When Your Guy Longs for Every Other Woman but You…
Yesterday, in my usual morning practice, before I sat down to write, I was scrolling through advice columns at the same time I lingered over my morning mug of tea. I read Carolyn Hax, Ask Polly, Ask a Manager, and a few others for two reasons, the voyeurism. The voyeurism! The second reason? Sometimes they make me think. Today’s was a “thinker.”
The question was one most would probably find fairly benign. The letter writer (LW) was baffled as to why her friend wouldn’t introduce the LW to the friend’s new boyfriend. The boyfriend had made a comment about a picture of LW being attractive. That was enough to shut down any prospect of a three-person meal.
The comments section of advice columns are places of wild speculation.
“The boyfriend is abusive!” half insisted.
“The girlfriend is insecure!” the other half cried.
I’m not an absolutist. Both could be true at the same time. There were many other commenters, though, who thought it was wildly inappropriate for the boyfriend to be discussing who he finds attractive with his girlfriend of a few months.
What? Inappropriate? Unkind? Lacking in emotional intelligence and empathy? I sat back hard on my breakfast barstool.
Not a single one of those possibilities had ever occurred to me in far too many years of marriage and dating.
While I sipped at my tea, I did a quick walk down my relationship memory lane. I couldn’t think of any man I’d ever been involved with who hadn’t done this—point out all the women he found (more) attractive (than me).
One of the first freeform things I wrote in college was titled, “The Life of Number Twenty.” It was about me being at the end of a long line of women my college boyfriend had loved and lost.
He was seventeen. I was his twentieth.
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