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The Hook Up: Life Happened

Hey Anna,

Just wanted to thank you for the great advice you offered “First Timer.” It helped me grow in my own convictions about my breakup with my first girlfriend about a year and a half ago now. It took me about five years to learn to get and stay off that nail in between two degrees. It was a bit of a classic case: best friends for four years until we realized we were in love with each other. She and I were scared to come out to our family and friends, so we were in a relationship on and off for five years during which we tried seeing other people. Life happened and we kept finding our way back to one another.

She said she couldn’t see a future with me because she just couldn’t envision the wedding or starting a family. Finally, I got the courage to break my own heart and really let her go by moving to another city for grad school. I’m slowly learning how to depend on myself and lean on others sometimes. After the grandmother I grew up with had three strokes over Christmas break following the breakup, I just couldn’t keep it all in, so I told some of my closest friends about being in a relationship with my ex-girlfriend. They all just wished I could have been honest sooner so I wouldn’t have had to go through everything alone.

I’ve moved back to Toronto now, but I haven’t come out to my family, partly because I’m just not sure about what I would even tell them since I’m not comfortable labelling myself (yet?). I feel uneasy about dating again or trying out the scene here (which I know I’m lucky enough to even have as an option), maybe because I’m having difficulty distinguishing my feelings about being comfortable with myself and just getting over my ex still. I usually just say that life will work itself out and eventually maybe I’ll meet someone in between working and my other responsibilities, but I’m not sure if that will actually help me to confront my anxieties? Should I just give it more time, do my own thing, and let the universe sort it out? Ease into it and bum around coffee houses in the village? Or just rip the band-aid off and head to the bar with liquid courage? – Resettling

Dear Resettling,

I know that the typical break-up convention is to just get on with it already-“In order to get over someone, get under someone” as the idiom goes-but well, as any moron will tell you, you can’t spell idiom without idiot. Meaning that just because you think you should do something, doesn’t mean it’s actually right for you.

The last time I got my heart broken, I was gearing up to do my usual post-breakup routine: a lot of drunk OkCupiding, followed by some glorious making out at bus stops. But no matter how much $4 merlot I imbibed, I couldn’t bring myself to actually hook up with near strangers this time around. I don’t know if it was the rawness, that I wasn’t ready, or if I was, despite most evidence to the contrary, simply growing up, but the realization that I didn’t have to do something I didn’t want to do was nothing short of revelatory.

I encourage you to cultivate your own such revelations, Resettling. It sounds to me like you’re not wild about getting back in the dating saddle. I know this because of my wise and mildly psychic prowess. And because you wrote, “I feel uneasy about dating again.”

Of course, there are times when “unease” can turn into paralysis, and that is something to be concerned about down the line, but as it is now, you’ve recently moved cities, and you’re still figuring out your sexual identity, so what’s the rush? There has literally never been a better time than now to fine-tune the art of YOU. Major life changes allow us a clean slate, a chance to engage with wild possibilities and secret dreams. A chance to gaze at yourself and wonder: Who is that girl and what does she want?

Your fierce sense of self-resilience is an admirable attribute, but I’m glad to read that you are also learning how to reach out and ask for help from others. Friends are probably the most important factor in getting over a long-term, not-good-for-you relationship. Lean on them. Rely on them. Let them take you out, and, when you feel up to it, learn to say “yes” to some new experiences, whether that be approaching a cute stranger at a bar, bumming around coffee houses, or whatever else you deem exciting in that great Canadian metropolis.

In the meantime, remember that the only authority worth listening to in regard to your life and your dating choices is you.

Hey Anna,

I do hope you can help because I’m really confused. Here’s the deal: I’m a “four seasons” gal, which means I’m not gonna U-haul with you.

(Well, we did only just meet!)

I waited six seasons for my partner and I to move in together. I own my home and said I would cover my mortgage, electric, gas, cable, you know household bills, etc.-since it was mine. I make over six figures and do not expect equal financial footing. Her contribution would be to the household-a set monthly amount that she came up with: $700 a month. We also agreed she wouldn’t begin contributing to the household expenses until her own house sold or rented. We talked about expectations and one was that she wouldn’t accept a job that did not pay her day-to-day expenses (car, mortgage until she sold her home, student loans, credit cards, etc.) AND life stuff (gas, going out to eat, new socks, movies, etc). and IF the job offer covered this, then it was a position worth pursuing. She said the position she ended up taking covered “bills and life.”

Nine months later, I feel like I’ve birthed a liar. Her job does not pay “bills and life”… only the bills (barely). Her house has been rented, and yet she has gone from agreeing to pay $700 a month down to $250. She lied because she wanted to move. I told her I felt like she disrespected our relationship and my needs. Now this is not a partnership, and she has moved into my home expecting a life together that she knew she could not afford. So, now I’m covering everything. She refuses to accept she lied. I don’t know if I can trust her anymore. – Wilted

Dear Wilted,

Money can’t buy love, but it can sure fuck it up, eh?

Let’s start by taking some of the blame and accusation out of the situation, shall we? Because calling your partner a liar rarely does much to alleviate the issue. The crux, as I see it, is that you think your partner should be contributing more to the household than she currently is, and that she overestimated her ability to do so when she was deciding whether to take this job or not. The $700 a month contribution was an arbitrary number that she came up with, not grounded in reality, and because you make six figures, it’s probable that she didn’t feel she had to really stick to that estimate. Or maybe she really thought she could contribute that amount and it turned out she was wrong. Still, you feel like you’ve been misled, and that the agreements you created together to avoid money fights weren’t adhered to. Hence, money fights!

What you neglect to mention is, well, anything about your relationship or your partner, aside from money. Do you want to be in a relationship with this person? I can’t tell! Though if you really feel that she manipulated you and lied to you just so she could U-Haul you, then you have far deeper issues than what’s in her bank account. It’s possible too that you’re coming from a place of frustration and that it’s coloring your view of things, and your view of this person you’ve been with for … nine seasons? (I’m not entirely sure how the math shakes out.) You’ll have to ask yourself what’s really at stake here. And if you determine that this is a person you love and a relationship worth fighting for, then you’ll have to have some serious talks with her about money.

Sit down with your partner and figure out how the two of you can align your financial goals-together. Lay it all out-the debts, the loans, the guilty, late-night drunken eBay purchases. The more forthright and honest you both can be, the better. Once you’ve talked income and expenses, come up with a budget that both of you agree is reasonable, and then revisit it regularly. If she can’t afford to contribute as much to household expenses, can she chip in in other ways? Does she love her current job or is she willing to try to look for a different one with a better salary? Above all else, try to stay focused on solutions, not blame or control.

And, perhaps most importantly, try to exercise a little compassion. It’s hard to be the partner that makes significantly less money in a relationship. It can make you feel inferior, stressed out, powerless, and just generally like a worthless piece of shit. It’s crazy how money can be so tied up in our sense of self-worth, but it doesn’t make the feelings less real. Finding out what emotions and doubts are lurking under those dollar signs would surely be a boon to both of you. Good luck.

Essentially, my problem is that I’ve managed to get to the relatively ancient age of 24 without ever having even kissed anybody, let alone dated or anything else. I’m terrified of how to go about breaking this trend and I recognise that I need to and the longer I leave it the worse it’s going to be. A little explanation:

I’m gay; I didn’t figure this out until I was 21, due largely to the fact that I grew up in one of those Christian families. It was very much “love the sinner, hate the sin” but also I pretty much never actually met any openly gay people so it wasn’t really a real thing for me. I eventually (in my final year of uni, age 21) met someone I wanted to kiss so badly I was actually forced to realize what was happening; let’s call her E. Unfortunately for me, and probably her, she was also from a similar “love the sinner, hate the sin” background. We had a moment, i.e. nearly kissed, and then both completely freaked out. It took me about eighteen months to process this new revelation about myself. I saw E again for the first time in ages and told her that I still had feelings for her. She said she’d pray for me and that she hoped I’d be able to fix my relationship with God and that she hoped we could get “back to normal” soon. Cue everybody’s gag reflex.

The next six months after that I spent gathering all my courage to leave my church and come out to friends and family and to try not to think about E; I was pretty successful on the former but not so much on the latter. There was (and is!! ridiculous!!) that niggle in the back of my head that kept saying, “She’s intelligent, she’ll figure out her theology is wrong and then it’ll all be magical and wonderful.” It’s now been a good eighteen months from that conversation and I have to recognize that holding on to stupid hope is stupid, not to mention unhealthy. I need to move on. My issue is: How do I jump into dating at 24 with less dating experience than the average 14 year old? I don’t even know any lady-loving ladies that I’m interested in, I just keep developing friendships with girls who like that I’m a good listener and think I’m cool because I ride a motorcycle, and then I discover that they have boyfriends.

If you were me, how would you a) find potential dates and b) not freak out potential dates with your overwhelming and culturally absurd inexperience? – Got a Prayer?

Dear Prayer,

You are so ancient. I bet you cave-painted this email and sent it on a pterodactyl!

As I’ve said before (See this column), many people don’t have much sexual experience in their early twenties (24 counts!), especially queer women because we were all brought up in a heteronormative world and taught that the only things that matter are diet yogurt and landing a rich husband, and hence it takes us a little longer to figure out why Teva sandals and bowties make our nipples hard. BECAUSE GAY*. (*Or your prefered label/non-label of choice.)

You ride a motorcycle, so really, you’re already 98 percent of the way to making sex happen. This is just a fact. The extra 2 percent of effort involved is up to you. Join Tinder or 3nder or Cuddlr or OkCupid or MulletPassions or FarmersOnly (Really the only limit to online dating these days is your imagination, or your fear of women who look like Ronald McDonald). Do stuff you like doing that involves other women. Join MeetUp. Volunteer for an obviously queer cause (manatees are popular). Practice talking to women (not just the ones whose mouths you want to put on your face).

And as to your second question, read this.

Hailing from the rough-and-tumble deserts of southern Arizona, where one doesn’t have to bother with such trivialities as “coats” or “daylight savings time,” Anna Pulley is a writer living in San Francisco. Find her at annapulley.com and on Twitter @annapulley. Send her your The Hook Up questions at [email protected].

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