Could It Be The Pheromones?

I have known for quite some time that I am really not girlfriend material. I just can't seem to get too excited about the prospect of being committed, except perhaps to an asylum.

You see, the trouble begins with my inability to pick appropriate men. I look back on the serious romantic relationships in my life and they look like something out of a poorly acted soap opera.

The first boy I ever loved with a heart old enough to purchase alcohol was this tall, dark, wild child from Indiana. He had moved up to Canada for the summer to play AAA baseball. He was a year younger than me, drove a Mustang and he could throw a 91 mile an hour fastball. We met by accident when he fell through the evergreen hedges into my back yard. We had the best summer as only two young twenty-somethings can but we always knew that he would go home to Indiana. We tried to do the long distance thing for a while and he was so decent about answering his phone even though I called like a total lunatic a bazillion times a day. However, on some level, I knew that I would never have to commit to this man because he LIVED IN ANOTHER COUNTRY! We are still good friends and I have already purchased the most insulting 40th birthday card I could find for him.

Then came the Honda CBR boy. He dropped into my life at a party. He was 6'5", dark haired and brooding. I mistook the quiet, unsmiling persona as mysterious and Marlon Brando-like. Wrong. He was just plain miserable. And gay. Not that there is anything wrong with that.....except that he asked me to marry him and I DID. Call me crazy but when a man asks a woman to walk down the aisle, the woman doesn't think to inquire if he might bat for the other team. Looking back, it was clear that on some level, I had to have known. After all, if it waddles, quacks and accessorizes better than me, it's a duck.

After that kick to my fragile feminine ego, I went out and found the biggest, most masculine, most Neanderthal-like man on the planet. If you looked sideways at him when he wasn't watching, you might have been able to catch his knuckles brushing the ground. Everything was a-ok as long as I was content playing cave woman. I fell hard and it was so easy because he was married to someone else at the time. We were still great friends, though. We'd have lunch and talk about everything under the sun using very. simple. words. He'd complain about his wife (red flag) and I commiserated because EVERYONE knows that the wife is the problem, right? I thought he was the second coming and I pined for him from afar.

Then, he did the unthinkable and left his wife. To compound the horror, he confessed that he was in love with me and wanted to pursue a relationship (danger sign, danger sign). I felt tremendous guilt along the lines of "be careful what you ask for...", so I married him, of course. Because nothing screams validation like being the new, much younger wife of a man in the throes of mid-life crisis. He is the father of my children.

I lasted a decade with him until one morning, I woke up and seriously contemplated the physics that would be necessary to smother him to death. You think that I am kidding...

Dallas is sweet and I have no regrets but he's still licking some pretty serious wounds. We have arrived at a comfortable place, though. I have a friend in another town who I dated for a few weeks and who treated me like a queen so naturally, I sprinted away from him. We're still friends, too. Something has changed, though because I have been asked out more often in the last two months than the last four years. Grocery store, line at the dry cleaners, Harley dealership, neighbour, etc. have all resulted in perfect strangers asking to exchange digits.

For instance, the other day I was at the hand car wash cleaning my vehicle to get it ready for trade in. I had my iPod on and I walked over to the vending machine to get some Turtle wax wipes (I like wipes-all kinds of wipes). I turned around and this guy started to make small talk about the bill changer and did I have any left over coins I might want to sell him. When I told him I had used my debit card, that launched a whole other discussion which ended with, "Gee. Your boyfriend? (pause while he waited for a confirm or deny which never came) is a lucky guy to be able to stay at home watching football while you're out washing the car." Big, bad, obvious fish for info but I just didn't feel like pursuing it so I smiled and went back to my car.

Well, I'm back out there again. I still do not trust my judgment because my track record is beyond pathetic. While I'm confident that my gaydar is now finely tuned, I'm not so sure about my ability to discern any other characteristic. One thing I do know for certain is that men must find commitment-phobes to be irresistible because my dance card is full.