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It’s Sunday morning and my usual long bike ride is being stalled to see if the rain clouds and drops are passing. So the newspapers were finally read, and the gift of tea my Flower sent me from Illinois was tasted, and Arlene was allowed to curl up on the couch and be near (something she seems to need more than anytime in the past – although she spent many a morning in between Steve’s legs while he read the paper – she is not used to my inability to sit still).

What came to mind this morning is the whole Sex in the City situation. Emailing with a friend, she writes – “I know he is bad news, but I want to read all about it.” And I know, frankly, what she means. Married my whole life, I was on the phone once with a newspaper advertising source who told me she LOVED the television show, Sex in the City – this was years ago – and I said, “I can’t relate to those women.” My friends were mostly married and the few in my life who weren’t, wanted to be, and surely none were indulging in $500 shoes or sport fucking anymore.

Enter 2006 and a big upheaval in my life and a change of scenery and friends. Now, when a woman from the Midwest refers to my “sex in the city blog entries,” I scratch my head. Earlier this year, I rented a few seasons of Sex in the City when I found myself waiting on a man to make up his mind about me, and waited for my feelings to sort out about my husband from whom I was separated. Inevitably, each episode would hold me in rapt attention and then all the air would deflate when the episode ended – I’d be left with this vague sense of emptiness and sadness I believed at the time was being informed by my own experiences.

In actuality, the single life of a woman in these times is complicated. Women are experiencing the empowerment of a feminine sexual expression, financial independence, as well as learning our own sense of what beauty is once the bloom of youth has passed. We are confident about who we are, but when it comes to communicating who we are to the opposite sex, we’re still at an impasse.

When we find the one man who stands out in the herd – call it sexual attraction – we behave in certain ways to communicate our interest, but more times than not, communication breaks down in each exchange – my friend laments in her email not hearing from this man she knows is “bad news” but she wants him anyway. I understand, is all I can tell her.

I’m not an expert on single life as some of my friends. But being married made me an expert in other ways. I know what it is like to love a man like your own life and care profoundly about his wellbeing. I also know what it is like to not be able to communicate with the same man even while sharing a bed every night, and drinking out of the same coffee mug, and staring into familiar eyes when you wake and before you go to sleep.

My ultimate desire in life is to communicate – to find the other on this planet to communicate who I am to – unfortunately I realize I want that person to know me, to get me, to want me, desire me, to love and like me, without too many words exchanged.

They’re only words, but words get in the way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 24th, 2006 at 9:12 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.