On my first date with Ted in 2022, we recited poetry to one another over a candlelit dinner. A glass of wine, a restaurant with a fireplace on a winter’s night… my eyes and my heart were bright.
On our second date, I asked Ted if he votes. He said yes; he’d voted in 2020 for Joe Biden, and for Obama back in the day. Did he vote in 2016? He didn’t like either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Okay, I thought, not everybody liked Hillary.
Stakes can be high when you’re dating. It’s easy, if you get a little scared, to find red flags that in fact might be invitations for conversation, for hopping past internal little fences into intimacy. I’d long had a field of internal little fences vast as an equestrian jumping course, and lately, instead of rearing from a hurdle and fleeing the field, I’d been clearing the jumps.
Dating had always frightened me. My mother raised me on equal rights. But my dating coach encouraged me lean into my femininity, and I found that not only did I enjoy being taken out to dinner and having doors opened for me, but it brought out my spark and softness. Suddenly, I felt seen after years of hiding, and I reveled in it. Until Ted, I’d gotten involved with softer men, wounded men who needed caretaking. Now I saw an opportunity to throw that pattern off and connect not from empathy, but from a magnetic attraction.
Still, I felt a contradiction in my bones. Is it more important to assert my ability to take care of myself or to let myself be taken care of?
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