So Luke made the mistake of pointing me to another blog…

…and this time I caught myself before posting a blog-in-a-comment.

Mel-Anon wrote a witty entry: “The best of both worlds”. That has me pondering dating and all that stuff that might follow.

The author (Ken? couldn’t find an about page) wrote: “I have a feeling this is going to come out sounding really awkward, but I’m going to try and say it anyway. I have a rather self-defeating attraction to independent, self-sufficient women. […] I say that it is self-defeating since it is naturally those kind of people who don’t feel any additional pressure to have a significant other, let alone sad old me.”

As (I guess…) one of those independent, moderately self-sufficient women, I’ll second the commenter Parke–the “don’t want to be a constant crutch” thing works both ways. Supportive is good, role-playing a prosthesis device is not.

(It’s strangely coincidental that that would come to my attention now, because I’ve been looping Everything But the Girl’s “Protection” for the past five or six days. Damn good song.)

I guess I’m not sure why the attraction to stand-up women is self-defeating. If you’re equally independent and self-sufficient, that sounds like it would be damn attractive to an equally independent woman; see above about crutches. Maybe I’m the weirdo (which is distinctly possible), but when I think marriage, I think “partner”, implying a balance of strengths and weaknesses, not “one person [either gender] dominating the relationship and the money and the kids and etc.” Should there be kids. Kids are eViL, though. Particularly kids with genes from either of the two families I represent.

I’ve seen the various ways that balance can fall–in some relationships, the women do dominate in most of the aspects of life that outsiders see. In others, it’s the man. I watch couples–aunts and uncles, my parents, my friends’ parents, curious as to what their balance is (or, again, what it seems to be to outsiders), and, quite frankly, I think I’d chaff if I found myself in any of their positions.

Guess it’s a good thing I don’t marry within the family or link up with my friends’ parents, I suppose.

Every once in a while, though, I see and experience what I think would be a good balance; I don’t know that I can put words to it, because although lists of things like “willing to do dishes”, “can cook basic foods”, and “don’t ignore their spawn” are amusing and sound reasonable, they’re also just reactions to what I don’t like about others, and I’m still not a fan of affirmation by negation (caused me some trouble in DISCO, that). I can pick out most of the elements from my better friendships with men and I try to study that, too. There’s obviously some reason I “click” with them, and I usually want to know why that is. I tend not to share, of course, because as soon as you start talking like that, people start thinking the “attraction” is on a sexual level and then they start harboring that suspicion that you’re lusting after their hot, sexy bod and things get really awkward and you find yourself wishing you’d just giggled your way out of the conversation and endured whatever torture was given out as punishment for your silence.

Ahem. So…

What does this have to do with the Mel-Anon guy and his attraction to manhandling women (kidding, kidding)? Absolutely nothing. But things are sort of falling together in my mind of what I want. Whether I’ll get it is a completely different question/issue, but theorizing can be enlightening, nonetheless, I suppose.