Shaving Hairy

At Frobisher's request I'm putting up one final photo of me and His Hairyness. This was taken at St. David's cathedral in Wales on our first camping trip. (You can't see them, but we're both wearing bum bags - proper tourists!) That was such a great trip. We talked about the holiday in France, about him coming to spend Christmas with my family in the States, about future camping trips we were planning. I can't believe how much has changed since then. It was only 3 weeks ago, but it seems ages and ages already. *sigh*

This is the last post I'm going to write about the Hairy Man. In a pathetic and blatantly infantile attepmt to find some closure so I can stop feeling like a piece of decomposing cockroach crap for dumping him out of the blue, I am now going to write all the things that bugged me about our relationship. These are all tiny, insignificant, niggly things that never bothered me individually, but taken in conjunction are useful for convincing myself that the relationship was doomed, would never go anywhere, and was bound to end sooner or later, therefore better was sooner. (Which is just a verbose way of saying what you all have been saying in the comments for days now anyway.) So here goes:

1. To the best of my knowledge, he never told his parents about me. Granted his parents are shits and he has little contact with them. Well, he has no contact with his father, but he does phone his mother now and again, and he mails her a postcard whenever he goes someplace, even if it's just camping for a weekend. I was sitting in the living room with him once while he was on the phone with his mum, and he was describing his plans for the day and never once mentioned that I exist or was part of those plans. When he would send a postcard from our camping excursions he would tell me to read them before he put them in the post, and there was never any mention of me. Now, if you were on holiday with a woman that you'd been seeing regularly for over 3 months, wouldn't you at least mention her name in a postcard? That's what I thought, too. Call me crazy but I get a bit paranoid when people won't admit to knowing me.

2. He wouldn't talk about his feeleings. Ever. Even on the rare occasion when I would ask. He never once told me how he felt about me, or named a single personal quality of mine that he liked or valued. (Well, not quite true. He did once say that I had "a very slappable ass." But I like having my ass slapped, so this was not insulting.) I can count the compliments he paid me on one hand. I didn't pay much attention to this either because all his actions toward me were very kind and generous, so I just dismissed it as him not being one of those verbal people. But I'm a verbal person, so it annoyed me.

3. He wouldn't come over to my place for dinner. Only once, our third date, which concluded with our first shag. After that he wouldn't eat dinner here. I could never figure out if it was my cooking or my flat that he disliked (he wouldn't say), but I love cooking for people and it really hurt my feelings that he always preferred to go out.

4. He wore really really stoopid shoes. Sketchers, with big poofy tongues, that he wore with the laces really loose and the tongues sticking out, like some 17 year old skate rat. Grow up. Buy some real man shoes. I dismissed this as unimportant because in the grand scheme of things, shoes are unimportant. (Though I suspect Hendrix-Cat will strenuously disagree with this stance. :-)

5. He was the biggest pain in the ass while shopping ever. Even for things that he genuinely wanted AND needed. We would go downtown or to the mall, try a few stores, compare a few items, he would find exactly what he wanted, and then... NOT BUY IT. For no reason. Just didn't feel like it. !?!?!? I never did figure this behavior out. He blamed it on being a Libra. Apparently that justifies his chronic indecisiveness. (You can tell I'm really groping for things to complain about, can't you?)

6. He didn't like to kiss me. He said I slobbered too much. I countered that just meant that I needed more practice, but he remained unconvinced. In just two dates I spent more time kissing the Pirate than I have kissing every other man I ever kissed - combined. He's yet to find ought to complain about. So there.

7. He didn't like the way Bluto smelled. I think Bluto smells exaclty the way a hamster should. But then, His Hairyness did genuinely have a very sensitive nose, and I know that I have a relatively insensitive nose, so it's very possible he actually was smelling things there that I was unable to detect. But still, it's bad form to insult someone's pet. Am I wrong? (We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel now!)

8. He didn't like my underwear. Well I'm sorry but considering that before I met Hairy it had been 8 years since a male viewed my underwear, my knickers drawer was stocked with comfortable cotton bikini pants, not scary hot pink glossy plastic g-string thingys that cost a fortune and are uncomfortable for more than 30 seconds at a stretch. I did purchase some lace French knickers in a variety of colors as well as a couple pairs of some really skimpy things that ride up my ass (and frankly i don't think look very sexy, but they are from the Victoria's Secret Very Sexy Panties collection and i figured they know more about these things than I do), but he wanted me to wear them all the time. He always teased me if I ever wore my comfy old cotton ones, and said that undressing a woman should be like opening a christmas present. Well, i told him you can't have christmas every day or it just wouldn't be special anymore, but I'm pretty sure he didn't believe me.

9. He complained if I didn't shave my legs or armpits. Personally, I'm of the mind that if God/nature/the universe saw fit to put hair under my arms who am i to argue? I am an advocate of looking one's personal best and keeping up good hygeine and all that, but the shaving thing has nothing to do with hygeine and little to do with looks. It's purely an artifical cultural contrivance created by the men who controlled the fashion industry in the 1940s and 50s to infantilize women. It's creepy. The onset of body hair happens at puberty. Remove the body hair and you are effectivley re-creating a pre-pubescent body, which put in a sexual context smacks of paedophilia. Until I started seeing Hairy I hadn't shaved in about 6 years, and I was very happy this way. But he said he liked smooth legs etc, and I figured it was a small thing that I could do to please him, and not an outrageous request given the current popular opinions on such matters, and so I went along with it. But I drew the line at the short and curlys. Those puppies are staying put, and I flat out refused to cave on that one no matter how much he hinted.



Jesus, was I a complete doormat and totally unaware of it? This really makes it sound like a rubbish relationship, doesn't it? How very therapeutic! I'm beginning to wonder what i ever saw in him. Keep in mind that if all this stuff annoyed me, and yet I still really liked him and had a lot of fun with him and found him to be a very generous and kind person overall that the list of things I liked about him would be a lot longer than 8 items and it would be about much more important stuff. But if I write that list I'll start crying again and the whole point of this excercise was to make me feel better. Which it has. Job done.