Why am I writing that in this blog? Because I no longer have good excuses not to do things. I hope this means you can expect more frequent (maybe even scheduled??) updates. I really, really hope.

This means you should e-mail me. Or tell your friends to e-mail me. Or just make something really interesting up and e-mail it to me. Questions, suggestions for topics, whatever. Do it.

I’m also working on buttering up a wonderful friend of mine to help me with a feature about a GIRL who has BOY problems. It’s has the potential to be an awesome story of a wonderful girl with unfortunate luck in the romance department. I’m not sure if I should try to do it as a running update or just different questions that come up. I’m not even sure if she will ever let me go through with anything. What do you guys think? Would answering a girl’s questions or seeing a girls point of view when it comes to the basics of dating be something interesting to develop?

Annnd finally, the KY lube product review has been one of my most popular posts. So naturally, when I found out KY has a new interesting sex potion out on the market (drugstore.com e-mailed me with an offer for $5 off, thanks to previous purchases… kiiiinda creepy), I HAD to buy it. It should be arriving within the next few days, so you can look forward to a new product post soon! Try not to get too… INTENSELY AROUSED. If you know what I mean.

He retorted with “Oh, yeah who was right about coating the chicken breasts with Dorito crumbs and baking them?”

“You were right, it was pretty good, I never said it wouldn’t be I just told you not to do it with the NEW YORK STRIP STEAKS we had the other night… and anyway what the heck does that have to do with you complaining about the App Store?”

… “Nothing, I was using that purely as a redirection tactic.”

Redirection tactics. THEY ONLY WORK IF YOU DO IT SUBTLY.

I have been really busy. Really, really, really busy. I’m only not busy today because my e-mail has been down for two whole days so I can’t get much done. Oh and also I celebrated my awesome birthday and took an awesome trip to awesome Tampa where I took a billion pictures of awesome aminals and got insanely sick after drinking an interesting shot called Liquid Cocaine.

When people ask me how my boyfriend and I met, I usually just chuckle and say “It’s a cool story involving us almost being related” and leave it at that. But today, you get the epic tale.

During my sophomore year in high school, I ate lunch every day at the same table in the cafeteria with my best friend Sarah and two of my best boy friends Flipper and Benjy and whoever else decided to join us that day. A consistent source of entertainment for all of us was jokes that Flipper or Ben would tell us about “posts” made on “The Shack”. I had no idea what they were talking about. I Google’d “The Shack” to find out where they were getting this stuff, to absolutely no avail. They also talked about their friend hawkeye, who was getting his G.E.D. so he didn’t have to go to school and he sat home playing video games all day and posting on “The Shack”. He sounded like a huge fucking dork. At some point, I figured out the location of “The Shack” and I joined the community and slowly started posting there under my new nickname that came to me out of a moment of either genius or insanity. I noticed hawkeye pretty quickly; he posted a lot, and I recognized his name from the lunch table boys. Soon after I started posting, we decided that we should meet, so we arranged a “Shackmeet” for the day after Christmas 2002. Ben and Flipper’s younger sister and Phil (hawkeye) came to pick me up in his red Ford Probe (which was cramped but a pretty awesome car) and we hung out for a few hours. I remember thinking he was cool and fun and surprisingly not fat and ugly for someone who spent his days in a recliner. I spent my New Years that year counting down to midnight in a room with Ben, Flipper, and Phil (all single) and posted later on the shack about feeling a bit disappointed at not getting a kiss. Phil responded quickly and promised to make it up to me. We went on a date a few days later and he did.

We dated for about three or four months, and it was pretty good. He was my first ever boyfriend, so my mom was a little obnoxious about restricting my time with him for not really any good reasons. We talked a lot. He made me pretty happy. I started bringing him to hang out with my other friends. He started to like my other friends.

One day, Flipper and my friend Sheila and myself skipped school (listen, it was Physics, we had a substitute teacher for more than half of the semester who could barely speak a lick of English, we rarely went to the class and I’m pretty positive we all passed) and went to a local McDonalds. It was 50’s style and had a jukebox and we randomly started dancing to one of the songs that was playing. A woman told us that we should stop by her swing dancing studio in a nearby town, so we took her card and all decided that sounded like a fantastic idea.

The first time everyone went, I had a previous commitment to go to a show in Boca Raton. The second time everyone went, I had a previous commitment to go to a show in Stuart. The third time everyone went, I got upset that everyone already knew how to do everything and I didn’t so I didn’t bother going. I was a stupid 16 year old girl and I should have sucked it up and just went. Meanwhile, those same insecurities caused me to fear for my relationship; Sheila was pretty much the epitome of an interesting person, not to mention beautiful, and I could sense Phil’s infatuation. He told me time and time again that he didn’t feel that way for her and that he was with me and not her, but honestly, he liked her and there wasn’t really much he could do to hide it from me, and it made me even more upset when he would lie about it. To this day, I have no idea if it would have just gone away if I didn’t have insecurities about it, but I still say that my insecurities were pretty well-founded considering the situation.

Anyway, rambling about insecurities, right. He dumped me and kind of used those as the excuse, but the real excuse was that I had introduced him to all of these pretty girls and he wanted to see what other ones were like. Pretty soon after he broke up with me (as in, like, two weeks soon… my 16 year old soul was completely crushed), he started dating Megan.

He dated Megan for three years. So much for seeing what other girls were like!

In those three years, I did some bad things. I learned a lot of lessons. I slept with my friend’s ex-boyfriend. I dated someone a lot older than me. I made out with one of my best friends at an 18-wheel tractor trailer game at a bowling alley. I started going swing dancing, and got pretty damn good at it. In my freshman year of college, I finally seemed to be settling down and I started dating Bob, a long-time friend… and Megan’s brother. Megan and I got pretty close, probably out of convenience more than anything, but I’d say she became one of my best female friends. It was a little weird for me to see Phil with another girl and I kind of turned Phil into two different people: the boy I dated, and the boy who dated Megan. I was happy, though, and I was happy that they were happy.

Bob ended up joining the military. I was supportive, but scared. He proposed probably about a week before he left for basic training. I was a wreck when he was in basic; I cried almost every day, wrote him almost every day. I didn’t really know who to lean on because I didn’t think anyone really understood how shitty it was to not even be able to contact someone you love. People started to annoy me. When we left to go visit him for his graduation, Megan was complaining to me about missing Phil less than 24 hours after being away from him. She later told me, and was right, that just because I had to go through worse doesn’t mean that her pain didn’t mean anything. But to have the audacity to say it to me when I hadn’t seen my boyfriend for over three months really showed me something. I wasn’t sure what, but it has stuck out in my mind as a turning point.

After basic and tech training, Bob was stationed in England. I visited him for our anniversary, and it was nice but it was probably when I started to really recognize the strain although at the time I didn’t really want to. I came down with an infection and managed to feel physically miserable for most of the time I was there, but most of what I remember was just enjoying being with him because it had been another three months of not seeing him since his graduation. The main issues I had with him were all pretty much revolved around the same thing. I thought that when he left to join the military, he would grow up. At the beginning, I thought that would involve him doing a lot more for himself and not relying on his mom to cook his meals or wash and fold his clothes. Basically, I was just wanting for him to disengage from the teat and do things for himself. He did. But what I didn’t realize that I wanted from him was for him to do all of those things and to also grow up emotionally. In so many ways, he was a kid. He was spending money frivolously. He smoked, which back then was just a huge fight between us but today would be an absolute deal breaker for me. He was still messy. He was selfish… not necessarily on purpose, but his first thought wasn’t really to think of other people. But most importantly, he didn’t make me feel secure. I felt like I had to uproot my entire life and dedicate myself to being a military wife in order to carry on a relationship with him. It was partially selfish. I can admit that fully. I wanted to have a life, and I didn’t want it to revolve around him.

I broke up with him in February. Phil broke up with Megan in February.

We both sort of leaned on each other. We talked about the problems we had been having in our relationships, and realized how similar we were in a lot of ways. We pretty quickly realized that there was still something there. When we were open and honest with our exes and told them about our feelings, we got a lot of suspicion. But we were open and honest. We dated for a few weeks, and Phil yet again felt that he wanted to date other people. Sow his wild oats, if you will. He was afraid that if he dated me again, he would never date anyone else.

I knew in every fiber of my being that he was making a mistake. I can’t explain how, and I might sound like a crazy woman when I say it, but I just knew. While we were broken up, I was still with him. We spent almost every evening hanging out and we still did other coupley things. Only he was allowed to go on dates with other girls (and make out with his roommates ex on top of a washing machine while I was asleep in his bed) without any guilt. I was an absolute wreck. I think back through my life and this is probably the third most horrible I’ve ever felt… it’s up there.

I don’t know how it happened, but something sparked in his brain, and he asked me out again. We’ve been dating since 04/05/06 and I think we’re probably more in love today than we were even at the beginning. We’ve managed to turn our absolutely backwards ass story into a healthy and thriving loving relationship. We argue, but we’re rational. He makes me think about the things I do or the things that I feel. A lot of people know not to take other people at face value, but I don’t think people realize that they take THEMSELVES at face value. Instead of thinking “he made me upset and I am upset and that is the bottom line because he did something that made me upset”, I try to figure out why I’m REALLY upset and use that to get to the root of issues. That’s how I approach a lot of the situations I am giving advice on. There’s usually a lot more under the surface than just “HEY, why won’t my boyfriend spend time with me!” I do it this way because after a lot of trial and error, I’ve found something that not only works, but makes SENSE. It doesn’t just work because we ignore problems. It doesn’t just work because. It works because we apply logic to emotion. The two concepts are not as unique as we all try to make them. They’re completely intertwined, and realizing that has lead me to be very comfortable in who I’ve become and in the relationship I’ve cultivated.

I might have just given away the entire point to my blog. I might have just bored everyone to tears. I should be updating again before the end of the week with some insight on the FRIEND ZONE and my first product review (once I manage to test it again… it’s for science, I swear) but today I was feeling a bit too introspective for something like that.

Need more questions for when I update frequently!

helpmewithmygirlproblems@laurgasms.com

OH! P.S.! The domain http://www.helpmewithmygirlproblems.com now points to my site! Awesome, huh? THANKS, ELECTROLY, LOVELOVELOVE.