strange attractors

It’s been a while since I posted an update on my heartspace….Really, it was four years of healing, and of processing the lessons of my first go at long-term partnership-turned marriage, and of dating (first a ton, and then barely), and of getting clear about the partnership and partner I want… since leaving my ex at the end of 2005. Lying fallow.

Last spring, during a sorry-ass sick-of-being-single stint, I hauled out some old photo albums, going back to my college days. One image stopped me: it was my flame from senior year, an utterly beautiful and brilliant boy, pinning me down on the ground, my smile so wide it could crack the earth in two, totally blissed out and secure in his arms.

That feeling! I want that feeling again, I said. I pulled the photo out of the album and stuck it on my altar, next to my most magnetic objects. It wasn’t the boy in the photo I focused on (the boy, last I’d heard, was still happily married and fathering, and we’d had no direct communication for 14 years), it was the joy and ease. The bliss, trust.

So… I do believe we co-create and alter the life around us as we live and experience it. I believe that we–those of us privileged enough to be able to dedicate the necessary energy– can pull a certain aspect of reality into being by will and focus. But–could I have conjured a man “off my altar and into my arms,” as one friend put it?

Because almost exactly a month after that, I got an email from the boy in the photo. Subsequent emails revealed he was separating from his wife, while I was well underway with a move… to the city where he happened to live. And ever since then, we’ve been revelling in our re-discovery. Magic.

in/decent exposure

The other week someone who reads this blog expressed her surprise that I was as open about my sexual exploits here as I am. I just shrugged: hooping has everything to do with my sexual and sensual (late-)blooming. The hoop’s brought heightened awareness, intelligence and blood flow to my pelvis. It’s made me more playful and powerful, more willing to take risks. Ask any hooper, and they’re likely to confirm this kind of transformation.

So last week when I went out with someone who actually seemed like he might make a heartspace contender, I was taken aback by his comment that he knew I wasn’t the sort of girl who’d go home with someone at the end of a first date, because he’d read it on my website. It was a joke, sure–but made me wonder what he was trying to say. What came to mind was the voice of a female relative, who once said, upon seeing photos of me in hoop costumes, that “no nice man would ever be interested in a girl dressed like that.” Of course I scoffed at her old-fashioned-ness: I am a strong, successful, independent woman who takes full responsibility for my sensual/sexual presence, needs, and actions.

But as the date from last week seems to have fizzled into oblivion, I’m left questioning whether I am indeed exposing too much in my posts and photos to expect that someone who reads it before knowing me would respect me and take me seriously. Because who isn’t doing their pre-date online research, right? I mean, I’m almost offended if someone hasn’t.

“So, basically, you’re asking if you should be less yourself,” said one of my best friends when we checked in about the date. Yes….yes I guess I am, but it could also be about taking responsibility for setting expectations through the image one projects, couldn’t it?

Hoop and the Single Goddess

Somewhere in the hoopgoddess archives there’s a piece I wrote about how my hoop helped me to define my edges and set boundaries. Visualize a forcefield that protects me from giving myself away for the wrong reasons: e.g. just to make the other person happy, or because of fears I have (of not being liked, of being lonely). That’s been the hoop’s single greatest gift to me. (Followed closely by this core, which michaelangelo himself could have hardly sculpted better.)

The forcefield’s bolstered my professional life, kept me physically healthy, but more than anything it’s kept me True in the romance department. See—about a year after my divorce, with a couple of hurtful rebound relationships under my belt, I had an epiphany. I realized that something inside me always Knew about the potential of a prospective partner very early on.

I’m not talking about love at first sight, but about whether there was Potential or No: that was always clear to my wisest instincts (which make their home somewhere in my gut-belly region), after the first few times I hung out with someone. If not the very first.

But more often than not, I let my head do the assessment, and if the candidate had a certain combination of qualities my head thought were important (education, worldly perspective, good looks, chivalry, professional prospects, and palpable desire for me), I’d ignore my gut. Inevitably, my heart would then jump into the game and develop feelings for the Certain Someone. I find I can grow fond of almost anyone, because almost everyone is loveable.

It would take months, or sometimes even years, for the feeling in my gut to finally prove itself right: we weren’t a fit. And that unavoidable Truth-of-the-Gut revelation was always a very painful time for all involved.

So, epiphany processed, I decided to attune myself to my gut. The result was the development of the Two Date Rule. The TDR goes like this: after the first date, if I have a clear feeling in my gut it’s not a fit, I don’t go on a second date. If I’m not clear, I go on a second date. If I have a clear feeling in my gut on the second date it’s not a fit or if my gut isn’t saying YES!, I don’t go on a third date. (Sometimes I do go on a third date just to let the person know in person that it’s not a fit.)

Nearly two years after instituting the TDR (in February 09 it will have been a full 2), only two men have made it beyond third/fourth dates into multi-week/-month relationships with me. Two out of 40-50. Meager returns, yes, but returns of the highest integrity.

There are multiple benefits. I’m on friendly terms with a number of the guys I went on 2 dates with—because we shared enough to appreciate one another, but neither invested enough (time, emotion, or money) to feel bitter afterwards (except for a couple of loonies who invest their whole heart on the first date, and yes, they are irrefutably loonies, not romantics.) And I haven’t wasted my precious time (or his) on those “I’m not really into this but at least I’m not home alone on a Friday night” moments—instead I’ve written two books in a single (ha ha) year and had many amazing adventures with my friends.

And I’m pretty direct about what didn’t work for me. “What do you say to them?!” friends ask me. Well, I’m honest. And honestly, more often than not there’s no chemistry—people literally don’t smell right to me (or, in the rarer case we get that far, taste right.) It’s a hard thing to argue with, being told “I’m sorry, I just don’t think I’ve got chemistry with you.” (Chemistry gets more elusive to me every year that passes, and I take it very seriously when I find it.)

If I met the candidate online, and any kind of lie has surfaced during the live date, I’ll say—“it disturbs me that you started things off by lying. I just can’t deal with that.” And once or twice, to a certain kind of person, I’ve said “you seem to be very excited about me, but you actually didn’t ask me ANYthing about myself over the course of the past five hours, and it makes me doubt your reasons for being interested in me.” Yes, I really did.

And, after 22 months (40-50 men, probably an average of something like 1.6 dates with each), I haven’t regretted my decisions. I haven’t looked wistfully back upon a single one and thought “I really should have given him another chance.”

Sure, I’ve found myself alone on a Friday night, and rolled around in self-pity in the wake of a sappy romance flick, even felt stabs of envy when I see friends fall into that most delightful of highs, fresh love. But I’m not settling for anyone just to have someone around, which is what I’ve witnessed my past self—and so many other people—doing. If it’s not right, I’d rather be alone, in perfect possession of my integrity, and proud of it. And maybe getting my hoop on, just for me.