Amos(&Dave Barry)-LOL!!!! Also, Kendall, I loved your comments as well. This has turned into a really interesting and revealing thread, hasn't it? Deckman, you KNOW I agree with you about cats!

What I kept going back to while reading these postings is how B&B was approaching this thing, and from what I can tell, it is from a thoughtful and emotional place. You want, I think, to wait for the person who fits. I say good luck to you, and he may indeed be out there right around your next corner.

As a woman, (it does make a difference, because both genders have been manipulated, some say from pre-birth, to adjust to a range of steriotypes) who was cursed/blessed with a modicum of good looks, I was aware from an early age just how much that factor was going to play into my life...and what choices I'd have to make as to how much I wanted to manipulate it. For a long while I didn't. I was the perverbial "tomboy", climbing trees, kicking boys, and generally trying to steer clear of the "let's play house" set. When I found out that on occasion I was getting miffed at some guy because he was responding to me as "one of the guys", I would whip off my glasses, comb my hair, and put on a dress. The reaction was so intense in it's difference that I knew I was playing with some primal fire.

Almost before we have a name for it, we are having to deal with our sexuality. It's now being literally crammed down our throats via the media as well. Children as young as 8 and 9 are being targeted for products to sexually allure. Of course, some can argue that this isn't new, and there are many cultures that begin arranging marriages at an even earlier age. But that's something else, though yes, culture can play a large part in what happens between us as we grow into the dating/mating game.

I can't remember feeling prepared for any of this. By the time a "talk" might have occurred between my mother and I, it was waaay past what I'd already received of my own sexual education via discussions in the playground and library books feverently read behind the back shelves.I knew the "facts", but honey, NO ONE could have prepared me for the reality!

Throughout my life I've had relationships both sexual and non. The sexual ones have always been more complex. Even in the days before AIDs and STDs were as rampant as they are now, women had to deal with one primary difference from our male cohorts...we could get pregnant. I knew that fact scared the bejiggers out of me, and yet still, time and again, I was face to face-or body to body, with some guy who was ready to ride the waves in a hot second, with little understanding of how easy it was for us woman to be washed under quickly only to come up to the surface preggers.

Does that change everything for most of us? I'd say it does, even with the best "protection" available. We've have to think about this every time, and men just don't.

Aside from the ramifications of what the sexual act can produce in the way of an embryo, there are also the emotional pressures of just saying "no". It's HARD to do that, especially since we do think about that word as a rejection..that's how it feels to us when it comes our way...how could it not feel the same to someone we like and usually go home and fantasise about? So again (just like in Amos' scenario) we are always playing out what the reactions will be, and for a lot of us, it's just easier to give in to the moment of persistance coming our way. That we feel badly about it afterwards is something we often learn to subjegate, though it does affect our psychies. How could it not? Someone was INSIDE of us!

The intimacy of the sexual act is something implied for a lot of women. Some have the ability to have "sex friends"...in all honesty, I've gone that route more than once. It does little more than scratch the itch, and then one is left with knowing that we've shared our bodies without our souls, as you pointed out, B&B. It's not very satisfying, and in the end, I think it was a poor compromise every time.

The problem is...waiting for what we want. I married my complete opposite, and we rubbed and rubbed ourselves raw (in the LH sense) and actually came closer to being who we felt more comfortable being, both for ourselves and each other. It was very very difficult, and in the end, we loved each other a lot more, and STILL couldn't live together.

Funny thing is that all the respect and love and trust that we can invest into a relationship will not confirm it's longevity. TIMING is also an enormously important factor. So on top of all the other trials and tribs we go through to get there, if we don't both hit at the right time we may still deflect away from each other! OY!

So in the end, well, as I said in an earlier posting, you can keep looking (or non-look in a freda underhill/Buddhist kind of way), which has it's great merits) or "Marry Yourself" which sounds hokier than I mean it to. But I do think that without the latter, you won't be nearly as prepared for the time, whenever that time might come-for the former..xx..e