My cousin and I
I am on the tail end of a really long work weekend and before I go home and crash I had some thoughts I needed to get out of my head.
Last night I had a really long and fruitful conversation with a friend, I’m saying last night, I should be saying this morning. She called my writing “fantastical” which is a real word by the way, who knew? What she meant by that was the way that I write isn’t who I am in real life. I took offense to that at first but the more she explained herself and the more I listened I realized she was right.
My writing takes place in a perfect world where situations always make sense and men and women are adults. I write about chivalry and responsibility and men taking women out on dates and paying for dates. I write about acceptance and understanding. Principles that I would like to think I live by, the problem comes in when people take my writing and apply it to everything I do and everything I am as a man on an everyday basis. That’s not fair because I’ve made mistakes. I’ll probably make mistakes in the future.
It’s not that I try to come off as perfect or having all the answers when I write. It’s that I want to set a higher standard and a lot of times that means I have to live up to those standards. I once went out with a woman and I had her meet me at Hooters. March Madness was on, it was a Friday, I thought it was going to be a good time, I knew she liked basketball and who doesn’t like wings? As we’re sitting there I could tell she was upset so I’m thinking in my mind if I did something to piss her off, instead of racking my brain I just asked her. She said, “You wrote an article about places a man should take a woman on a date. There was Top Golf, there was Hotel Sorella and there was some other really romantic place. Why are we at Hooters?” At that point I realized she couldn’t separate the writer from the man and that was my fault.
There has been so many times that in the middle of a conversation a woman has literally quoted something I said and shut me up because how do I argue with my own words? That’s the problem when you put your voice and thoughts out there, you run of risk of being a hypocrite if you aren’t the man you’re telling the world you are. I’ve written about loving women that are girly, dresses and heels not realizing that if I’m dating a woman that isn’t girly that could be offensive. I’ve written about the proper way to date when I’ve sent text asking women to go get a drink knowing two days earlier I said that men should call and schedule. I was held accountable and it made me better.
