One more time around the sun...

Today is my birthday and I was thinking this morning that it is a very good thing that this is a planet for slow learners. You know how once you know something intellectually it can still take an incredibly long time to change your behavior, or integrate new behavior.

I have been having a blast today talking with friends who make me laugh and who are learning a lot of the same things I'm learning.

One of the things we were talking about is relationships and how men and women can perceive them so differently even though they're both there, in the relationship, at the same time. For instance how do you know if a guy is your boyfriend, or if he's just "having a good time". I mean the behavior is all the same - you hang out together, you make out, you have sex, if something breaks he fixes it, if he gets sick you take care of him. But if you don't have a "conversation" to define what it is that you're doing - you might be doing two different things.

This can go both ways - there are men who think that they have a girlfriend, but they are really spending time with a women who is just having a good time. It's much more rare though because if a woman is really sexually attracted to a man and wants to jump him, odds are she's going to consider herself to be in a "relationship", not "just having a good time" if all the above behaviors are going on.

Yet, I cannot tell you how many times in my life I have found myself being advised after about four months of relationship type behavior that we were only "just having a good time" and there is much surprise that I thought we were having a relationship. Well guess what? If you don't have the conversation about what the hell you're doing that means there are perceptual options available for both of you and most women are going to pick the "you're my boyfriend" perception because that's what they want to be happening.

And men know this - I mean how many women have you met out there who just want to "have a good time" for months on end without defining it so they know "where this is going"? And the catch-22 in the situation is this: exactly when is a good time to ask the guy you're dating, "so what's going on with us?" Because you ask that question too soon and you run the risk of freaking a guy out. And women know this.

I've taken that class so many times I just have to take a romantic sabbatical.