Day 0507

Oops! Turns out Love does not actually = Kindness. I’ve spent my life thinking the two things shared the same definition, which makes me a real turkey cos I’ve certainly experienced all types of love but relatively little kindness over the years.
In fact, when I think about the possibility of meeting someone new – and it has begun to cross my mind once in a while (a nice change) – I want to find kindness before almost anything else.
Almost anything equals: right wing political views, unkempt nosehair and an exhaled wheeze instead of a belly laugh. And, of course, anyone who says while naked and in bed: So do you think less of me now because you know I cheat on my wife? … This is the first time of course!
SO how does one identify kindness?
I can recognise love: big, warm, blinding, deafening, stomach churning, electricity making love.
But kindness, it’s much gentler and quieter cousin, how do you identify that? And how do you distinguish true kindness from just being polite or gentlemanly? How do you know that it’s a kindness that will last into the intimacy of knowing someone really well?
Is the only way to test it? Because I don’t have a great batting average with that method?
I need a Cosmo Quiz!

Day 0470

Now there’s a feeling I haven’t had in a good long while: attraction to a male human being.
It’s especially nice as there is no potential for it to go anywhere, just that nice thrum of enjoying someone’s physical company.
A complex, hard to find feeling with no complications. A feeling that is only mine and doesn’t need to be analysed or over-worried, just enjoyed and giggled at inside myself.
Nice to know that feeling can still occur; that biology wins out over the sad ugliness of Halfman’s afterburn.
Seems a fairly delightful kind of thing.

Days 0409 & 0410

I think maybe I’m addicted to that feeling when you realise that someone you like likes you back. It’s such a lovely feeling that floods from one part of my body through every vein and every pore. It’s as nice a feeling as there is.
The best one was when I was 19 and this guy I’d just met – the one who turned out to be The Love of My Life – said bye to me as part of a small group of people in a friend’s kitchen. We’d all just been out on a humid summer evening to watch a movie. He was utterly gorgeous. And smart and lovely. And didn’t seem particularly overtly taken with me. Until that moment I said bye and he said it back. And he looked me right in the eyes and held that look just a razor’s edge of a moment longer than would be natural.
It was marvelous. We fell madly in love and floated on a happy cloud together for many years.
The second best was Halfman, who had been playing a metaphorical game of footsie with me for a while but whom I just couldn’t imagine being interested in me beyond the friend zone.
It came in two halves really. He told me one evening over a glass of wine in a cosy pub as the night grew dark around us that he thought I looked very beautiful. That seemed a very non friend zone comment.
And then there was an awkward non conversation on a semi circular bench in a parallel park in the sunshine. And when I walked him back to his office and turned to get in my car, he reached out and touched my fingers with his. And then as we walked away from each other he kept his fingertips on mine until we finally slid apart. I felt the warmth of this finger tips for the whole of that day. And the next.
And the sharp electricity of longing that it awoke in me was incomparable after so many years of being crushed alive.

Day 0263

I had an absolutely stunning, intelligent 31 year old woman-friend tell me a truth I’ve searched years for over a glass of sparkling yesterday.

What stunned me is not that she had this truth in her head but that she knows it already when it’s taken me repeated (some might say ‘serial’) misjudgments and 42 years to get to a place where I had yet to articulate the learning so succinctly.

The pearl she dropped before me was:

‘… and if you didn’t really notice them until you found out they liked you, then that is a BIG NO’

So bluntly put, this gelled all my experiences, in particular the still fresh carcass of Halfman into my head.

There is only one relationship where I liked the person before I knew they liked me. And more importantly, all the people who I found out liked me and subsequently had relationships with didn’t even enter my mind as suitor material before then.

Is it an inherent weakness of mine that I need to be admired before I can identify things to like about someone?

Do I need the ego boost or confidence of knowing they like me first before I can make a move?

Or do I just not have a clue what I’m looking for in a mate? Or even whether I am actually looking for one?

I think I need to buy that wise friend  another glass of bubbly one afternoon and thank her for her wisdom, and hopefully squeeze a whole lot more out of her.