History

It started with C, a guy whose motto - who needs foreplay if you have water-based lubricant? - still rings in my ears. He was health-conscious (didn't even drink caffeine!) and exercised with weights. He thought I should too and bought me 10-lb. dumbbells. I just really, you know, needed to get in shape. Maybe someday we'd be that perfect jogging couple in color-coordinated shell suits.

No.

I dated M many years later. He liked poetry, but I knew more about it than he did, so I exposed him to more poets. I liked classical music, but he knew more than I did, so he exposed me to more composers. Oh, the give-and-take! I pictured white nights at the opera during our St. Petersburg honeymoon. It seemed perfection until he confessed he usually went for thinner girls. My intuition had failed me. I asked him to elaborate, and he said he liked girls thin to the point of delicacy, but not waif-like. Oh, I said, you mean like the young Mick Jagger? Bonne chance.

Non.

And then there was P, who said after three years of dating: ya gotta lose the cellulite.

Let me be honest and say that I've weighed more than I should once in my life, when I was taking Paxil. It never fails with Paxil, it seems: you won't have panic attacks anymore, but you will gain at least 20 lbs. and never, ever have an orgasm again. Until you stop taking it.

Otherwise I am normal. (5'8" and 145 lbs.)

If I could go back in time, would I present C with a copy of Tibetan Arts of Love and withhold sex until he presented me with a notarized document stating he'd read it from start to finish? Would I tell M to cut his effing hair because it wasn't 1990 anymore and he was no longer the AlternaBoy in high school? Would I tell P ya gotta lose that smallish c_ck?

Probably.

Why didn't I have the balls back then?

Later there was G (God bless that boy), who encouraged ice cream atop the peach cobbler because well, girl, you're just too thin.