SEXTING after 50

OMG. KATHY LEE and HODA are talking about SEXTING. AFTER 50. And "selfies" those pictures . . .
I haven't seen my own ass in twenty years and frankly I don't want anyone else to see it. It's candles (waxless from QVC) by the bedside for me. It's laying flat then bunching my arms by my side so my boobs stay out of my armpits. He needs bifocals so thank God he can't see the sprouting hairs under my nose.
OK- I admit I have sent messages to David while he's working upstairs and I'm working downstairs.

"Honey can you walk the dog?"
Ten minutes- No answer.
"Honey PLEASEEEEE walk the dog."
Ten minutes- No answer. So I walk the dog.
We're back. I type,"Honey, I'm downstairs NAKED- I neeeeeddd you. I need you to check out my body. . . all the parts I can't see." My panties drop to the ground.

I hear the rumble of his feet.There I am naked, with the couch throw over my shoulders.
He looks longingly at me.
"I walked the dog. Now check me for ticks."

The Fine Line Between Love and Hate

I really hate my husband today. HATE! It’s OKAY to use that word, I’m a psychologist, and I gave you permission. Since we got the puppy I have learned a lot more about Mr. Perfect—and myself. How could I miss these qualities?

            “Honey,” I begged, “since I sprained my ankle on the log you threw under the bunch of leaves you had to rake in a pile across the path, could you walk the dog?”

            He grabs a sweatshirt (so I know this isn’t going to be a long trek), then discards the leash. Princess, he claims, knows he’s the alpha male.

            Five minutes later I ask, “Did she poop and pee?”

            “I don’t know, I was raking, and cutting shrubs.”

            “Shrubs, cutting? I ask the man who doesn’t know a tulip from a rose.

            “I found a clipper.”

            That thought is ambushed when Princess begins to sniff the new wool rug in the dining room. Princess is now 12 weeks weighs 43 pounds. I find out in the next minute her poop weighs half of that. One ruined cake spatula later, a roll of paper towels (Bounty), I see her squat again.

            I scream so loud even David’s rectum seizes two stories up.

            What to put on? Princess has thankfully left me with one of every shoe; a boot and rubber clog (which worked with my ace-bandaged foot), David’s sweat shirt; my fifty dollar silk scarf (for only $19.00 at Marshalls) and I run outside.

            Princess unloads. She makes a prefect Dairy Queen size softie on David’s sacred lawn. Yes, he designated the “lawn” as sacred. We have 4 acres of grass. Oh well, we couldn’t make it to the hinterlands, I thought. “Rotten me,” I tell princess.   

            She appeared to know exactly what I’m thinking. She looks quite charming with my scarf run through the collar. And I smile, long enough to crook my head down to her and glimpse the climbing roses that should have been behind her head.

            A nub. They are nothing but a nub. Twenty years and my roses look like that discount plastic sack they sell for $5.99-take-your-chances at the discount department store. The ends of the branches were ripped and torn as if they were sawed off.  

            I yank my silk scarf and march upstairs to his library (the bathroom).

            “What the F-U-C-K is wrong with you? Yeah I spell it. But that’s another story.

            As I yelled out my complaint, as he told me his story—fining the new clippers—a You Tube video on pruning—my hand found the weighty object in his sweatshirt pocket.

            I pull out my brand new ergonomic orange handled fifty-dollar Frisker Sewing Scissors.

            “Dawn, you know, they really took you on those things.”

ONE HOUR LATER: 

             "Sweetheart, you're not blogging that story, are you? You know I'll go right up to that store and buy you another one of those things." 

           

How to Attract and Keep a Loser . . .

I’m thinking of a series because there's just too much to write. Here's the first few you need to do to turn him off (or on) depending what you are looking for. I've gathered these hints from 20 years of experiences with kvetching women, friends and my experience as a therapist/researcher.   

You have just connected in person, on the phone, via email, or text.

1) Believe everything you see and hear. If you have met online take his profile as gospel

2) Rather than discuss politics, news events, or neutral topics (Gee, that storm last night was terrible . . .), talk about yourself—a lot. Tell him how great you are, how many men you have put in your slush pile, how valuable you are as a partner, and make sure to reveal all your requirements in a potential mate, sprinkled through your conversation.

“Family is sooo important to me.”

Now that you’ve told him what he needs to do to jump your bones, make sure you tell him how your ex failed, so he can avoid doing those things.

“My ex was a terrible parent.”

3) Don’t ask him anything about himself, where he works, how long he’s worked there, where he was born . . . .Don’t ask the questions that might give you a hint that you’re sitting across from a psychopath, sex addict, liar, or loser.

4) Allow him to text, or email most of your early pseudo conversations, rather than meet in person.

5) Don’t check him out. Don’t run to Facebook, Google his name, go to his employers website, check out his address (where you might find a ramshackle mobile home, a wife, kids, or foreclosure notice on the front door).

6) Daydream. Create all kinds of positive scenarios, because you know he’s prefect.

7) Disregard everything your friends tell you. What do they know?

TEXTING a Break up- Oh Please Give Me a Hydro, My Head is Splitting- Thank You Quinn Woodward Pu

Could someone please mail me a hydrocodone,

I have a splitting headache.

For the past month I’ve been preoccupied with my friend, SUZY’s break-up. Almost a year, after she rubbed the gloss off Mr. X, I’m a athlete (as long as it doesn’t cast money), into Zen (come and let us feel each other), I have a dick that never stops (I take Viagra because my prostrate is not working), entrepreneur (I’m chronically unemployed), and feminist (I’m into splitting the check and three-somes).  It was a yearlong, and YES SHE TEXTED her displeasure and need to break-up. They met, and she delivered the final blow. Cruel? For texting?  Considering their relationship was ½ texts, I think not. At least she had the courage to face him at Panera (while he ate and never offered her even a cup of coffee).

Speaking about breaking up via a text . . .

Bethany featured Could someone please mail me a hydrocodone,

I have a splitting headache.

For the past month I’ve been preoccupied with my friend, SUZY’s break-up. Almost a year, after she rubbed the gloss off Mr. X, I’m a athlete (as long as it doesn’t cast money), into Zen (come and let us feel each other), I have a dick that never stops (I take Viagra because my prostrate isn’t working), entrepreneur (I’m chronically unemployed), and feminist (I’m into splitting the check and three-somes).  It was a yearlong, and YES SHE TEXTED her displeasure and need to break-up. They met, and she delivered the final blow. Cruel? For texting?  Considering their relationship was ½ texts, I think not. At least she had the courage to face him at Panera (while he ate and never offered her even a cup of coffee).

Speaking about breaking up via a text . . .

Bethany featured Quin Woodward Pu, a 26-year-old writer who kvetched –via her blog- Little Black Blog-about his break-up via text. Now Ms. Pu, you made a stink on national TV, I am sure it added revenue to your blog and career as a memoire writer but you certainly gave me pause (adding to my headache) because you are a self-centered, egoistical, prima-donna, who could not take a little rejection. Actually, rejection is too big a word. He was just not that interested in you. Get over it- it was two dates, and no sex (at least that is what you say).  

However, after hearing you describe yourself as the kind of woman who gets a lot of attention from a lot of men, I’m sure the word rejection is not in your vocabulary.

GROW UP Ms. PU!

It was not a break-up! A break up results after a serious run of dates! My daughter, your age, Emily, says a break-up occurs after a commitment of monogamy and emotional commitment occurs between two people.

Are you nuts? “He was friendly enough, but annoyingly and sloppily drunk, which is why I offered my email address when he asked for my number.”

The day I’d offer my number to a drunken slob at a bar is the day someone needs to hit me in the head with a 2 x 4. They had a date, which turned dinner and champagne. “I kinda have chemistry with pretty much everyone, because I really like talking to people and winning over complete strangers.”

Are you kidding? Well that’s your problem. Normal people don’t think they have chemistry with everyone nor do they begin a conversation to win other people over. They consider sharing, enjoying debate, learning about another person.

If you take Ms. PU’s advice you need to have your head examined. Suzy had the same mantra- winning them over. That game plan bypasses authenticity. Mr. X, a creep, sought out all the things she needed in a mate; a good substitute father, sex, and intelligence. He had the smarts to placate her kids, eat her food, and take her money.

It is hard to be rejected.  But two dates? Please send me that hydrocodone. My head is beating . . .  a 26-year-old writer who kvetched –via her blog- Little Black Blog-about his break-up via text. Now Ms. Pu, you made a stink on national TV, I am sure it added revenue to your blog and career as a memoir writer but you certainly gave me pause (adding to my headache) because you are a self-centered, egoistical, prima-donna, who could not take a little rejection. Actually, rejection is too big a word. He was just not that interested in you. Get over it- it was two dates, and no sex (at least that is what you say).  

However, after hearing you describe yourself as the kind of woman who gets a lot of attention from a lot of men, I’m sure the word rejection is not in your vocabulary.

GROW UP Ms. PU!

It was not a break-up! A break up results after a serious run of dates! My daughter, your age, Emily, says a break-up occurs after a commitment of monogamy and emotional commitment occurs between two people.

Are you nuts? “He was friendly enough, but annoyingly and sloppily drunk, which is why I offered my email address when he asked for my number.”

The day I’d offer my number to a drunken slob at a bar is the day someone needs to hit me in the head with a 2 x 4. They had a date, which turned dinner and champagne. “I kinda have chemistry with pretty much everyone, because I really like talking to people and winning over complete strangers.”

Are you kidding? Well that’s your problem. Normal people don’t think they have chemistry with everyone nor do they begin a conversation to win other people over. They consider sharing, enjoying debate, learning about another person.

If you take Ms. PU’s advice you need to have your head examined. Suzy had the same mantra- winning them over. That game plan bypasses authenticity. Mr. X, a creep, sought out all the things she needed in a mate; a good substitute father, sex, and intelligence. He had the smarts to placate her kids, eat her food, and take her money.

It is hard to be rejected.  But two dates? Please send me that hydrocodone. My head is beating . . .

Holding out: How long should, would, could you wait before sex?

If you are interested in a relationship,  what should your strategy be?  Hook up or Hold out?
I don't care that some chick screwed her way to monogamy, I have a masters in statistics.  After screwing hundreds of men, you are bound to get one sucker and HPV.

My new read is Dan Slater's Love in the Time of Algorithms.

It's a  fascinating journalistic look at history of on line dating with some insights into some issues. And there are issues. Big ones. Worse is that everyone seems to have an opinion.  Did I mention that my mentor was the master of the liking algorithm, Donn Byrne.  So I think I know something. Here's a hint: they don't work on line.  Most people can develop some similarity.

I have five friends miserably failing right now.  Besides having way too much choice, thinking you have so many options because there are thousands of good looking mates out there, on line daters are becoming way too choosy, choosing men and woman way out of their league. Then they fantasize about their imaginary relationship with this person through emails or chats, never realizing that this person has a list of their own of potential mates, and they also have overestimated how worthy they are.

There was a time when men married to get reliable sex.  No, I'm not bullshitting, there was a time when women didn't give it away for a wink, a flirt, a text message or a dinner.  

I have a male friend named "Don," the Don of sex.  Every Friday, when he doesn't have a date, he winks at the woman that's not so good looking but not so unattractive. He looks for a woman less attractive than he thinks he is- and desperate. "Why isn't someone as nice as you out?" he writes her.  He told me one night he never made it into the bar-she flashed her lights and they did the deed in the car. here is the worst part: Don is looking for love! He wants to find his soul mate! But with Vagina growing on trees, he's waylaid (I mean that pun) on his love journey.  He's not alone, Dan Slater exposes the issue in his book.  Dan Slater says that convenient sex discourages men form commitment and I agree. What we need id e-Date-Etiquette- or a refined set of rules for behaving.

Helen Fisher did a mini study addressing this issue and although she is paid by chemistry, her results show that women are opting out of sex early on in the relationship.  It's a smart move.

Lesson: lower your standards in on line dating and not your pants.  Match up--look for someone in your league. The Don's out there are ready to take full advantage of the desperate women

Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In and Listen

What Women REALLY Need . . .

Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In . . .misses some valid points.  It might be a good read for those of us who have social supports but not for the 50% who have only themselves to rely on.  Lean In and ask for more work, for a raise, for more responsibility?    

            Last night, my youngest of six, Matthew, saw me working on the computer.  "Mom," he said. "Can I make dinner for you?"  I smiled.  But I'm grinning wider now—he's part of a new generation of men and women who have taken on nontraditional roles without balking and squawking.  He's part of the solution, groomed by my desire to earn a PhD in Psychology and have a career.  Remember that old TV show, Queen For a Day?  For you younger ones, women would compete for the crown and the ermine cape.  One winner was woman whose house burned to the ground. She moved her entire family into the backyard shed, wove beds out of pine boughs, gathered dandelion greens, and fed them small game caught in a noose, fashioned out of an electrical cord.  She won a barbecue grill for her glorious of multitasking.  They took that show off the air, deeming it too indignant to women.  Well, they ought to bring it back because I deserve that title—and I'm not alone. I want Martha Stewart herself to crown me.

            As I wrote this and had a good laugh, my husband David poked his head out of my computer and said, "What we really need is King for a Day."  I looked at my king, the poor guy whose mother garnished his plate and needed to be reprogrammed by his wife-who-wanted- a-career, and knew there was a grain of truth in what he said.  There is our first quandary—we need men or partners just as much as we need to meet our aspirations.      

            Our second dilemma is what women want and need may not be the same thing.  While my oxytocin-wired brain summoned babies (I'm a mom to six), my intellectual side needed stimulation.  Perhaps if I were back some 10,000 years ago with my cave sisters I might have had some female company.  I might have been debating, inventing some new method of weaving rushes, or leaving my babes with a friend while I dug up some fresh roots.  Sadly in today's world, sisters, mothers, grannies or friends are not there to reinforce our social needs—which are different from men's.  We're wired for comradery and cooperation rather than competition and contest. 

            Our folly might be discarding  those needs and attempting to circumvent them.  We're also wired to worry.  It might have served our cave-sisters well but not us.  Thinking about raises and job opportunity when you have babies in daycare?  Ha!  It's made all the more terrible by the fact that we have little choice in the matter; we live in an economy where not working is some sort of shame.  Most of us come home to waiting laundry piles, and hungry men—not necessarily hungry for food.  To add insult to injury, we're expected to Martha-Stewart our lives in our spare time.  One year I carved twenty five tiny pumpkins to hold the Thanksgiving soup, and that was before I collected flora and fauna for the centerpieces.   No Betty-Croker-in-the-box for our generation.  Had Martha been born in the late sixties, we might have been embroidering our bras, not burning them.

            Have a laugh now because the rest of it is poignantly sad.  American women are among the most depressed and stressed in the world. "Role-strain" is what we call it—and we need to admit it before we try to tackle the problem.  In the 1990's, a PhD student, teaching for pennies, I was accused of breastfeeding my newborn in the classroom—by the male chairman of the Psychology Department!  It was untrue, but such sentiments have hardly gone away.  The pull to "mother" will not wane until the pull to "father" meets it with equal force.  With men earning at least 20% more than us, the tradeoffs are not in our favor.  While many European countries provide stipends to parents who need to parent, today's woman faces a quandary; leave and parent, or stay and hold on to one's position.  Yes, while that job might still be waiting, chances are you'll lose seniority, accumulated six time, raises, and respect.  Women who leave for more than a few weeks are castigated as the Benedict Arnolds of the workplace, their minds thought lost in the world of diapers, bottles and teddy bears.  I've had friends who've been on that cliff, holding onto their positions with their fingernails as their eggs rotted.  "I don't know when the right time is to get pregnant," said my thirty- nine- year old executive friend. 

            No wonder we take the crumbs we're offered, and don't lean in.  We're caught between thinking we don't deserve it or worrying that any added responsibilities to our pile might just Jenga that tower.  The male patriarchy (yes, it's alive) is not going to fess up to its complicity.  And it also means that most of our life-partners have to take on additional responsibilities.  Ours was a balancing act, dividing up the chores, yet reserving time for one another, no matter what.  This brings this conversation to a happy note.  When men take on that task, they raise children who understand those roles.  Those children will one day be executives, CEO's, and wield the power to shift our strain, equally.  

            I looked at my husband, the man who let that screaming baby suck on his nipple until it was purple while I was taking my doctoral qualifying exams.  I'm going to crown him King For a Day—tonight.    

Dawn Marlena Hopper, PhD 

What Do Men Want?

Today I met a friend for lunch with a copy of my book on men—a book jammed packed with their love stories.  For one hour we discussed my ideas.  The woman at the next table felt my very words were an insult to her ears.

She went militant on me.  I tried to calm her.  But when she called me a crazy religious zealot and an affront to all women who fought for women's rights I went "Gloria" on her.  I lived in a women's commune in the mid-seventies!  Burn my bra?  I cut a huge hole in the ass of my jeans and let my checks spill out.  I fought idiots at Planned Parenthood.  This wasn't the first time I got that reaction and it won't be the last.  I love men and because I love it doesn't negate the fact I love women.  SO I'm reposting Dr. Helen Fisher's blog that gets to the meat.

For centuries Americans and people just about everywhere else, have believed a lot of things about women that we now realize aren’t true.  Among them, the credos that a woman’s place is in the home and that aging single women—long called spinsters—are sad misfits.  Decades of marches, articles, books, law suits and national, regional and local discussions have finally uprooted these and many more wrong beliefs about women.  This national survey furthers that cause.   Indeed, it shows that women seek more independence in a partnership than men do.

But I have long wanted to bust myriad myths about the other half of the human race–men.  Single in America does it in spades.   This national survey clearly shows that men are just as eager to marry as women are; 33% of both sexes want to say “I do.”  Moreover, men in every age group are more eager than women to have children.  Even young men.  Among those between ages 21 and 34, 51% of men want kids, while 46% of women yearn for young.  Men are less picky too.  Fewer men say it is  important to find a partner of their own ethnic background (20% of men vs 29%  of women said this is a “must have” or “very important”); and fewer say they want someone of their own religion (17% of men vs 28% of women said this is a “must have” or “very important”).   Men are also more likely to have experienced love at first sight, as well as open to introducing a date to their parents sooner.

Perhaps most impressive:  In a committed relationship, men are less likely to say they need personal space (58% vs 77% of women); less likely to want nights out with friends (23% vs 35% of women); less eager to own their own bank account (47% vs 66% of women); and less likely to want to take a vacation on their own (8% vs 12%).  Remarkably, men under age 45 are also more willing  than older men and women to enter a committed relationship with someone who has everything they were looking for in a partner, but whom they do not find sexually attractive.  And just as many men under 35 believe you can stay married to the same person forever (84%). http://blog.match.com/2011/02/04/the-forgotten-sex-men/

Sorry, we are not from other planets.  Dr. Dawn Hopper