I had a mini-breakdown yesterday.
Pretty much right after I got home from the airport at 10 p.m. Probably caused by the fact that I was trapped on a plane for eight hours with a broken entertainment system and no functioning light. (Was practically going blind in the name of reading Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room.)
Anyway. All I will share is that I had a domestic dispute that involved a Hello Kitty Christmas ornament. Suffice it to say that the situation has since been resolved.
I hesitate to even share the existence of a fight. People write the cruelest things about Patrick and me (he’s my European sugar daddy! I’m his Asian trophy girlfriend!) in the comments section of this blog and make all kinds of assumptions that I find laughable because even my closest friends aren’t familiar enough with the intimate details, yet random Internet stalkers think they’ve gotten us all figured out. Their criticisms put enormous pressure on me to maintain the facade of a perfect romance, which is ridiculous because I’m pretty open about the fact that my life is otherwise very unconventional. This is also the first time in my life that I’ve had a relationship which is entirely my own. I don’t share details of my love life with anyone, in part because a lot of my closest friends from college and in the Boston area are also friends now with Patrick. Talking about our issues with them would be way too weird and close for comfort. But on the other hand, my friends also aren’t quite close enough to the situation to really offer an informed opinion either.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m flailing out here and not entirely sure if what I’m doing is right. But blogging about sex and relationships and thinking critically about the gender roles to which we’re all subject has actually been really helpful to my love life in many ways. It makes me less possessive and jealous (because I realize that my partner is not someone I “own”) and less focused on reaching relationship benchmarks like engagement and marriage (neither of which we’ll be participating in). Mutual satisfaction — in and out of the bedroom — was one of the most basic goals of women’s lib, but it’s funny how things today haven’t necessarily improved for the better … problems have just evolved. Women get stressed over why the guy hasn’t “put a ring on it”; dudes get paranoid over what happens on girls’ nights out. My relationship isn’t perfect, but the above problems aren’t what we fight about and for that — I have feminism to thank.
