What a Girl Wants

Posted on | June 26, 2012 | 5 Comments

When I was a little girl, I used to cry every time I got what I wanted.  I would tell my mother to leave without me because I didn’t want to go to the store and then I would curl up on the window seat in the kitchen of our old split-level home and sob, heartbroken that she left without me.  As I got to high school, I no longer cared about going to the store with my mother, but oh how I would cry when I would tell a guy I wasn’t interested and he would… gasp… stop calling me.   I remember laying on the soft gray carpet of my bedroom and sobbing softly into the floor because I had told a guy that OF COURSE I didn’t like him as more than a friend.  When apparently I did.  Or maybe I just wanted him to like me. Who knows.

I guess you could say I never really knew what I wanted.

I guess you could say I still don’t.

When I first started thinking about dating, I had a laundry list of everything I didn’t want in a guy.  Emotionally unavailable? No thank you.  Hates kids? Absolutely not.  Plays hours of video games? Hell to the no.

I knew exactly what I didn’t want.  I didn’t want anyone who bore any relationship to my ex in any way.

And then I started dating, started meeting men and letting them take me out and I realized that I still have the same hang ups that I had in high school.  I still push the good ones out to arms length and let my inner critical eye tear them apart piece by piece.  I still flock to the ones who don’t call back, don’t respond, or don’t care anything at all about what I’m thinking or feeling at any given moment.

I have this idea that somewhere there is a guy who is every conundrum that lives inside of me… childish and grown up, silly and smart, nervous and confident. I seem to think that he will be wrapped up in packaging that looks decidedly like Jim Sturgess or maybe Jason Segel.  I seem to think that perfect men exist… and that if they did, they’d somehow want to be with imperfect me.

So yeah… I don’t know what I want.  I just know what I don’t want… sometimes.  Until it changes.

But there is one thing I have learned as I brave the dating world … almost any flaw, almost any check in the negative column can be cured by one small, simple thing… by one thing that was sorely missing in my previous relationship…

If he loves his own child or he loves children in general and if he is or he wants to be a fully hands-on engaged father?

Then yeah.

He’s alright with me.

Warts and all.

So I suppose that means that maybe, after all this time, I am finally learning what it is, WHO it is, that I want.

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