As a loud and cheerful individual, I've come to realise that I have an assigned role in every conversation that my friends and I engage in. I am expected to chip in with a random, sometimes humorous, opinion and keep the conversation going. Coupled with this great responsibility is the expectation to remain calm, cool and collected no matter where the conversation leads. This expectation is often met with great pleasure except for the times when everyone else seems to engage the most; when we bring up dating, love and sex. This discomfort stems from a number of factors that have governed many of my interaction on random girls' nights and in pj parties. Factors that I've worked hard to ignore but are constantly reminded of when I find myself lying in bed struggling to fall asleep. The first is my experience of men; as a girl with two younger brothers and mostly male cousins, I learnt to be one of the boys. I learnt how to play PlayStation games for hours on end and derive great pleasure from it; I learnt to speak about cars as if I cared and I got used to listen to men admire other women either than myself. Naturally I learnt how to give more confidence rather than receiving them and thus created a void that would lead to many bad relationship choices and deep self-worth issues. I learnt to hang onto the tiniest admiration from all men and learnt to settle for treatment that I felt made me feel special every so often. I learnt to accept what I received and desired the heartfelt compliments that all the women around me seemed to be showered with. I learnt to be good enough and to accept the terms of strangers who knew nothing more about me except my name. I learnt to compromise myself for others to love me. I learnt to cling on even when there was really nothing to be had. I experienced men as these foreign creatures who were meant to determine my worth and who could make me feel beautiful and worthy of affection. I built relationships with men mainly built of lust and expectation as opposed to a desire to truly love and understand the other person. I learnt to be ok with being sexually appealing instead of beautiful. I accepted feeling wanted for an hour as opposed to being cherished at all times. For someone who had been in many relationships with men, I knew very little about what it truly means to fall in love and be love, I still don't. The second is my experience of myself; Having been a full figured, socially awkward and pretty plain Jane, I learnt to pretty much not assume I'm that the random guy looking this way is looking at me. Most of the time I stumbled into relationships and spent more time puzzling on how I got into the relationship than the actual relationship itself. I have been confronted with the reality that a lot of the male figures that came into my life wanted something more than just my company and witty conversation. As a result I avoid conversations that require me to bare my heart out about things I have not wrapped my head around. I avoid having myself look like an weirdo who doesn't know what it's like to depend on someone either than the people who have no choice but to love you (family) and those who choose to love you but never seem to fill the void ( friends). I refuse to put myself in a place where I can talk excitedly about marriage and babies when I don't even know if there is really someone out there who could love me how I want to be loved. I refuse to engage in conversations about sex at a deeper and emotional level when I have just experienced it as a means to an end for a lot of people around me.
