News

I’ve gotten so many comments on line that I wanted to clarify a few things about yesterday’s blog. It’s always the problem with blogging, or writing in general. What you mean as a writer isn’t what everyone takes away from the writing. It is the nature of the beast, but in my fiction I’m used to it, blogging, not so much.

I am not now, or have I ever advocated anyone to tone down their personality in order to date someone. Never pretend, never be other than what, and who, you are, not for anyone. First, it’s a lie. You are pretending to be a different person than you truly are, and eventually that lie will break down, and then your boyfriend/girlfriend will wander what the hell happened. I am very intense and that is very true when I am intimate with someone, but for those that are okay with that the rewards are just as intense. I know I’m a high needs item so I do my best to give as good as I ask from the other person. So far, everyone that’s gotten that close to me has eventually regretted their decision to distance themselves from me and come back wanting another chance, so I must be doing something right.

The history with men and intimate relationships was just the pattern that made me turn to Jon, my husband, and ask why this had happened so often. But it’s not about the men and the dating, it’s about the realization that I do this level of intensity in nearly ever damn thing, or did. I’ve actually toned it down in the last couple of years, relaxed a little. I haven’t actually made a waitress cry in over three years, so I have been getting better, but I still get too upset over smaller things. I still expend that life or death, fight or flight, energy into things that don’t need it. That is what I am working on changing.

I suppose if I were capable of truly casual sex that I could, for a night, tone down the intensity of myself, but why would I want to? I’ve never had a one night stand in my life. I don’t judge that as good or bad, it’s just not something that has interested me up to this point. For me to want to sleep with a person I’ve always needed to be interested in that person, as a person. A pretty face, and a nice body, has never been enough without a good mind to go with it, and a good personality. Never underestimate the attractiveness of being an intelligent, decent human being. Nice, interesting, men that can make me laugh always got further with me than the handsome bad boy. If a man was rude, or impolite to me, that was a deal breaker. Respect yourself, or no one else will.

Am I intense? Yes. Has that cost me more than a few relationships with men? Yes. But in the end, I would rather have the relationships end than compromise myself as a person. When my first marriage ended, it was like a kind of death, but when the dust settled I was still me. I was still Laurell, and to have compromised enough to make that first marriage last I would have had to give up being me. The same is true for the other relationships that failed. But were they failures? I learned something from each of them, and what I learned has helped make me more of myself, and helped make Jon and I a happier couple. It has made me more aware of what makes me difficult for most men, and what I needed in a man for things to work better. Jon and I have been together almost ten years. He loves me the way I am, and we can talk honestly about the problems we both had with each other when we were first dating. I was never going to marry again, and Jon wasn’t sure he wanted to marry anyone. Six months later, we were engaged. I learned it wasn’t marriage I didn’t like, it was marriage to the wrong person, just as Jon learned that marriage wasn’t a trap, or a cage. We both learned, and grew as people, and we continue to learn and grow. Marriages, like people, don’t stay the same. They grow, they evolve, and I work at seeing that I hold up my side of the marriage, as Jon does to his, because though you can hold up a marriage single-handedly for awhile, in the end, the weight will crush you. Jon and I work together to hold it all up. Part of what holds it’s together is the very intensity that almost frightened him off in the first place.