While I was lying awake the other night, in my perpetual state of insomnia, I flashed back to a date I had with this GORGEOUS guy, many, many years ago. I don't remember his name, or the circumstances, but I do remember his face. I recall building this whole scenario up in my mind....being so smitten with his looks, probably wondering why the hell this fantastical Adonis had actually asked me out....such were my deeply entrenched insecurities at the time. I distinctly recall being about 30 minutes into pre-dinner drinks, when I realized this guy was a total jerk. I went to the ladies room and came back, looking at him as I returned to the table, thinking that he really WAS NOT that hot looking. Every hormone that had been peaking for days prior to, every nerve-ending that I had thought about to explode from overactive imagination stimulation, ceased to function. The rest of dinner was a chore to be finished, like cleaning up the kitchen, and then I was outta there!

THIRTY MINUTES! That's all it took and I believe it took that long because I had already managed to knock back 2 glasses of wine and was working on a third. He was obviously self-centered, intelligent but dogmatic, lacking in empathy, and in need of constant stroking and admiration, which he received plenty of from the other females in the restaurant. In fact, even my male friends liked him because he was also pretty humourous and had a quick wit, qualities I also relish in people. Anyway, I spent most of the rest of dinner fascinated by the fact that I had found him so amazingly enticing until, outside of a 'party' situation, he had opened his mouth for more than 5 minutes.

This was huge, but it was a pattern. I look back and think of how most, (definitely not all), of the men I became seriously involved with were precisely that 'type', but it seems like it took me longer and longer to figure it out each time. Instead of picking up on the cues faster, I seemed to become less sensitive to them......in the last relationship it took about 20 years before they began to consciously kick in.