Not in Love, No, No

Womyn, as I’ve already alluded to here, a man’s relationship with his mother is an important, possibly critical, determinant of his view of women. My best advice is to find out how a man views his mother on the first date, if at all possible. You can subtly show interest in his family, for example, by asking about siblings, then move on to parents, where they live/if they’re still living, what do they do/used to do, etc. If it’s easy to keep the man talking about his mother, you have your answer right there.

Equally important but much trickier to extract is information on how a man sees the women with whom he’s previously been involved. It typically won’t be possible until after several dates and, in my experience, often not until you’ve slept with him. It’s a project for the future, I suppose: to figure out how to sufficiently probe this before jumping in the sack, without scaring the guy off. Because here’s how it works: the older the man, the higher the chance that the way all those other women ended up is exactly how you end up as well. There’s really no better predictor. All of us are special, of course (Sexless Berlin blog readers being naturally more special than most), but womyn, please don’t make the mistake of thinking you will be the beautiful fairy princess who finally sweeps this man into a rosy end-of-the-rainbow happy ending. Sure, these things do happen. But only in film, trust me. During the initial stages, go ahead, fantasize about it if you like, but please recognize that cold, hard reality will kick you in the ass and it’s much better if that happens sooner rather than later.

As extreme examples I present two mature, worldly European men from different cultures and countries who personally reported to me having never been in love before. These cases touch me in a special way, they truly do, after my initial astonishment wears off. I don’t know if there’s anything more wonderful than falling in love; it’s happened to me once in a big way and many times in a range of smaller ways [yeah, yeah, despite the tough exterior, Katchita finds it easy to fall at least a little in love with many of her lovers]. So to think of a man having spent half his life without this seems quite simply tragic. Even though I so much want both of these men to have this experience, it’s simply naïve of me to imagine that they don’t have their patterns well established. I have to ask, what are the chances for these men? Sadly, I fear they are low. Although I sincerely wish them both the best of luck, at the same time I must gently suggest that some serious paradigm shifts might be in order. OK, so, a screening question does occur to me: “tell me about the last time you were in love and who's that lucky woman?”