Q I’m a 32-year-old, very attractive, very fit SWM living in NYC. I’m well read and well spoken. I march to the beat of my own drum. Friends tell me that my personality is intense. It must be true—everyone concurs. I’m extremely idealistic, and I count myself as a romantic. I’m interested in an intense and consuming love affair with a woman. But friends tell me that my approach to courtship and my energy scare women off.
A You don’t give me much to go on, WHDMA. It would help to know, for example, what exactly you’re doing—besides being all intensely romantic and extremely idealistic and physically fit and stuff—that scares women off. How does your “intensity” manifest itself? Without that info, it’s difficult to whip up some advice for you.
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But I can do a little decoding: When friends say “Your personality is intense,” what they typically mean is “You’re an asshole.”
And that lady friend who offered to take you out and act as your wingman? I suspect she was trying to pull the stick out of your ass and trying to get you to see that dating—at least at the outset—is about pleasure, not intensity. I assure you that bars all over the civilized world are packed with “random women” as interested in intense and consuming love affairs as you are. You might want to give them a chance.
Q I thought I knew what teabagging meant: to dip a man’s testicles in and out of your mouth. But during a recent conversation about the Republican teabag party craze, my boyfriend told me that teabagging meant to put your balls into someone else’s mouth. A person without balls, he insists, can’t do the teabagging. But many people I know think they are the teabagger and their partner is the one being teabagged. An Internet search turns up both definitions. So, Dan, I’m asking you—as an expert on all things both political and sexual—do any of us hetero females have a chance of teabagging President Obama? —The Earnest Aspirant
