Love Ain't a Bad Thing

"What is it that you are lacking in yourself that is keeping you single?"

I was taken off guard to be asked this question. What am I lacking? "Do you want the long list or the short list?" I feebly joked.

"I want an answer to the question." He said. "I've done the work and I know why I am single and also why most single women are still single. I want to know what you think is lacking in you."

I had a hard time answering the question. We all are lacking something. I'm not near enough to perfect and I guess I never expect someone else to be. I make poor choices and I make excuses for men and for myself too. My life can be quite chaotic at times and not necessarily because of my own doing. I have a hard time believing the bad in people. I trust too easily. I am too accepting at times and then I can be taken advantage of when someone finds my kindness to be a weakness rather than a genuine strength. I feel things intensely. I tend to have a lot of instability around me and what I want is the stability of everyday life. I listed these things that I could think of in a stilted voice.

"Mmm hmm." He says. "See the problem with women is you want what you don't have to give. You just said your life can be chaotic and men don't want that in their life. You want someone stable and you can't give them the ability to be stable back. You don't understand men at all…"

He was right about that in a way. I can't give the stability I crave. I can't expect someone to understand in a ten minute conversation that though my life has an abundance of havoc, I am steady in the person I am. "I can only be who I am. I can only offer someone this person I am. I am loyal and giving and forgiving. I'm not a quitter. I continue to hope and live my life in such a way to make it better not only for me but for all who enter into it. This is all I have. Everything else that I might lack it's not from a lack of trying. I'm not asking for a man to fix me or my life."

I ask him why he thinks he is single since he has "done the work".

"Women don't understand men. We are not emotional. We don't feel things and we don't want to feel things. I want a woman who is like me. Who can just tell it like it is and isn't afraid to say what she needs and wants. You see, you women want our sympathy. We might say, 'Hey, sorry your aunt died.' But we don't really care anything about that. You want us to be all sad about things and we just aren't. We aren't emotional…You're never going to have a man of our age in your life as long as you are emotional about things. We want what we are."

I'm not sure if that's true. I'm not a man. I can't possibly know what a man actually feels or how they feel about women or what they want. I just know the men in my life-my father, my brother, my brother-in-law, my uncles and cousins and friends, men I have loved in the past and men I have only liked-can be emotional about people they love. They are emotional.

Even if men do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, I would like to think if the woman they love is grieving that it affects them too. I think that is why men might be in the role of the protectors sometimes-to guard who they love from pain and heartache and danger. Love makes us all emotional-it is an emotion.

"Have you ever been in love?" I interrupted.

"No. I have not. If I had been in love nothing could have torn it apart… I never even was in love with the mother of my children."

And see, I got a little emotional here. It brought tears to my eyes. Because where he sees it a failing to have been in love and loved deeply or having been emotional over people that it didn't work out with as a weakness, I was sad for a man who lacked the experience of the wonder of loving someone.

I may lack more as a single woman than I even realize or will admit publicly. But I don't lack the ability to love and to know it was a wonder to have done so and will again be a wonder when it happens again. I'm ready for it and for the man who will be emotional about me as I will be about him.

Monika M. Basile