by Anne Gabriel
As a single 40ish woman in LA, paramours, or potential lovers fall into several simple categories. Friends that want to sleep with you, acquaintances who want to sleep with you but are boring, acquaintances that want to sleep with you and they’re dumb but hot as f&^k, emo skateboarder boys, and strangers that love to take up time. Each kind loves to walk up behind you and give you shoulder massages hoping this will elicit spontaneous desire – but instead just elicits a cringe and icy reception on arrival.
Let’s start with the strangers that want to take up time. It’s not on purpose mind you and in fact I put myself in a position to have it happen. I signed myself up for group dinners that set you up with strangers in a similar age bracket plus 20 years. This is where the most amount of time is wasted. Between meeting pipe salesman and dog walkers that are old enough to be maybe not your father, but definitely your uncle—the most action can be had among the women who grasp onto each other for pure novelty and to experience 10+ syllable sentences without having to wonder if their companions qualify for medicare .
Then there are the dumb but hot boys. I love the dumb but hot. You look at them and blush while your panties soak. You know it’s not going anywhere long term because you’ll kill yourself if you actually have to have a conversation with them for longer than 5 minutes more than once. “Oh, you make candles. That’s so…..interesting, tell me more…” But they keep showing up for whatever reason and you wonder if just having straight sex is worth the effort. They flash a charismatic smile your way and you think, oh, that smile has seen at least 20 other faces today, but I bet they’d be great to f%^k.
Then there is the eager but boring. They really are quite lovely and normally fairly handsome. You blush at their effort, but wonder if sex will be just as vanilla as they seem. They really want to have conversations with you. They want to know all about you and they want you to know all about them. They find everything about you fascinating and it makes me want to crawl into a hole and never come out because if you pop your head out, there they are, smiling from ear to ear. They also. Keep. Showing. Up. and you take a minute to assess their effort and take notice. Maybe they’re more interesting than they let on? Probably not.
Next up is the snarky and shy and complain-about-everything intellectual kind of dude. He most often rides a skateboard. He’s cool and cute in kind of a hipster way and often wears glasses. But he loves loves hanging out with the boys and geeking out on random facts and the time you spend talking is mostly about him complaining that he hasn’t made it as big as all of his friends. This kind of interaction is exhausting. He hits you up once, maybe twice, and if you don’t respond immediately his feelings are most definitely hurt and he slinks back into his cave.
Then there is the friend who really wants to sleep with you. That when drunk, backs you into a corner at a mutual friend’s birthday party to confess that they really, really have been wanting to get into your pants. This last one is a bit tricky because, well you’re friends. Maybe not close friends, but friends enough to enjoy each other’s company and you wonder if there might be a shot if they just weren’t so eager and sad.
And among all of this, sometimes, sometimes something real happens and you end up falling for someone that maybe normally you wouldn’t have because by chance or accident you found each other and maybe that works out and maybe it doesn’t but either way you’re thankful that you followed your heart.
Dating in LA is complicated and boring and scary and insane because, well, that’s most of the people living here. It takes bracing yourself and deciding what kind of effort and where to point it as least painful and maybe as you make your way through the gauntlet, you end up on the other side with the golden snitch stuck between your two front teeth because it was slammed into there by life.
Photo: Grimarika