Male on the brain

I often marvel at my girlfriends. They’re amazing not only for their incredible beauty, but by the amazing lives they lead. Beyond the smart, polite kids they’ve raised and the inviting homes they’ve created, these fortysomething gals have managed to carve out successful, high-powered careers.

But lately I am marveling at the odd affliction that has possessed their minds, their thoughts, their conversations.

It’s men, men, men, 24/7.

Just what in the world is going on?

Of course, it wasn’t always like this. On our long morning hikes in the Headlands, at our gal get-togethers at the Left Bank or the Buckeye, on the bleachers at Boyle Park or Friends Field for our kids’ soccer and baseball games, we used to talk about other things. Politics, aging, sex, work. Intellectual things. OK, I’ll fess up; we talked about our kids mostly. But men? Outside of gripes about how our husbands did one thing or another, or the one time we rated which of the dads at out kids’ school was “doable,” men just weren’t on our radar all that much.
Now, I know that this isn’t happening everywhere. I talk weekly with my dear friend Ali who moved to Seattle just as my marriage was busting up. Her knitting group talks politics, books, movies, wool weights.

So what happened? Is it yet another an Only in Marin thing? No, but I can only blame it on one thing: the D-word. D as in Divorce. First Mary, then Anna, then Mia, then Jessica, then me, then Jennifer (prompting Trent, my teenager, to ask, “Did you guys all make bets on who was divorcing next?”)

If I’ve learned nothing else in the few years since my split (and I’ve learned plenty), it’s this: Get a bunch of divorced fortysomething women together and nothing else is going on in the world except men. Forget Iraq, stem-cell research and what’s going on in the Mideast: It’s all about who called, who didn’t call, who did what and when and — yep, sorry guys — how.
Unfortunately, it’s even afflicted the (very few, at this point) married gals among us, who listen in envy — or downright fear, depending on the situation — of the tales of sexual conquest and dating disasters. The married ones are pretty fascinated by the lives of the divorced ones. And I admit, sometimes with good reason; It can be fun (if you can forget, for a while anyway, the havoc divorce wreaks on your kids, emotions and finances).

But this obsession with men starts to get old, not so much because of the topic — I happen to find men fascinating. In fact, I love them. But because it inevitably comes down to the B-word. B as in Boyfriend.

Accustomed to having someone warm next to us when we wake up and go to sleep for a decade or two, my divorced friends are looking to fill that spot. And it seems the only way we know how is by finding a man to call our own. Now.

“I don’t want to do that whole dating thing. I’m tired of going to parties alone. I want a boyfriend,” Jennifer protests.

“I know, Jen, but so does Anna and Mia and Nadine and Mary and ...” I answer, perhaps just a bit too snarky. “Plus, how do you expect to find a boyfriend without the dating part first?”
One friend rejected a man because he was bi-coastal. “I don’t want a boyfriend I only see every other weekend,” she sniffed. They’d only gone on two or three dates. They hadn’t even entered boyfriend-girlfriend territory yet.

Another friend started talking of a future with a single dad who drank way too much. How well was that going to play out?

But the part that worries me is this: Here they are, successful, smart, beautiful women so focused on filling the void when they finally have the time to know who they are now, minus a husband and the trappings of marriage, what they really want and what they want in a partner.
I say “they,” not “we,” not because I have it all figured out. Trust me: I don’t. But I am looking at this solo time as an opportunity to explore a lot of different experiences with a lot of different people. I read an interview with Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues” recently, and she put it so beautifully: “I meet people and I have experiences, but I don’t date.” To that I say, right on, Eve. And if those “experiences” don’t look like the traditional every-Friday-and-Saturday-night-date kind of relationship, that’s OK, too. I’ve done that. My thinking is: What haven’t I done?

Do I want to meet and “experience” men? You bet. Do I want a boyfriend? Not really.
The last thing I want to do is to partner quickly with someone just because we like each other and we’re hanging out together so ... I dunno, must be the next step. There’s too much at stake now. I’ve dragged my kid through one divorce that’s probably going to impact his life for a long, long time, likely forever.

I’m not against having a partner. In fact, at some point in my life, probably when Trent’s launched into a life on his own, I really would like one. What that partnership looks like, however, is open to discussion.

If I can ever get back to discussing things other than men, that is.