A guy wrote:

“Hello, my name is [redacted] I’m attempting to introduce myself to you. I must say it’s one of the most awkward things I’ve ever tried. I mean how does a man say hello and convey his interest in a woman on POF of all places and not sound like some player, Viking or some other undesirable. I’d like to tell you how beautiful but not have it sound like some sort of one liner. What I seek is companionship and a partnership I don’t seek to date numerous woman or have meaningless relationship’s. Im mature, fun and laid back if I sound like someone you’d like to get to know message me back.hope.to hear from you.”

POF=Plenty of Fish

He messaged me on OKCupid.

If one is trying to avoid having things sound like one-liners, one should avoid obviously cutting and pasting one’s opening gambit.

I, author of two books on Atwood, President of the Margaret Atwood Society, editor of Margaret Atwood Studies, creator of the Margaret Atwood Book Group, mention Atwood in my favorite author list on OKC.

This was an opening volley from a guy today:

Have you read the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood? I did go through an Atwood phase where I read a lot f her books. She’s amazing.

All I want to do is send this picture:

How much should I cop to?

Many men, when reading my profile, picture someone very different from me.

Other Karma is the girl next door the “just a regular guy” says he wants. She doesn’t have strong opinions or a PhD. She definitely isn’t funnier than he is; instead, she laughs at all the jokes he makes when they watch hours and hours of sports.

Alternate universe Karma does not close down his profile as quickly as possible, in horror at the thought of becoming his “ideal” woman, one who will “lend a hand when I have my three kids on the days I have them” and who isn’t appalled at his work schedule–4 a.m. to noon.

Karma in the upside down loves that he’s married and would like to practice non-ethical non-monogamy with him. She does not roll her eyes when the married man answers the question “Would you be okay with your partner spending a lot of time with an ex” with “no way.”

Discworld Karma doesn’t have PTSD flashbacks when he brags about being a “Southern Gentleman.”

Dark timeline Karma has the hots for obvious spelling and grammar errors.

Mid-world Karma does not recoil when a man starts calling her “sweetie” before meeting her.

Parallel Karma has no problem with a 54 year old man who is only willing to date 28-48 year old women.

Karma through the looking glass is not scared when he says, out of nowhere, “I can protect you.”

Karma who got sorted into Slytherin didn’t mean it when she said she only dates liberal nonsmokers. She’s glad the smoker who believes contraception is immoral, climate change is a hoax, and Donald Trump is a hero decided to ignore what she said. He knows better, and she could learn a lot from him.

Cylon Karma is completely turned on by blank profiles, and her panties get wet when a blank-profile guy opens with “hi.”

Last weekend, I had to break up with a great guy–one who fit me in a lot of ways. During the last couple of months, I found myself being really irritable around him–much more than I should have been, much more than he deserved.

He was just so great in so many ways, and I was trying to overlook the ways that we didn’t fit.

So my subconscious made me bitchy.

It was a hard decision; I’m well aware that there might not be anyone out there who fits me better.

But I can’t walk around being bitchy.

I hate having to go into my boyfriend’s office. Everywhere one looks, there are naked and nearly naked women–there are three pin-up calendars, signed posters from porn stars, etc.

One day, I had to give up when looking for scissors because I was way too distracted by how many pubic regions I could see from every angle of the room.

Now, I have some pictures of male stars on my computer (David Tennant saying “You Should be Writing,” for example), but they are clothed.

My boyfriend thinks I shouldn’t be upset about the walls of boobs because he knows all of these women and has slept with most of them.

Yes–you read that right.

He thinks it should bother me less that he has naked pictures of his exes in his office than just random naked women. (These are the only pictures of humans in the house–no friends or family.)

(And yes, he’s slept with a lot of models and porn stars.)

I don’t mind people having pictures of their exes. I have pictures of mine. They’re mixed in with the many, many pictures I have of friends and family around the house.

However, one can walk through my house without seeing any of their erect, throbbing penises.

Today, I’m trying a compromise. One of my boyfriend’s presents is two posters of me–one of his favorite picture of me, the other is KarmaZuul. Alas, I don’t have any naked ones, as I’m not a porn star or exotic dancer, though I’ve played them before. Am pretty sure Costco doesn’t want to make a giant poster of a naked me, either.

Readers, I’m gonna take over the wall.

I used to be good at keeping a diary.
Now, unless I’m traveling, I almost never do–except here, for you, which is different. This is not just a space for me–there is an audience with needs, to whom I give background, for whom I try to be coherent.
Diaries unfortunately lost their appeal for me when I was married in my late teens.
My brief disastrous marriage had a lot of wrong in it–readers might remember that my ex liked my looks a lot, but not me–not my smarts, not my drive. He misrepresented himself, hoping that marriage (and his god) would change me.
What I haven’t written about as much is his jealousy. We had a bad dynamic. I wanted to be trusted, but he wasn’t capable of giving it. I had watched my mother date possessive man after possessive man (most of whom were cheating on her), so I hated that sense of being watched, being accused. My ex’s mom had been cheated on too–and thus he said he couldn’t trust people.
And so there we were.
Our marriage deteriorated very quickly, and I pulled away emotionally. And I wanted out. And that caused his jealousy to rise. And that caused me to pull away and to want out more. And so on.
And then he started reading my diary. He justified it by saying that married people didn’t need secrets from each other–they were one flesh and all. As soon as I realized that I couldn’t have privacy in my home, I stopped writing.
But he kept reading, going back in time.
I remember once coming home to find him upset and jealous over some guy I’d had a crush on when I was fourteen.
Him: Why didn’t you write about me like that?
Me: I was 14!
I lost everything I wrote when I was younger, so that it couldn’t be used to pressure me, to judge me, to guilt me.
I burned my diaries.

I know that I’ve complained a lot about all of the guys out there who have wanted to change me, from the strangers on the internet who want me to be the kind of person who will give them a chance, even though they’re smokers or dumb or married or dumb married smokers, to the men who have supposedly loved me but wanted me to change into someone who wants more children or who believes in female submissiveness or into a very unhappy submissive woman with lots of kids.

My boyfriend does hope that I’ll get more comfortable with the “m” word one day, but on the whole, he accepts me for who I am.

I should therefore feel a lot more guilty about not accepting some of his particular shortcomings.

But I do want to change him.

He’s a brilliant, talented, sexy, successful man, but he had never seen Outlander. He’d never watched Sherlock or Doctor Who. He’d never even heard of One Mississippi or Maria Bamford or Stranger Things.

At the risk of being a cliche, I am now a woman on a mission to change a man, to improve him for the better, for both our sakes.

When my best friend of many years came to visit me and, by default, the guy I was living with when I was 19, he kept making “jokes” about threesomes.

During one of the “jokes,” he grabbed her breasts.

If he’s on social media right now, he’s shaking his head at all of his female friends saying, “me, too.”

He’s astounded at what men do to women.

I know him.

Unfortunately, I was briefly married to him.

So I know he’s not thinking about having assaulted and harassed my friend.

He thinks he has never done that. That he never would do something we would label that way.

He thinks he’s a good person. In many ways, he is. He is generally kind, generally generous, etc.

And he’s religious–very religious.

And that’s part of the problem–he thinks that because he goes to church, he’s a good person.

He doesn’t see the way in which evangelical Christianity is at odds with treating women with actual respect.

Once, we had an argument about “chivalry.” He’s Southern (like me), and he thought it was the right way to be.

Me: But answer me honestly.

Him: Okay.

Me: Do you go out of your way to open doors and stuff for fat middle-aged women?

Him: No.

Me: Then it’s not about respecting women. You “chivalrous” guys treat young women like me differently–and part of it is so you can have a chance to be physically close to us, to talk to us, to have us smile at you.

Marrying him was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, and I won’t go into all the ways and reasons here, but he had pretended (lied) about believing in equality before we got married.

And then when we did, he said words like “submit.” He said he had “hoped God would change [my] heart” after a marriage based on that lie–that I wouldn’t believe in what I believed in anymore.

In his mind, he was a good man.

In believing myself equal, I was a bad woman.

Even though, “in the image of God created he them, male and female.”

Until he got with his current wife, he came to me with his dating problems, even though I all could do was laugh at him sometimes. Like most people his age, he slept around. Then, he’d say things like this: “I really like this one, so I talked to her and we’re going to try not to have sex anymore. It’s what God would want.”

I never could get him to see the strangeness of that logic or any of his logic about how he interacts with women.

Once, he came to me worried that a woman was going to call the police. He had run into a girl he knew in high school at a club. He had always wanted to fuck her. When she left, drunk, he followed her home, to make sure she was safe. He said she invited him in.

The next morning, she asked how he got there, how he got in, and if they had had sex.

I don’t know what happened, really.

But I know that he thinks he’s never assaulted anyone.

I know he thinks he’s one of the few good Christian men who treat women right.

But I also know that one day, after dropping my son off, long after our divorce, he made a move on me. His desire for “ex sex” was something he’d commented on before–I had made my lack of interest clear.

I asked him to leave.

He moved closer.

I asked him to leave again.

He moved closer.

I told him that if he came any closer, I would punch him in the face.

He left, after I punched him in the face.

I’m lucky that he didn’t punch back–that he didn’t force himself on me.

He probably thinks that’s where the line is–that he’s not guilty of anything because he’s never used force.

I tell this story not because he’s the worst or most dangerous or most threatening man who’s ever done something to me.

Far from it.

I tell this story because my grandmother died thinking the worst thing I ever did was to leave him, because he was such a good Christian man–and because he knows that’s what she thought.

And because he thinks it too.

Now that I have a boyfriend (he prefers “paramour,” by the way), it’s time to do some reflecting on the search.
As my readers know, there have been a few guys who let it slip that they weren’t looking for anything serious, which led me to break things off.
The guys were always surprised, even though the only box checked on what I was interested in was “long-term relationship.”
So did I want to date a guy who says that he’s never been in love (even though he’s divorced), who says I’m obviously lying to myself about wanting long-term when I don’t like living with people, who says the twenty minute drive to me was too much for something real.
Did I want to date the guy who confesses that he is still very much in love with someone else, but he’d like to keep things casual with me, since it will help him have sex with this other woman less?
C’mon, guys.
After I realized that our interests were not aligned, I called things off.
In these cases, the guys would make the same request:
Why don’t we just date casually and see what happens?
In other words, why don’t I (the guy) get what I want and you not get what you want, which will lead to a frustrating end in which I reiterate that I was never looking for something long term?
And in these cases, the guys came back, sometimes weeks after, sometimes years after, saying they’d made mistakes.
That they didn’t appreciate what I had to offer or the ways in which I’m different from most women.
Maybe they should have been different from most men.