talked to myself. I thought about going into my room and saying my daily motivational quotes. They always helped to put me in a better mood when I was feeling down.
And sometimes I felt down, which I suppose was normal. Everyone had moments when they didn’t feel like they were the best or even worthy of love. And that’s how I was feeling today. I’d woken up feeling really bad about the fact that I ditched Pierre the night before. I felt guilty that I’d judged him before I’d even met him. I didn’t even know if he did have a foot fetish and I’d judged him. I judged him based on one email and hadn’t even given him a chance. I hadn’t gone on a date and asked him, “Do you have a foot fetish? Are you obsessed with feet?” Maybe he just liked shoes. Maybe he was in the shoe business and wanted to buy me some, but no, I had judged him, and that was something I’d told myself I would never do to anyone, because I knew what it was like to be judged.
Coming from a big Greek family and going to school with a lot of Irish Americans, I’d always felt different. I’d always felt like the odd one out. When you took weird foods to school, when your family showed up loud and boisterous every week to complain, you kind of realized what it was to be the odd one out, to not be understood, to be othered. And I hated it. Sure. I understand why my parents did it. If they thought a teacher was picking on me because I got a bad grade and they thought I deserved a better grade, they thought it was up to them to make sure the teacher knew that I had parents and a family that wasn’t going to let the teacher treat me unfairly.
Not that I felt that any teachers had given me a poor grade on purpose, but try telling that to my folks, because as loud and as crazy as they were, they always had faith in me to be the best. They’d always had trust in me, and I think that’s why I wanted so desperately to be with someone. I wanted to make them happy just as much as I wanted to make myself happy. I wanted to find love for me and for them. I wanted to show them that they hadn’t failed. And I knew that they felt that a part of the reason why I was single had to do with them, they felt like they’d given me some sort of issue that I couldn’t be happy with a partner. They thought it was their fault that I couldn’t find a man that I could love who could love me back, and it wasn’t. They had done the absolute best job and I loved them more than anything.
They just didn’t understand that it wasn’t like when they were young. Women like me, we didn’t need a man to make us whole. I didn’t need a man to marry, to live my life and be happy. Sure, sometimes I was lonely. Sure, sometimes I didn’t want to sit on the couch on a Friday night and look at movies about happy couples while I was sitting there alone. But I didn’t miss the arguments that came in relationships. I didn’t miss the bad sex because let’s be honest, every guy is not good in bed. And every guy does not know what they’re doing. And it doesn’t matter how good-looking they are or what they’re working with. If they don’t have the skills, they don’t have the skills. And there’d been too many nights where I’d had to finish myself off after the guy had already come, rolled over and fell asleep.
I didn’t want a boyfriend just to have a boyfriend. I wanted a guy that respected me, that loved me, that paid attention to me, that cared about me and that was interested in my pleasure as well as his. In fact, that was a really big thing. If a guy didn’t know how to please me in the bedroom, that wasn’t going to work. Not that I could tell my grandparents or my parents that. That was too embarrassing. They would not want to hear about boyfriends who didn’t know how to work their cocks, but sex was important to me. I smiled as I thought about