. Like how he didn't tell me his birthday for at least a year, though my memory recalls it was closer to two years. And how he wouldn't tell me his middle name, which was an innocent enough question to ask when you're sharing harmless things with people. So many of his responses pushed me further into the dark about even the most benign knowledge of him, so much so that Allen and I joked that Dan was married, and I couldn't know who he was or be friends with him on Facebook because he didn't want me to see he had a wife. I say joked, but Dan's steadfast refusal to make me any kind of part of his life as the months we were together grew kept me a little fearful that maybe it wasn't a joke after all. Dan may not have been married, but maybe he had another girlfriend back from wherever he came from. That shit ate at me a lot. 

I was a little irked that Dan wouldn't give me my number. I told him I'd give him his! I was prepared to inflate his number to sweeten the number he'd give me. That's how the number system works, right? Reciprocity, not honesty? That's the system I was prepared to utilize. But he stonewalled. I let it go, for a little bit. 

A few months later I asked him again for my number, this time in response to a similar conversation we were having about assigning a value to each other's sexual skills. This was another value Dan was reluctant to give me, though he did say something to the effect of needing to have sex at least 100 times, to make it scientific. 

Bitch....that's not how science works! Though...in fairness, I was running around randomizing my sample size all around town, so I felt like I had a pretty good grasp on where he fell in my ranking. Which sexually, he didn't clear the top fifty in skill, but made the top three in participation! Again, I was prepared to lie, because...well. A few reasons. I was already well gone for Dan at this point, and I didn't want to hurt his feelings. Also what if he told his wife I gave him a low score?? In reality, I didn't feel secure enough with Dan to vocalize my wants and needs for myself in anything more than a superficial way. "I want an avocado" or "I want a bottle of rum" felt safer than saying, "I want you to learn about MY vulva  apart from whatever it is you think you know about general vulvas, because you're not really doing it for me". 

Aside from not being science, it also wasn't cute. I think I found it cute in the moment, because when you're besotted, you'll swoon over any dumb thing that your paramour says, unfortunately. I really hate that part of infatuation. I begged a bit for my number, in that pleading way that feels flirtatious, but in hindsight looks gross and pathetic. Dan told me no again, and told me he'd perhaps tell me later. Way in the future. 

I think I asked him for my number one additional time, while he was deployed in 2012. He told me no, of course. He kept my number from me forever, and now I'll never know it. EVER. And the twenty something in me that LIVED to be objectified will absolutely die fucking mad about it. 

The thing is, Dan not giving me my number was something I dwelled over the longer he withheld it from me. I panicked over it. I told myself that if I had a high number, he would give it to me, right? Everybody wants their partner to know they find them attractive! If Dan really found me attractive, he would fork over my number, then he'd fuck me badly and that would be the end of it. Boom! Romance. 

So...I must not have had a very high number. Earlier I said that you can probably safely assume that your number is at LEAST a 5 if you're with someone who spends more time with you than they spend without you. I felt less and less confident in that the longer Dan and I were together. It wasn't just the lack of giving me a number that made me feel like I was, in Dan's eyes, down in the mucky muck bottom number of like, a 2 or a 1. It was that combined with EVERYTHING else. I was never invited to go on weekends with Dan's friends, even though they took their girlfriends. I was broke and couldn't have afforded it, but to not even be asked was hurtful. I wasn't allowed to meet Dan's friends until WAY late in the game, and even then I didn't get to meet anybody local until Dan asked if I could hook someone up with one of my friends. Dan didn't tell his parents about me, and I have to guess he never told his brothers about me, either. I wasn't allowed to be his friend on social media, I had no real foothold in his life. And if you were with someone who you found attractive, or even just smart and engaging, why would you hide them? You wouldn't unless they were a forbidden affair, and as fun as it was to joke about Dan being married, I spent WAY too much time with him for that to have genuinely been the case. 

So I landed where anybody would land after obsessing over such things: Dan was deeply, deeply ashamed to be with me. And like, the shitty thing was, I told myself I understood why. I was broke, kind of directionless, a little wild, I didn't come from a "good" background. On paper in my mid-late twenties, I was a mess. Me circa now know that I've been worthy of love my whole life, and my career or lack thereof, my not being a college graduate, my being a young, single mother, should not have counted against me, and if I wasn't someone Dan wanted on paper or in real life, that was an easy to remedy problem with HIM, not me. But I didn't feel that way then. I felt like I was ugly and completely worthless, and Dan was right to hide me, so I wasn't going to do anything about it, I would just...stick it out, because I didn't deserve better. 

NOW. 

Here's the thing I thought about this morning as I was making my toast. I can't tell you how I got there, the train of thought that took me to where I recalled this certain thing is unknown to me. 

When I started college, Dan and I weren't necessarily together, but we weren't necessarily not together. It was a weird kind of limbo, though I suppose it was technically no different than when Dan lived in Colorado. The only true difference was proximity to each other in our daily lives. I had a schedule: I went to school four days a week, and three days a week, I got together at VI with Stevie and Tom to study. We would order grown up grilled cheeses and endless pots of coffee, sit with our books and laptops, and study for HOURS, mostly in silence, but also taking occasional breaks to chat and detox from whatever we just learned. At one such study session, I brought up Dan. And I had a picture of him with me...not one of us taken together, as clearly those weren't allowed, either. I do not think there is a single picture of Dan and I together that exists. If I didn't have three pictures of him with my rabbit, I could fairly easily convince myself Dan wasn't real at all, and this relationship never happened. 

I brought out a picture of Dan and asked Tom what he thought of him. Tom looked at Dan's photo, looked at me, and said, "I think you two are of equal attractiveness". 

And. 

I.

FREAKED OUT. 

I had never been so fucking insulted in my life. 

I looked at Tom and said, "....Seriously? You think he and I are on an equal playing field in the looks department?" Tom nodded, smiling, as if he was giving me a compliment. 

"Tom. What is my number?"

"Your what?"

"My number. My assigned value of attractiveness on a scale of 1-10."

"Oh. An 8."

I screeched, inside of Village Inn, at 1 in the morning, "YOU THINK THIS MAN IS AN 8???"

Tom ended up saying that no, he did not think that, but he also didn't want to tell me the dude I was interested in was straight up ugly. I remember telling him that if that's what he thought, he was instead telling ME that I was straight up ugly. Tom said, "But you love him! I know girls want to have everybody validate that the person they're with is at least as attractive as they are!"

I dropped the conversation, mostly because I assumed Tom was lying about something, and it would only further frustrate me trying to figure out what that was. 

Cut to this morning, and what should have been my take away right that very moment: regardless of whether or not Tom was lying...whether or not Tom saw me as an 8 and saw Dan as distinctly less, or saw us BOTH as like...4s but couldn't bring himself to tell his friend she was a stone cold uggo just like the janky dude she was hung up on....what mattered was I did not see Dan as my equal. I saw Dan as physically below me. Me. The girl who had spent their entire relationship with this dude so fucking worried about how he saw her that she didn't bother to assess how she saw HIM.

I was going through some growing shit in my twenties. A lot of it. I had had two children, I had moved around a lot, I had a lot of my life stolen from me, I was using my twenties to just sort of...be aimless because I deserved to take life with a gentleness I controlled. My job didn't have to be important, it just needed to sustain me. I didn't have to have a college degree to be smart. I didn't need a fuck ton of money, or a great pedigree, to be worth anybody's time, and even though I questioned it and settled for less than I deserved, deep down I think I knew it. I think I knew this about Dan, that he was not worth my time. Not for his looks, not for his brain, not for his personality, there was nothing about him that was redeeming enough for my to slink into his shadow like a homeless fucking dog that was grateful for the shade. 

I just wish I had asked Tom for my number sooner. 

Oh hai, reality!

Of the vast array of things I struggle with regularly, one of the things that bothers me the most is my inability to say what I want when I want to say it. There have been so many things that make sense to me about myself being able to view my behaviors through autism, and while needing time to properly put a response together is one of them, there are still moments where it irritates me. I get angry with myself over it. It isn't that I CAN'T respond, it isn't even that I don't have moments of quick wit where I didn't mean to say a thing, but I am glad I did after the fact. About six times out of ten, I feel pressured into saying SOMETHING, and the something that I say is not the thing I actually want to express.

I had to do a really fast real estate shoot update today. One of the properties my agent is working with is a new build, so I'm popping by every so often to take photos of the progress. There was siding put on the house, so I popped over to grab six or seven photos of it, and leave. There was a worker there, a very friendly older gentleman named Wayne that was more than happy to converse with me, and while I do not mind being courteous, small talk makes me uncomfortable. It's one of the scenarios where I know I won't be able to say what I mean fast enough, because I'm very busy combatting how awkward I feel, and judging my safety, and planning my escape routes should things go sideways. 

I as Wayne if he'll move his truck so I can get some photos of the front of the house, he happily obliges, and as I'm shooting the front, he remarks, "you sure have a lot of ink on you". I didn't expect anybody to be at the property, so I wore my work out outfit. A really breezy, sleeveless tank top that shows my entire back, and a pair of tight 3" seam shorts that show the bottom of my mermaid tattoo (that Derek calls my tree fish). You can absolutely see pretty much all of my tattoos in this outfit. So I laughed and said, "I sure do!" Wayne said, "oh, that's alright, I like tattoos." I laughed again, but felt a little irritated inside. I wasn't apologetic in my response, I'm not looking for absolution in having them, or approval. I opted not to say anything in response, because I know he meant nothing by it. In fact, to spoil the ending, that's the entire MO of everything he says for the five minutes extra he keeps me there, chatting to me. He meant every single thing he said as a compliment. Nothing he said was meant to be anything other than nice. And yet I still left the conversation feeling frustrated twice over: one, because I didn't have the space to figure out what I wanted to say, and two, because I felt so diminished as a person by what he said. I felt like what he said really diminished all femme people, and I can pretty much feel my husband's eyes rolling straight out of his head at me saying that, but the words people use matter, and they tend to speak volumes about any given person's world view. 

So there he was, chatting with me about tattoos. He said the problem with them is once you get one, you're hooked on them. I replied that he is absolutely correct, and I've worked my entire life to afford my tattoo habit. Then I mentioned that my oldest got their first tattoo in June, and is about to get another one. He scoffed as he said, "you're not old enough to have kids that age!" I said I absolutely am, my oldest is 19, my husband's oldest is 19, and my youngest is 15. He was shocked, quite plainly, and he told me that I am just so young looking, he wouldn't have guessed I had kids at all. Point one for having kids and not looking haggard, but also...what is it that he thinks about people who have kids? Does having children automatically age you, or make you look a certain way? I guess...I guess it's equally great he didn't just....ASSUME that I have kids because I'm a femme presenting person. It's hard to suss out a general idea about what he meant there, but it felt a bit....off. There's something in there that's sticking in my jaw, and I'm sure I'll work it out later. 

I finished up taking photos of the house. It didn't take long, maybe 5 minutes. I went back to the front to thank him for moving his vehicle, and he wanted to sit and chat with me about himself. Which is fine. He was very nice, very friendly, and even when it makes me uncomfortable, I tend to indulge people when they want to chat, because I've been on the other end of that and I always feel dumb or worthless if I just want to be nice with someone and connect for two seconds, and they're clearly not interested. I could write a whole thing about femme people being taught to be accommodating to masc presenting people, but I will save that nuanced conversation for another time. 

Wayne told me that he's a 70 year old man, and he stared at me for several seconds, clearly expecting SOMETHING. So I was like....well you don't look it? And he said thank you. And then he said, you know, it's so funny, my daughter is 45, and she has a best friend who's had eight kids. EIGHT KIDS. And she looks just like you, she's skinny as can be and you can't tell at all she's had eight children. But then my youngest, she's had one kid and...at this point, he gestured around his body, making the universal signal for "not thin" and made a sound like a hot air balloon being inflated. A comical WHOOSH. I looked at him and said, "well yeah, carrying a baby does that to you, it's an unforgiving process and it's hard on the body." And he said, "exactly, and it's so sad that she's just so big now while people like you and my daughter's friend get to stay so thin even when you've had so many kids." I frowned a little and said, "why is it sad?" And he looked at me for a moment and replied, "well, when you're beautiful, you're beautiful. And that's it. If you're born beautiful, you're beautiful you're whole life, no matter what happens to you, or how many kids you have. So that's why it's sad for her. But you and my daughter's friend are so lucky! You're both gorgeous!"

I felt...I felt weird. I know he was complimenting me...like...skinny? Come on. Of all the things people accuse me of being, thin has never been one of them. In the moment I felt myself trilling inside at the compliment on my figure. I have worked my whole life to be seen as...if not thin...slender adjacent. I felt instantly pleased, and I felt pleased at him insinuating that I've been gorgeous my whole life. Which is objectively untrue, but I felt pleased jut the same. But I came off of that high really quickly as I realized what it was he was saying about me, what it was he was saying about his daughter, and what I could pretty easily hone in on as his central thesis. He kept talking. My face must have been obviously frowning or making some kind of face that showed I wasn't appreciative of what he was saying, because he switched gears. Well, sort of. He stayed in the complimentary gear, but stopped talking about other people in relation to me. 

"You know, your husband is a lucky son of a bitch." Oh. My face still hadn't moved, I felt myself frown a little harder. I was obviously actively frowning now. 

"Do you tell him that every day?" 

"No I do not."

"Well, you should! Does he know that if you weren't as beautiful as you are, he'd have nothing?"

"Well I'm not sure that's true?"

"No it is! And you need to remind him of that EVERY DAY! You tell him, you say that I AM BEAUTIFUL AND YOU NEED TO REMEMBER!"

"I will do my best."

"Ok, now you take care now, baby, have a nice day!"

"Thank you, you as well."

And I got into my car and drove off. And I felt strange. 

I wrestled with myself about several things. First of all, I know him calling me 'baby' was not lascivious. It felt very paternal, it wasn't a come on. I've had enough people call me baby that I can tell the difference. People of all genders. I'm actually not that upset that he called me baby. I am not making excuses for him when I say that he was just being genuinely friendly with me, and he wasn't trying to be fresh. But...I wish I had felt ok in the moment to say, "oh, you don't need to call me baby, my name is Ondrea. Lovely to meet you". I felt panicked and unhappy and couldn't think of that, though. All I could think of was being socially polite. Secondly, I know he was trying to make me feel good by saying my husband is a lucky man, but it didn't make me feel good at all. It made me feel like my worth is merely decorative. I could be a fucking heinous cunt, Wayne has no idea who I am as a person. A heinous, bossy cunt that steals from my husband and cheats on him all day long. I would like to think that yes, Derek is pretty lucky, but not because I'm gorgeous. As established, I do not think I am. What I think makes Derek lucky is that I'm a good partner, I'm smart enough and funny enough to talk to for extended periods of time, and I care about him. We share interest, we have a great time together, I'm relatively patient. None of Derek's luck in having me as a partner, in my mind, is related to how I look. And it feels absolutely fucking WILD to have a stranger tell you that you are nothing more than window dressing. 

Of course, as I drove the fifteen minutes home, I was able to properly put how I felt into words that I should have said. Responses I wish I had been able to process immediately so I could have said what I wanted to say. It's frustrating to not be able to get everything right in the moment.