Try, Try Again

Hey Fab Fam!

I have been away for a hot minute. Since it’s a holiday weekend, I’m going to try and keep this to a minimum and refrain from giving you a full rundown of everything that has gone down in the past month. I’ll just give you the highlights. But before I do, I want to stop and wish you all a Happy Holiday season.

Now, where do we begin? First, I work in healthcare data & technology consulting. There’s never a quiet time in that field, but lately my schedule has been merciless. Luckily, I did not have to make the schelp to Ohio after my client said that virtual workshops would be safer and more convenient. But let me tell you, co-hosting one four-hour, virtual client workshop and leading another was no joke. After that, we only had a a few days to distill all that dialogue down into a summary of key findings. But I like being busy and using my brain, so that wasn’t a problem. However, another client decided to issue a last-minute proposal request for a massive engagement in 2022 and they gave all the bidders only a few days to respond. So, that was a problem. There were a lot of early mornings and long nights. I had to just put my head down and do it, and I’m happy to report that I did! Yay.

Unfortunately, as I was getting through all that work I was also enduring nonstop, heavy uterine bleeding. I have been taking high dose hormones for two months but each time I taper off, the problem comes back with a vengeance. This has turned me into a raging bitch with an uncontrolled appetite, extreme fatigue, elevated blood pressure, and oily skin and hair. I went to see my doctor during my third flare just before Christmas and finally – after over a decade of pleading – my doctor finally suggested it might be time to part with a couple of my female organs. I would have been able to easily fit major surgery into my schedule ten years ago. But as if my current work demands aren’t enough, I have decided to take the plunge and get a second master’s degree that I will complete while working. That Ivy League program commences in just a few weeks. It’s an accelerated cohort program so I can’t start late. This means that a casual trip to the OR for a hysterectomy, followed by six weeks of recovery, doesn’t exactly work right now. We’re trying a third course of high dose hormones of a different kind, to stabilize me until I can work surgery into my schedule. On a positive note, the new hormones aren’t nearly as awful as the others were and I feel more like my cute, smart, sexy self. So yay for that too.

Although all of the above has forced me to be less socially active than I’d like, it hasn’t kept me from collecting dating stories. You may recall that in my recent hormone induced depression, I begrudged being ghosted by a guy with whom I really thought I made a connection. This man is crazy smart, tall, athletic, gorgeous, traveled, a bit irreverent, sweet, and funny. Our text exchanges brought out my wit that I so often find absent in my dating exchanges with men who talk over me. We met once and spent an entire afternoon together and were looking forward to meeting up again, but then he went dark. I knew he worked in landscaping (after taking a break from being a science teacher) and I entertained the notion that he had fallen out of a tree or from a ladder. I joked with my friend that this would be the only excuse I would accept for his sudden disappearance.

And well, I kind of feel like the Angel of Death because that is indeed what occurred. A few days before Thanksgiving, I got a text message from this lovely man. He told me he had a sudden heart attack while at work (a couple of days after we met), fell, hit is head, and lost his memory of the past few months. He had no memory of meeting me or even what I look like. I suppose he found our text correspondence in his phone and felt compelled to reach out to determine how far along we were. 

Right, so I can’t imagine anyone would know how to respond to such a message, but I’m fairly certain most people would not have responded that way I did. I immediately wrote back to him, “OMFG! I was about to text you to ask if you had fallen off a cliff!” Fucking hell… Um, yeah, he did effectively fall off a cliff so that remark might not have been my wisest or most empathetic reaction. Oy vey.  

I did get my shit together and sent a note offering support should he ever need it, and explained that I’m the go-to girl for navigating complex medical issues. But that was all I could do. Recovery from a life-threatening episode, not to mention a traumatic brain injury, is no joke. The guy has a very young daughter and I’m sure this has been equally troubling for her and her mother. A friend of mine encouraged me to go aggressively after the guy, speculating that his newfound medical status would make him less desirable to others. That is not the way I think - were that true I would also think of myself as belonging in the discount bin and I sure as hell don’t. My uterus and I might be frenemies and I have an autoimmune thing that isn’t always fun. But I deal with it like a boss. So I would never proclaim that anyone with a medical condition is an also ran in the dating world. Plus, the guy was plenty interested in me before his horrific episode. I don’t believe I need to be the dating equivalent of a wreck chaser. I felt the nicest thing I could do after offering words of encouragement was to step aside and let his family step in, so that’s what I did. End of story.

And with that, I determined the universe just fucking hates me. I was reminded that I have extremely high standards. I want to find a companion who matches me intellectually, is as kind as me (forgetting for a moment about my blunder above), is as attractive, successful, interesting, and funny. I finally found someone who is all those things, and he nearly died a few days later and developed amnesia. I don’t know what I did in my past life but I do know I must have been a total asshole.

I decided to keep my Hinge profile going for entertainment value, and oh Lord, the things I have seen. You cannot make this shit up. There is the guy I refer to as Naked Santa - a man who looks like a bald Santa but for some reason felt the need to post a picture of himself with his shirt off. That was not a good look. I’m not a fan of the shirtless selfies anyway because that sort of vanity seems so 1968. I mean, I have a nice body but I would prefer to meet someone who is as interested in me as they are in my boobs. That goes both ways. I’ll be happy to see man boobs once I know there’s more to a dude than that.

Then there all these men who ramble on endlessly about their manliness, because God forbid a woman should dare to outshine them. There are men who write about their sexual prowess, one declaring he can do tantric “lovemaking” for up to 14 hours straight – something he learned to do after sleeping around in Nepal. OK, so the guy is a slut who probably has all the sexually transmitted diseases, he thinks modern women like to hear sex referred to as “making love” (ew), and he thinks there are women who are captivated by the idea of a 14-hour sexathon? Five hours straight is my max; after that I’m giving the guy a blowup doll and getting a snack. And finally, there are the guys who talk about wanting to find a woman with a large sexual appetite. Here’s the deal: When a guy asks a random woman whether she wants to fuck him, there’s a high probability she will conclude she does not.

Two things have remained constant since 2020: Covid-19 is not going away and neither are horrific online dating experiences. But I know that my ex’s ex-finance just met someone awesome, and I also just started chatting with someone who seems really great (although I refused to share this blog with him), so maybe 2022 will bring much needed change. If not, I’ll continue to try and try again. Happy New Year! 

Love,

Fab4Eyes