There are times I truly hate reading "single female" editorials in the newspaper.

Today I parked it on the couch and lounged around drinking tea, having a quiet morning while two cats tried to shred the paper dangling so temptingly above them. Normally I never get to the paper before it's folded up and separated –  the Paper is the Girl's turf, and she devours it every morning before anything else goes on.  The Girl has a fetish for newspapers borne of her parents' upbringing; namely, that they bought the Seattle P-I and the Seattle Times when they were growing up, and at least half an hour of every day through her childhood was dedicated to reading the papers.

I, on the other hand, grew up in Eugene, Oregon, where the Register-Guard was the common paper. It was also nicknamed The Regrettably Garbled for a reason. Even when I was getting the paper, I had the Seattle Post Intelligencer not just because it was a writer's newspaper, but because I loved their take on news. Now that Seattle is a one-paper town, I find the lack of variety dull. I'm tempted to renew a subscription to the New York Times just to have another paper to read over the weekends. Sure, I still read the Seattle PI online, but on an intrinsically tactile level, it's just not the same.

Cats can't try to shred your paper when it's online. Don't ask me why this is a negative for me; it just is. It's not really reading the newspaper if your animals aren't trying to destroy it in retribution for not providing them enough catnip.

But why do I get the luxury of the paper to myself? The Girl is up in Anacortes, riding her horse and having a Girls' Night Out with her best friend The CPA Valkyrie –  so named because she both does our taxes and gives me stern looks when I ask, “So, is there any chance I could deduct the cable TV as a fiction novel writing expense?” (Also, she rides a Harley. And looks like she could take out a horde of Jotun with one hand while swigging a liter or two of beer with the other. Her husband is a very happy man.)

At any rate, I get to flipping through the paper until I come across the headline “Seattle's Dysfunctional Dating Scene”. This is something I know a bit about, but from a male perspective. For over twelve years that I lived in this city, I had dating experiences that ranged from the sweet and poignant to the utterly ridiculous.

Then I realized that the entire editorial was about one thing: how much the author thinks Seattle men suck because they don't want to ask the author out. Or refrain from doing so. Or won't.

And the author is from Alaska, a state well-known for two things: the absurdly skewed male-to-female ratio, and their overwhelming population of men who live in areas where a mani-pedi combination isn't to be found for over four hundred miles and a long flight via the Tweto's Era Airlines.

Ah. Ah hah. Hah. Whoo.

I've got a host of stories about this ranging from the awkward bar pickup to having to find my drink parked among a forest of Cosmos headed to a table full of single giggling females to the oddity of having to explain to a young woman that no, I will not pass a request to the DJ to play Rebecca Black's Friday because in point of fact, a deep jungle house DJ does not tend to take either requests, especially from people with horrible taste in music.

There's the dating saga of meeting girls who believed Ayn Rand to be their spiritual mentor (and therefore directly responsible for their terrible, terrible taste in books), the women (yes, plural) who propositioned me for anal sex thirty minutes into a first date, and the ever-present Picasso Girl (where none of the lines ever really seemed to match up –  facial structure, body, personality, awkward-as-hell-make out and sex positions, etc). I went down those roads and believe me, my frustration with the Seattle Girl was at least as prominent as this author.

But the more I read this woman's editorial, the more I went, “Bitch, PLEASE.”

At any rate, I wrote the following response.

Ms. Campoamor's editorial about the supposed dysfunctionality of Seattle men in the dating scene is a bit over the top and ridiculous. As someone who spent nearly twelve years in it as a male, I can offer Ms. Campoamor a simple explanation: if you want a meaningful relationship with a Seattle guy, stop meeting them in bars.

This has absolutely nothing to do (as Ms. Campoamor suggests) with a lack of Alaskan-style manliness, confidence, or the ability to express oneself with big-boy words. It doesn't have anything to do with Seattle men being “Shy, retiring, timid, and seemingly incapable of striking up a conversation.”

It has everything to do with the natural environment of mating that Ms. Campoamor seems used to, IE, the bar pickup.

When I was single and dating, I made a point of order to never, EVER pick up a girl in a bar. The reason? My assumption is that she was there to have a drink, not cruise for guys. When I go to a bar, I'm either on a date, or I'm hanging out with a friend I haven't seen in a long time, or I'm there to try new food. I think of bars as a place to eat and drink, not some gladiatorial mating arena. Fortunately most of Seattle's bars and restaurant proprietors seem to agree with me on this point. As do many of the women in Seattle. 

Even now, if I were single, I'd never pick up a girl in a bar. What do two people have in common when they meet at a bar? They both drink. For some that might be a brilliant foundation for a relationship, but strangely enough, my standards for female companionship stretch a little higher than that. 

I was the kid on the playground who'd walk up to someone and say “Want to be friends? Let's play!” As I went through awkward, gawky teen years and my early twenties, that never changed, regardless of gender. For me, it felt incredibly awkward and out of character to dropping a line like, “You must be a gift from heaven, because that body is divine.” (And in certain all-male situations, more than a little inappropriate.)

Even today, I go to a bar to eat, drink, and socialize with my friends –  I don't go to a bar to attempt to make the beast with two backs. And socially, I don't mind meeting new people regardless of where I am, but the ring on my left index finger usually (though not always) discourages the feminine bar-prowlers. Even so, even single, I knew to avoid certain bars on certain nights because there was no way I'd want to deal with the miasma of wannabe pickup artists and preening Cosmo drinkers.

Fortunately for me, I never was attracted to the kind of girl who found nothing wrong with getting hit on in a bar. More than likely, the genetic imperative driving my personal DNA replication program kept grabbing me by the gonads and going, “NOPE NOPE NOPE THIS WAY NOT THAT ONE RED ALERT RED ALERT”.

Perhaps that's enough for some to found a relationship on. For me, it's enough to found a kinship based on alcohol consumption. I might find someone interesting if they order Shackleton's on the rocks, or a Pappy Van Winkle neat, but the likelihood of finding something to discuss other than “Nice shoes” or the equivalent of “You're attractive and have a likely potential of having low enough standards that you'll find a conversation shouted through bar noise intellectually stimulating enough to warrant a date” is low.

And as most of the guys I know who are in the dating scene can attest, if Ms. Campoamor is playing the Alaskan wallflower, expecting someone to stand up and charge forth to sweep her off her feet by planting herself at the bar / coffee house / outdoor theater, it ain't gonna happen. The “game”, as Ms. Campoamor terms it, has changed. Chivalry isn't dead. The modern version just expects the princess to pick up her own damn sword instead of waiting around for some knight to kill her dragon.

For me, back in 2008, I had tried the dating scene, the bar scene, the party scene, the dance floor scene, and realized the previous truth –  that if I wanted a relationship of substance that lasted longer than five weeks or a hurried flurry of activity, I was going to go for something that required effort –  something Ms. Campoamor seems loath to consider. I signed up for the Stranger's Personal ads because in order to communicate, one had to commit a single credit per contact. The profile and system of the Stranger's Personals meant women had to expend energy and not just play the pretty girl, waiting for all the suitors to come rushing to your door. And people were definitely interesting. But nobody was really connecting.

With my last four credits remaining before I took some down time, I contacted a girl whose prankster-style headline and ad made me crack up. I met her for lunch and laid out my full credentials –  I was obnoxious, loud, opinionated, had just gotten laid off, and had no idea what I was going to do next with my life. For some strange reason we went on a second date. Then a third. A tenth. And so on. Apparently I'm either that charming or there was something about me she found appealing.

On New Year's Eve 2010, we got married and have been rocking it ever since.

And I can assure Ms. Campoamor that had I met my wife in a bar, I would never have thought of asking her out, or buying her a drink, or any number of the things she seems to expect men must do in order to mate in the Seattle scene. It's not because I'm less of a man, or because I have zero confidence in myself. I don't need to drink a twelve-pack to express my feelings, and I certainly don't need my father to ask women out for me (primarily because he wouldn't have a clue how to, being married for nearly fifty years himself). It's because I don't play a numbers game. I don't drink 3.2% beer, I don't believe in faking your way through a relationship, and I don't in particular find it appealing when women whine about how hard the single scene is when they haven't put a single calorie of effort into the whole process.

I also don't do Facebook or Twitter, and tend to ignore the comments section of any article I read online. I know, I'm odd.

Ms. Campoamor's attitude seems to be that it's a horrible, horrible, oppressive thing that women must take up the onerous burden of having to ask for a phone number or to split the check. Personally, I think that attitude is both idiotic and demeaning to women. There's no struggle here. For the past fifty years women have been striving to be treated equally on a professional and personal level. There's no reason that the dating game should be any different.

My personal rules still remain in effect, even after being married –  that if I ask someone out somewhere, I carry enough money to cover the expenses of the date. When single, I also enjoyed being asked out (though these days my wife seems to treat incidents where she's not the person doing the asking with a mixture of bemusement and disbelief). The attitude is born from more than one occasion where I walked out on a woman who, during the course of the date and six large, expensive mixed drinks into a meal, decided to inform me that it wasn't working out and that she wanted me to pick up her $100 tab for the pleasure of hearing her tell me she wasn't interested.

In part it's acting to hold those people accountable for their own actions without manipulating the good will and sensibilities of others, but in large part, it's expecting people to put more than a soupcon's worth of effort into finding the right relationship for themselves. And more than anything else, it's expecting that a woman puts more value on being smart and knowing what she wants than being pretty, and knowing what other people want her to be.

It's called, “If you want something badly enough, do the work for it and don't expect it to come to you just because you're pretty / rich / smart / have large mammary glands.”

In other words, the best dating advice I've ever gotten was one other truth –  from my sister, a veteran of the dating wars herself, and something to which Ms. Campoamor should take to heart:

“In all of your failed relationships, the common denominator is: YOU.”

For all those women (and men) like Ms. Campoamor out there: If you want a stable guy in your life, stop going to bars and mooching for drinks, phone numbers, and the ability to interact at a shouted conversation level (which is surprisingly about equal to the communication style of Twitter and text messaging). I have my drink. It's right here. Go order your own. You want to ask that cute guy out? Go for it. Ask for his phone number and call him. Don't sit on your butt digging pine splinters waiting for Mr. Right. Go make it happen.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is great when you're trying prove the Narcotics Anonymous axiom. Doing it in a relationship and expecting different results from your partners? Not so much.

A softer version of my sister's advice is this: change your tactics instead of demanding that the world change to suit your own personal worldview. If you don't like paying for everything on a date, try not dating people who are dead ass broke and taking them to Canlis for dinner every evening. If you don't like discussing Fox News every day, don't date a Tea Party Republican. If you aren't that into organic gardening, try not dating Master Gardeners. In other words, shift YOUR perspective before you demand that the world changes to fit your expectations.

And if that shift in perspective doesn't work and you still want someone who will always worship at your feet for the next ten years or more, the Seattle Humane Society is always looking for warm-hearted women and men of all ages who can give a canine or feline a good, happy home.

As for Mr. Right or Ms. Right? Don't try to find him in a bar around here. Seattle has bars for a reason. They're where we get good beer and drinks. They're not where we try to pair chromosomes. It's where we go get deep-fried dill pickles or peanut butter burgers. It's where we go to have a good time; not where we try to convince someone to go home and have a good time with us.

If nothing else, Ms. Campoamor, please, quit with the whiny mantra of “Seattle men have no backbone or confidence”. That's a complaint that has no substance. It speaks far more to the entitlement of the person writing it than it does to the manliness (or lack thereof) of the males in this region. Seattle's men have backbone, confidence, and the ability to go forth and ask a woman for her number. I've been a cheery wingman for single men on many occasions in the past year alone –  and never, ever do I allow a male friend to buy a woman a drink. If she wants a drink, she can go get it herself (and the reality of roofies means that a woman who accepts a drink unseen from a strange man is running the risk of getting dosed with far more than a vodka sour).

If you're confronted with a new dating scene, rather than saying “This is stupid, raaaar, Alaska Girl SMASH PUNY SEATTLE MEN”, try learning it, living it, and going into it without expectations. Blaming Seattle's men or women for your own personal inability to get a date belies the true common denominator – you. Nobody wants to date someone who exhibits profound entitlement issues in addition to a series of ridiculous assumptions that seem to be more about Ms. Campoamor's personal agenda to become one of her own self-described Seattle “sugar babies” than it does any real analysis of the dating scene in Seattle.

That said, if Ms. Campoamor would prefer a dating scene where men fall all over themselves to win a date, I suggest returning to an environment where women are outnumbered by men 3 to 1. (Alaska isn't the only place for that –  engineering school is a great one, too. Smart guys, AND they know how to build stuff!)

So don't worry, single women and men of Seattle. If you're willing to put yourself out there and do the extra work, you'll meet the person you're meant to be with –  whether it's online, or in a bar, or at a rock-climbing class, or at hot yoga. And in the meantime, you live in a city where you can just go to the bar without having to worry about being SEEN. We're a city that lives in its comfy pants and leaves the shirttail untucked. Our pickup lines are, “Oh hey, is that a good book?”, not “Is your father a thief? Because he stole the stars and put them in your eyes.”

You might not be used to it, coming from other parts of the world. It's a culture shift, and it's not always easy to adjust, especially if you're used to having guys follow you like a pack of lions watching a solo gazelle. But I can assure you, like anything else, putting just a little effort into it results in both hilarious bad dating stories as well as incredibly good relationships.

The one thing Ms. Campoamor and I agree on, though, is that Seattle is a great place to be single (or married, for that matter). Except for one thing. Having lived in Seattle for nearly twelve years, I still haven't been to the top of the Space Needle. Oh well. I suppose I've got time. I'm not out at the bar every night to try to meet the antiquated dating expectations of an unimaginative, bitter and cheap barfly. Being from Seattle, I'm usually out in the garage checking on the 55 gallons of cabernet sauvignon and steel-casked chardonnay, and rolling my rum barrels to the left and right.

After all, when I met my now wife, it was AT a bar. That's where we decided to introduce ourselves for the first time, after spending a good week laughing at each other's online profiles and emails. I certainly would never have met her IN a bar. Not just because of my own standards, but because she too, believes bars and restaurants, like our lives and our personal directions, are destinations.

Not a shopping mall, or a waiting lounge.

That's the difference between Ms. Campoamor and myself –  as well as most of the single men I know in Seattle. I see dating as an activity that provides a means to an end. Ms. Campoamor seems to see it as an activity and a destination all in one, and a game to be won by the prettiest girl in the room. Unfortunately for her, Seattle guys aren't looking for the prettiest girl in the room. We go for the smartest girl in the room. If she's pretty, funny, and charming to boot, that's a bonus.

We expect our women to pick up the sword themselves and go slay the dragon without waiting around for Prince Charming to sail through the door and carry her away (with time left over for an empowering moment of white wine in the bath). It's called self-sufficiency, ambition, and being independent. And it's kinda hot. Ultimately, that might be why Seattle's single men aren't falling all over Ms. Campoamor to buy her Cosmos at the bar.

It's certainly a more polite explanation than the alternative.

And thus I'm likely to get both ignored by the Seattle Times editorial department (I am nothing if not prolific in work count) and skewered if Ms. Campoamor actually gets around to finding this blog post. In either case, I don't really care.

Because tonight, I have a date. I'm taking The Girl out on a walk in the park, and she can have anything she wants off the 99 cent menu at Taco Bell.

Cheap, but not as cheap as a whiny, entitled, single barwhore in Seattle. Thank god I'm married.

On Pajama Bottoms and Being One of Four Non-Batshit-Crazy, Non-Hormonal, Non-PajamaGram males in the house. (Also, being the only one still in possession of his testicles.)

I don't know what women go through when they're on their periods. I know it involves being self-involved, making internal excuses for irrational behavior (look, it's not funny – or rather it wouldn't be if there isn't an element of truth to the stereotype that batshit female behavior often coincides with doing the tampon tango) and lunging like a starving hyena in pajama bottoms for a bar of chocolate or whatever comfort food seems to fit the bill.

Incidentally, pajama bottoms are the modern equivalent of a flannel fucking nightgown. I comprehend the idea behind them. I also know for a fact that if you sit a drop-dead gorgeous woman in front of me wearing an oversized hoodie and a pair of pajama bottoms, almost every man in the world would likely go “eh? Eh” and chase after the girl in the stretchy yoga pants, regardless of whether or not she looked like the current incarnation of Kim Kardashian (how can someone so vapid and so incredibly, completely and totally useless as anything other than entertainment still be so hot?)

I hate the existence of pajama bottoms. I have since my days of college. I hate seeing them, I hate trying to convince women they're unattractive and look ridiculous, and I refuse to buy any for myself on the same general principle that I refuse to buy a pair of bunny slippers. If I can't go outside in clothing or make a run to the store to pick up something, then it is not clothing. I am not a doctor, a nurse, or a med student, so I don't wear scrubs. If I'm wearing comfortable clothing around the house it's a pair of pants and a t-shirt that was well-broken in long before I bought it.

Don't get me wrong. I found the concept of formal wear, suits and ties repellent mainly in the idea of buying and taking care of them. Funny thing is, though, now I have the “nice jeans” I wear to work and the “around the house jeans” –  the ones frayed at the hem from being dragged along, the knees comfortably bent, the pants pockets in the rear showing holes.

Before I'm accused of being sexist and insisting women be held to a different standard, I'll point out that I married a woman who has dressed up for work exactly twice since I have known her, has worn a dress exactly twenty-two times in my memory (once on our wedding day) and refuses to wear makeup on principle (which I still argue is informed in part by an inability to give a flying goat's nutsack about the latest makeup line from MAC or Avon or Maybelline). I own more business suits and outfits than she does, and I also find it somewhat ironic that with my intense dislike of pajama bottoms – which I didn't tell her about until recently – she owns more pairs of “comfy pants” than I think she owns pairs of jeans.

I also love her for all of these things, but also know the minute she steps into a power suit and heels, I may well have a new fetish. She looks -good–  dressed up, but she hates doing it and revels wearing the very thing I could happily deposit into the donation bin without a second thought.

It is, in short, the thing I hate more than waking up early on a weekend – the arrival of the fucking pajama bottoms for a day-long appearance.

I also find people who wear sweat pants on a daily basis annoying as hell. Partially because as someone with a 6'5” frame you would LOVE to have the fashion choices most people under 6'1” get to make, and they wear…sweat pants.

I would gleefully strangle someone with a pair of Hanes double-knits if I could get away with it. I've lived for periods of time in the Midwest and on the east side of Seattle, where you see women of certain ages moving from what would be considered sensible, sexy, even daring outfits, then migrating into the herds of SUV-driving women in tracksuits, with expanding waistlines to match. There are times when I've sat in a food court in the more affluent shopping centers of my home city and watched women with frosted hair and long pearl necklaces wolfing their way through a salad, wearing stylish shoes with a matching track top and bottoms. The outfits make perfect sense –  why make yourself up when all you're doing is going shopping? Might as well be comfortable.

The only problem is there's something to be said about wearing the clothing that's uncomfortable as hell. To a large extent, comfortable = frump / hobo. My most uncomfortable clothing is also the clothing that makes me look the best. Some of my really nice clothes make me look great –  the tuxedo, cummerbund and tie that I know how to array in dishabille make me look good. The linen suits I've owned always are comfortable as hell. The discomfort comes from knowing that this clothing is something I don't want to ruin –  so I don't wear it in the garden or when I take The Beast for a walk (or in his mind, Food Guy gets the Rope Thing and We Go Exploring Around Our House Until I Get Tired And Look At Him Hoping He'll Pick Me Up And Carry Me. The problem is, this worked when he was a cute little puppy of eight weeks and 15lbs. Now he's a cute little puppy of two years and 175lbs. Unless your leg is broken, you're walking your own ass home, dog.)

But by definition, pajama bottoms are meant to do one thing –  keep your ass warm when you sleep. They're loungewear, and I can't ever understand needing to lounge that much. The concept of changing clothing to do multiple things is constrictive to me, so I figure if you have to put on different clothes to go out, and change back into those pants when you come back, it's a layer of “oh, I'd have to go do that to go out” that effectively constrains your ability to do just that. Keys in pocket and go. It's worse if you think of it as a procrastination tool, which is exactly what my first girlfriend in college used it to do.

Angela couldn't actually go out somewhere if she was wearing her pajama bottoms. Those were what she slept in, ran around the dorm halls in, etc. Except the morning I pounded on her dorm room door and woke her up to go to our last final of the year. Then she panicked, because not only had she overslept, she'd overslept and not put on her makeup, done her hair, etc, etc, etc. I gave her a once-over, said, “It's Finals Week. Get dressed afterwards” and hauled her out the door, skidding to our seats just as the professor closed and locked the door. She kept hiding behind my bulk, borrowing a baseball cap out of my bag midway through because she didn't feel like she was actually able to be seen by anyone without careful layers of foundation, eyeliner, eye shadow, etc., etc. Angela was what most women now would call “high maintenance”, but she was also the most low-key person I met there. She knew what she wanted and she was going to school to get it. That I was both a good study partner and relatively easy on the eyes made me a good combination.

We gnawed our way through the final and went back the quarter mile across campus to her dorm, where Angela immediately set to work showering, shaving, curling, styling, and smearing makeup over her face. She came back from the bathroom looking like we were going out –  which I then promptly ruined by doing what most hormonally charged teenagers do confronted by a woman in a matching pair of bra and panties who looks like she's about to go out on the town. But it didn't matter –  the armaments for the outside world were on, and when we did venture out (after a five-minute repair job) to have dinner and go hurl stone-like bread crumbs at the increasingly nimble ducks along the mill race, even in a basic shirt and jeans, she looked like she could march into Washington DC and slam a stack of papers on the nearest Supreme Court Justice's desk.

Apparently that's what she does now, so more power to her.

But as a result I've always detested pajama bottoms –  the more twee and cute and “ooo, the little fuzzy [insert animal here]” they are, the more I've hated them. It's as if the textile manufacturers of the world specifically target beer-referenced pajama bottoms to guys (who, let's face it, would much rather be drinking the eight pack of Guinness than wearing the pajama bottoms purchased with the money instead) while attempting to delude otherwise intelligent women into believing that a pair of hot pink and purple bottoms made out of heavy cotton flannel are adorable. They're not. If I must, absolutely MUST buy sleepwear for anyone, adorable daughters included, those pants are going to look like they've been run through a Russian discount surgical outlet with pockets for useful things, like, say, baseball bats down the side.

But The Girl loves her pajama bottoms with almost the exact same level of adoration as the level of antipathy that I carry for them. And so goes my subtle nods to things like yoga pants, or Athleta or Prana's latest catalogs, hoping that at some point the detested loungewear could be consigned to the bin of All Things Not At All Sexy.

To a certain extent that's what I think the pajama bottoms mean –  they're the symbol, like a security blanket or a mug of hot cocoa that Now Is My Time, and My Time Is Going to Be Mine, and This Is Not Meant To Be Sexy. It's small wonder that leaping into comfortable, stretchy clothing is something that is almost always depicted in mass media as something going hand-in-hand with idiot males being idiot males, pints of ice cream and curling up on the couch with an empowering glass of white wine.

I hate that, too. If you're going to go off and have a good long sulk or cry or pity party, you might as well do it in a full length ball gown and tiara; planting your ass squarely in a pair of flannel trousers under a blanket isn't going to do you any good other than to ID you as either a college student in a hurry, someone who's just gotten out of a nine-hour surgery, or someone who uses the word “yummy” in a sentence with no hint of deprecation or irony. (Seriously, if you do this to my face I will growl at you. No human being who is capable of taking a shit on their own should use this word, and no woman over the age of 30 who isn't using it in a food-contextual conversation with a child should do so either. Any male of any age above six needs to be smacked upside the head for using it non-ironically, and this does not include hipster males of any age or creed, since my general opinion is that their default requirement is to be smacked upside the head in any case.)

To some extent I'd love to reincarnate the smoking jacket for modern men –  a jacket worn with the intention of being the equivalent of the pajama pants of women. Pockets for things like pens, tissues, maybe a liner for one of those baby wipe packages or a roll of dog poop bags. Comfortable. Washable, durable. A place for a pipe or (since we do live in Washington) an airtight container capable of holding a few grams of combustible materials of your choice.  And the point is not to be “comfy” or to revel in being at home, but to revive the idea that you can look stylish and be comfortable in something approximating a robe without turning into a straight-up slob.

Granted, if I'm going to be a father, I think a patch on the shoulder capable of being both puke and pee-proof for burping babies would be a good thing, too. Washable would be another bonus. Reversible with another pattern on the inside? Even better.

In any case, I still cling (perhaps in a misguided way) to the belief that comfortable clothing shouldn't be used as an escape to look good, but rather a way to keep yourself grounded in the moment of where you are. My most comfortable pair of jeans is actually the nicest pair I own –  and yet I'll still grub out in the garden and happily wipe off dog puke with a little Febreeze and wear them another day.

And yet I've still worn those jeans to see Puccini in box seats at the Seattle Opera. Yes, I wore a pair of nice shoes, a tweed jacket and a shirt that didn't have a crew neck, but still. I wore jeans. I'm not asking for the world, pajama bottom addicts of the world –  I'm just asking that you don't wear the damned things that make you look like you're trying to masquerade as a permanent twelve-year old girl.

Being a Hopeful Father and Backup Plans

I am not a traditional male in his thirties by any stretch of the imagination. Oh, sure, I have many friends who have had their children ten years ago and my aging peers watch me poke ruefully at the top of my skull to find the hairs that are migrating away like a crop circle, but up to this point in my life, I thought I'd escaped the whole concept of having a kid.

I could barely keep a cat, much less a girlfriend. I had an elderly Siamese cat for five years and spent more time obsessing about him eating habenero peppers than I did about what the girl of the month was going to think about me ditching her to go out and have drinks with her best friend's sister. (Mostly because it did happen more than once. Not with the same girl.) Some people go through their high school and teen years and then grow responsibility like a goiter. I kept trying to make sure I was on the Responsibility Chemotherapy plan, which also meant a steady diet of cigarettes, medium-shelf alcohol, wine held in racks on the wall and a half-assed attempt to make food that wouldn't kill me and a date.

I don't know how many men I know kept a supply of condoms, lube and at least four morning after pills in their bedside table. After one memorable evening with a friend that also resulted in a “uh, where did THAT go, exactly?” the Plan B made its appearance. The expression of a pharmacist when a tall guy with a scruffy beard rolls up to his counter and says, “Yeah, so I need a six-pack of the morning after pill,” without thinking about the way the words will tumble out –  that's probably something I could have used Google Glass for once upon a time. (I did apply for the Beta, but the reality is Google Glass is something I'd be using now, and back then, I probably would have happily worn it at all times. I'd also probably be the first one to ask for waterproofing, and I'm almost certain at least one of those testers has uploaded homemade porn to their sites with it so far. If they haven't, there's something wrong with the world.)

At any rate the pharmacist was kind enough to fill the request, though, in retrospect, he was eyeballing the at-home STD kits and using the hand sanitizer a little too much while he rang me up. I guess visions of some hedonistic orgy where six ovulating women somehow simultaneously became impregnated were dancing across his cortex, and while afterwards the friend and I laughed, drank a ton of water and had dinner on the balcony of my thoroughly urbanized and crappy 1960s–style apartment, I still had those Plan B pills.

Then I met The Girl, and she was…irritating. But funny, and smart, and somehow centered on me. I don't know what made me think “this is the one” but it was always a question of “this girl is the one I can't think about not seeing on a daily basis”. She also didn't need the Plan B, since she'd been on the knock-sperm-dead-in-the-head pill for a good ten years previously, faithfully taking one a day. Somehow knowing that if I routinely drank enough and went off the rails in the bedroom enough to lose a condom inside someone while having wild banshee screeching sex I should probably have backup plans, just in the event said person wasn't on some form of birth control other than the calendar method.

And she still knocked me back. In those days I didn't expect to really keep seeing someone for longer than a couple of months, and usually concurrent with someone else. But something about The Girl made me keep going back to her place. Granted, we were both in the single mode where bad decisions that are made when drunk and horny are often considered good decisions. To this day I can remember exactly the first time I saw her naked.

Two months ago she told me she doesn't remember much of the night and that she more or less blacked out. I am absolutely positive this is not much of the truth –  she was capable of speech, she was capable of conversation, and she was capable of introducing me to the Abusive, Deranged, Evil Spawn of Satan that was her elderly, cranky-ass cat. So either she's embarrassed that the first night we had sex she was out her gourd and made what most of her female friends would call a bad decision, or she truly doesn't remember.

I do remember asking, though, “Are you on the pill?” Memories of my tall, leggy, blonde friend having a moment of “wait, WHAT?” while performing a gorgeous, completely nude, acrobatic on-point ballet leap from the bed aren't supposed to dance though your head at such times but I'd been a nervous wreck six months beforehand and making sure certain constraints were in place…well, that's the key to a good relationship. Good company, similar backgrounds and values, and fantastic sex.

You move in together. You get married. You fight. You make up. You take showers together. You try to revise your schedules. You look forward to seeing them when you get home. You bump asses in the tiny, tiny kitchen and dream of getting a bigger place. You get the bigger place. Life goes on.

Fast forward through the next three years, and suddenly the problems that show up when you realize you have a finite window of fertility make you WISH for the magic of a lost condom. Because it's time, says the genetic clock. Time to make a kid or call it a day, because you didn't do it when you were in your twenties or your early thirties. A pregnant belly fifteen years ago made a man run for the hills; now he catches, simultaneously, almost all his formerly thick, rich hair falling out at the crown and finding the movements of pregnant women at the gym both graceful and sensuous. That the women are probably ten years younger than him doesn't hit home until he actually hears one of them talking about growing up during the 90s.

Shit, says the brain. What? says the penis. We talked about this. You were EXPLICIT about this. And now you're all trying to hurry up because your master plan to execute bachelorhood for life got thrown to the winds once you met someone you didn't want to hurl out the window via James Bond ejector bed after three months? Suck it up, I'm on a break. You remember those Viagra commercials? Yeah. They WERE funny, weren't they? Now you want to have a kid. Suck it, hot tub boy. We're on strike tonight.

Now we're looking at the clock together and wondering how it's all going to pan out. It means egg fertilization has to occur on a clock, with apps on our phones to sync up and check everything. It means the purchasing of tests in the form of sticks.

Sometimes it also means wondering if the days when you could just have a night (or morning) in or heading home from a party early to “get an early start tomorrow” are gone, because now you are both on a timeframe. I never understood how sex could be like loading the dishwasher, and how all the things you used to do together are now considered advantageous because it helps do X, Y, and Z.

Half the time I keep thinking, “I thought we just did that because it was a lot of fun. Now it's to make sure optimal fertilization happens? The fuck is wrong with people?”

And I have to realize that it's not what's wrong with people; it's that for so long I fought against being a parent by any means necessary that now the concept presents itself in a whole new light. I  –want–  to be a father. I'd love to have kids with my wife, and raise that child or children in our family. But the freedom-loving sex maniac that would have normally just laughed at a romp in the garage at 2AM has been replaced by someone who is as nervous and scheduled as someone who makes absolutely sure the right month is set so the tomatoes are ripe in the garden at the right time of year.

That The Girl's college friends are now having babies and doing their “firsts” might be pushing at her; that a woman in her late thirties is in the “okay, now or never” timeframe might also be another, and the fact that we simply still are figuring out how not to be fat and lazy on the couch together is yet one more.

But I still hope I'll be a father. I hope that I can be a father, and I hope that if this whole biological thing works out for us, that I'll be able to teach my son or daughter about having dreams and hope for the future –  for me, for my wife, and my kid.

Because as someone who finds himself in the odd position of now hoping with all his soul that the exact OPPOSITE of what he was praying to the contraception gods to grant him (namely, zero growth in the target zones) for twenty years will occur knows, sometimes all you really can do is cross your fingers, have some sex, and hope for the best.