‘Dating a woman saves hours of bullshit’
Image: Unsplash
Marleen (41) is the mother of Isaac (13) and David (10), whom she had in a heterosexual marriage. Since her divorce, she only dates women.
“’Hey, finally’, my mother sighed when I introduced her to my first serious friend a year ago. ‘How nice of you to have the courage to investigate that.’ Nice of her to say that, but I was dumbfounded at the same time. I knew that Bart, the father of my children, was their ideal son-in-law.
When I told my parents I wanted a divorce, they initially yelled that I didn’t realize what I was throwing away. A punch to my stomach. Because Bart was indeed golden, but also boring, and I was very unhappy. Although I now understand that that was mainly due to me; he just couldn’t thrill me. His safety and tranquility, which seemed so attractive at twenty, drove me insane once we had children. I wanted to sparkle, enjoy life, make every day an adventure. But Bart filled in every weekend according to a fixed pattern. Even the sex, which I had always enjoyed with men until then, was always the same.
Women
In fact, I’ve been watching women all my life. In elementary school I had a classmate who I fantasized about for nights on end. Not in a sexual sense, I was much too young for that, but I really wanted to cuddle her and hoped she would sleep in my bed when she came to stay. I preferred to be with her day and night. More ‘fascinations’ for women followed, as I put it. For the supervisor of my freshman group during the introduction week of my study. For a girlfriend. Even for a neighbor when I lived long and wide married with children in our Vinex neighborhood. I devoured TV series like The L word and Tales of the city. And I remained interested in men.
“I wish I was with her day and night”
The first time I turned on Tinder after the divorce, I only swiped on men. I had a single date, ended up in bed with them twice. Tasty, but still not mindblowing. A friend with the same penchant for women’s love suggested that I date a woman. That had pleased her very much; there turned out to be a lot less jerks walking around than in the men’s section of the app. It could at least give me a pleasant evening, she thought. With my heart in my throat, I put my money where my mouth is and adjusted my dating profile. I immediately had four matches.
Read also – ‘Before I knew it, I was passionately kissing a woman’ >
Scan
A period of scanning followed. Of at least six dates with different women, with whom I kissed, but nothing else. Kissing a woman was not new to me, in my student days it had happened often out of annoyance.
“Dating women was pure for me from the first second. Fair. Without games”
Now that I did it with a romantic approach, it was scarier, but also nicer. And another nice side of dating women: I didn’t have to plow through hours of bullshit to get to the depths of conversations. There was no game of attracting and repelling, I felt no inclination to appear more graceful than I was. Dating women was pure for me from the first second. Fair. Without games.
Relation
My kids didn’t flinch when one of those dates, Rachel, seemed to get so serious that I introduced her to them. “Don’t you think it’s strange that Mum is now in love with a woman?” I asked cautiously. “Why,” Isaac shrugged, “you were also in love with Daddy, weren’t you?” We had a few wonderful months, but the distance between our places of residence proved unbridgeable. Too bad, the children thought, but especially for me. It seems to me that they see a relationship with a woman as less of an intrusion into the three of us than if I brought a man home.
I recently got a new girlfriend, but I’ll keep her under the radar for now. Also a piece of cake for the neighbors: all those women on my floor just mean a neighbor with a busy social life to them.”
This article appears in Kek Mama 11-2022.
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