Datingish | true stories on the journey from single to *it's complicated*

Wednesday, 22 May 2013

I'm Not Your Mother: When Your Significant Other Has a Talking Limb

I wanted to simply pose this question to my Datingish readers and ask for your honest feedback on this subject: significant others and their extra baggage, children. More Here...

Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Balancing Womanhood

My father thought I’d be pregnant by the time I reached my fifteenth birthday. I know this because my mother repeated the last words he told her before they separated over and over during my adolescence. It was easy for him to say that. After all, he moved back to the Dominican Republic and left my two sisters and me to be raised by a single mother who barely spoke English and worked minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. My father thought we’d end up raising ourselves, end up in some older boy's beds, drug addicted, with an infant as our prize. My mother, however, would not let that happen, reminding us of this every time she thought we were straying off the path.

One time during high school she received a postcard saying I had not been attending my math class. “Have you been cutting school?” she asked me while shaking the postcard at me. “No! I think that was a mistake. They do that all the time,” I told her nonchalantly. She looked into my eyes, accepted my answer and walked away. The next day, during math class, my teacher received a note asking me to go to the main office. I walked into the main office and found my mother staring at me, the postcard she had been shaking the day before in hand. “Good,” she smiled, “just making sure you are where you’re supposed to be.” More Here...
Relationships Are Like a House

I was sitting on the floor of my friend D's apartment last week, having a couple of beers and musing about life. My boyfriend of 4 years and I had just gotten into a fight, and I needed to take a couple of hours to breathe and think it over. D is the sort of friend that will tell it to you straight, even if you don't want to hear it (especially when you don't want to hear it). She explained that my boyfriend and I were both about to graduate, we'd be living in different states, and that maybe this was the natural progression of things. Maybe, she said, this was the time for us to part ways. I remember I started to tear up at first, and I thought to myself, "She doesn't understand, she's never been with someone for this long, she's never felt this way."

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Sharing Details with Your Girlfriends

Everyone talks about their experiences with their best girlfriends, right? After something new and exciting happens with your guy the first place so many ladies go is to their best friends. Whether to brag, complain or ask for advice, girls love to confide in each other about their love lives. More Here...
How Beneficial Are Friends with Benefits?

School was out for the summer, and I was bored as hell. My neighbor James and I hung out a lot, watching movies, playing video games, staying up late and chatting…. After a while, though, we grew tired of those activities. We needed something fun, something exciting, and something that would fit our high school budgets. One day, sitting in the shed behind his house, we grew silent. We made eye contact. And we started making out.
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Monday, 20 May 2013

Sharing is Caring... or Not?

This post was submitted anonymously.

It was just a regular work day for me sitting in a cramped room at work which we call our "office space" for myself and two of my co-workers. We talk and joke on a daily basis and when we have phone conversations with our significant others, none of us really care if the others are listening. I mean, it's not like we talk about anything inappropriate. Just about our children, confirming future plans, or what's for dinner later. But one thing that one of my co-workers had mentioned on the phone, really got me thinking.

She asked her husband of 13 years if she could "borrow" some of his
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Phone Calls: Dead and Dread in the Age of Miscommunication

I was talking with a friend of mine a couple days ago about communication in today's generation. Specifically, methods of communication and the inherent psychology behind it. It applies to initial courting between people, but also to relationships. Today's generation has access to a variety of electronic communication: email, texting, FB, Twitter, etc. As a result, we've come to rely heavily on these means. The main benefit to them is their safety. They're low pressure, you can think about your response and take as long as you like to reply. So they're not scary.

The downside to this safety is that electronic communications are often fraught with miscommunication. The person on the other end can't read your emotion through your words, and so we're forced to pepper our texts and emails with "lol," "haha," and smiley faces. Think of how much implied meaning a winky face can carry. It can completely change the meaning of an entire sentence! It's all massively stupid to me, but sadly necessary so that people don't think that you're a sociopath or an asshole. More Here...
The Destination Wedding Dilemma

Two of my best friends got engaged two years ago and I couldn’t have been happier. I am the person that constantly watches romantic comedies even when the rational part of my brain knows it’s ridiculous. What can I say? Sometimes I just want Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams to show me what true love is. I’m corny, sue me.

My friend’s stories are my real life romantic comedy equivalent. Thinking about how happy they are always makes me smile. My friend Amy spent the better part of a year chasing a guy with a girlfriend. “She’s just so lame! They won’t make it 3 months” she would whine whenever he’d come around with her. She made it her mission to prove how much more amazing she was.

Her plan didn’t work. He loved ‘lame girl’ and Amy spent every weekend for 8 months locked in her room, crying her eyes out. My friends and I knew it was time for a “Friendtervention.” We sat her down and gave her a dose of reality. The bottom line was that he didn’t like her and she had to move on. Four months later she met Connor and two years after that she’s engaged. More Here...

Sunday, 19 May 2013

Rebuilding Love and Trust in an Old Broken Relationship? Help!

This is going to sound extremely complicated, and it is. Please bear with me, try not to judge too harshly. I have known my youngest son's dad for 4 years now. I got pregnant within the first month of being together, and moved in with him a couple months after with my other two boys. This is not the greatest of scenarios, but we made the best of it, and it did bring us closer. We had a system worked out, where I took care of all the domestic duties and he went to work, which I think is something that he wanted. So, we were rather happy and a family with a system that worked, and as a result, a deep love developed. Yet, as time went on, we had fights as all couples do, and as I became heavily pregnant (something he wasn't ready for), it seemed the more I needed him the more he would withdraw and pull away.

Issues that needed to be addressed were swept under the rug, he avoided me, and was not there for me though I tried my hardest to take care of him and my other kids, and tried to be there for him. Every time I tried to address the issues we had, he'd say I was starting a fight and he'd walk out of the room—even sometimes leaving completely. I understand he needed his space, and being rushed into a family was something he couldn't handle. More Here...
Should We Just Leave the Past in the Past?

I used to be a little crazy as a girlfriend. Not the overbearing or controlling type, but I was a little pushy about uncovering details about my boyfriend's past relationships. I don't know why I wanted to know. Once I did, I wish I didn't. I trust Andrew, I always have, but the thought of him with other girls really bothered me, and still does.
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Saturday, 18 May 2013

Keeping Up with the Exes

I was wondering the other day if there are any people out there who DON'T stalk their exes online at one point or another. With Facebook and social media being what it is, most people I know have at one point or another checked up on how an ex is doing. Some are even still openly friendly which is not a big deal. I wonder though, is it okay to snoop into each other's lives and to be so intrusive as to stalk them online to find out the details?

I know people will say that if they don't want their business known, don't put it online for the public to see. But for only $39.95, you can purchase all sorts of information on your ex that they did not post online. More Here...
Seperate but Equal Lives

This is something I have spent a a great deal of time thinking about lately. Perhaps it's the immature child inside or maybe I'm on to something, not that it is by any means a novel way of thinking: living single but being in a relationship. I'm not shy to admit that I truly love being alone, meaning both in the presence of others and being single. It's a means for me to shut down the chaos roaming around in my mind that quite literally drives me insane. When I am in a relationship (and even when I am in the company of others) my brain will not stop going, making it incredibly difficult for me to concentrate.

This period of my life is one where I need Karate-Kid-Ninja-Like concentration because I am at the very start of my career and life adventure and full concentration is what will help me to achieve me goals, of course. Being in a relationship, I'm sorry to say, distracts me tremendously. Maybe it's just me. More Here...