Backup

As I'm getting older, I'm losing my guy friends by the dozens. This is irritating because I have always been more comfortable hanging around men (less talk of feelings, more wit battles) than women. My closest girl friends tend to be women who "act like men" - no matter how backwards and ignorant that sounds. Yes, you can be as girly as you want, but if you shy away from sharp observations and harsh truths, I am going to have a hard time trusting you. The extra vagina in the mix just adds to the problem. Because my menstrual cycle just really wants to fit in, and I get tired of ovulating with all of my friends at once.

I am not losing my guy friends to disease. Rather I am losing them to other women, and such is life. (For the most part), I like my guy friends' wives and sometimes I even like their kids. But because I grew up in a family where infidelity was all too often a reality, I am careful about being out with married guy friends alone lest it hurt their wives or make them worry. Sadly, even when things are totally innocent and you're just swapping great public fart stories, there's now a family factor in there and, despite my at times unconventional outlook on love, I am rather conventional in my outlook on marriage and what it means when two people promise to love each other forever EXCLUSIVELY. So the karma fairies don't get me if I ever decide to walk down the aisle.

But this post isn't really about grieving the loss of male friends to marriage and their happily ever after lives. And I certainly am not discounting my female friends who have brought me safely through many a rough patch in the last year.

Rather this post is about the backup. I think everyone has them - the friend that desperation might one day make you think "Hey, sex with them might not be that bad and I already know their irritating habits." And so, maybe one night you both have a few and decide that if and when you are both old (40) and still single, you might think of actually falling in love with each other. Which is fine. Like a benzo, it calms down the worry over the future so you can get on with your life actually meeting and liking other people whose dark pasts are a complete mystery and will hopefully remain that way.

However, there is one requirement for the backup situation and it is that THE FEELING MUST BE MUTUAL. You must mutually be on each other's backup lists. There needs to be an understanding, in writing if need be.

I have a reason for this. It is most disconcerting to realize that you are on someone's backup list, that you would never in a million years agree to back up into.

In fact, downright insulting in some instances. Let me elaborate:

Despite the narcissistic tone of this blog, I am, as it were, actually a pretty decent catch. I am also single at the moment. This is a feat accomplished by few of my caliber, and usually I am proud of it because I can honestly say I would be a miserable cow had I married anyone I had ever dated and I think it took me some guts to realize that and walk away before I took the step of telling everyone my marital issues over facebook stati.

However, in the past year, I've had several people from various social circles sort of "check in" with me. Which would normally be fine and a little flattering, whether or not I liked them back. But these people do it in such a way that it's obvious they are putting some energy into trying to keep me there, rather than asking me out right now. Almost like I'm a sure bet or something.

Fair enough, we've all had delusions of grandeur. But these are also people that I would never in a trillion years even think about dating. In fact more than 80% of them are people I would be terrified to have to spend time with alone. Their crime: disregarding the mutuality of back-upedness by having the gumption to think that I would be right there waiting for them, when I find them about as attractive as a mole on a walrus's backside.

That high level of conceit coming from that low level of male really irks me because I don't have any way of dealing with it constructively. I am perceptive to the point of paranoia. I can read between the lines of these kinds of communications really well. But I am not sure what to do about them. If they were an explicit, "hey, let's hang out sometime" from a guy who I've never gone out with - easy to deal with. Say "sure, one of these days" and then don't and usually they get the picture and probably move on to someone else.

But these irritating fellas don't do that. They write me messages that border on stalkerish, with an apparent assumption that we'll be together when they get around to it. And I've left flummoxed as to how to approach this. I can't say in response to their assumptive cheese, "hey, I don't want to date you, EVER" because then they get a pass and can say "I never asked you out. Whoa." And you're thinking, "yes, you did, because I just forwarded your message to ten of my vagina friends who all independently confirmed that you think you actually have a sporting chance of locking me into a relationship whenever you feel like it."

Now that I am writing about this ("I write to find out what I'm thinking about"), I realize the part that really bothers me is I have a hard enough time finding someone I actually like enough to have sitting in my first chair, and yet there are these bastards out there who actually think they get to have me in their second chair, apparently without any concern as to whether or not I am interested in sitting in it.

Or on a deeper level it's about American society where fat jerks on TV always have the hot smart wives and a lot of these men bugging me seem to have the same mentality. That they are entitled to just keep a thumb on something, and the something doesn't mind being thumbed no matter how undeserving the, uh, thumber.

So, I just don't respond, which never seems to discourage this behavior, and at times makes it worse. (One, for example, always starts off his emails to me with "haven't talked to you in awhile." That is true, because I blocked you on facebook and never write back. Hint much?) And lately it's been happening so often (I guess their marital pool is thinning too) that I am thinking I need a good game plan to convey the fact they are pompous douchebags that make me uncomfortable with this unflattering display of territory marking.

Looking for suggestions, penis and vagina alike.