The Fear

I tend to make friends with older ladies when it comes to who I converse with in the workplace. For instance, right now my best work friend is a 46 year old paralegal who curses more than I do and is always talking about working out her "obliques" in her spare time. This kind of senseless bragging makes me want to kick her in the neck, but I'm too fat to kick that high, so....touche I guess.

Anyway, I don't know why this happens, honestly, because outside of work, despite my pension for dating charming and handsome older men, I have always had friends that were pretty much in my age range. But at work you can undoubtedly find me sitting at the old ladies lunch table listening to stories about their grown kids money problems or watching videos of their lame ass cat's birthday party.

Don't get me wrong though, it's not all bad. 

Sometimes they bring me candy and little cakes or pies they made because they miss having people to cook for other than their ungrateful as shit pets, and a lot of times they give fucking spectacular advice. 

Especially if they're older ladies with a lot of sass, which are my kind of older ladies. {trust me there was absolutely no way to make that statement without sounding porny as all get out}

One of the drawbacks to this nonsexual hetero Harold and Maude friendship, is that old women can be bitter as fuck, and inevitably they always give me The Fear.

At some point, regardless of their actual age, if they're over 30 and/or have been with their current partner more than 5 years, they end up giving me The Fear.

What is The Fear, you ask?

The Fear is the overwhelming terror that overcomes me when I listen to stories from other women describing how they basically could care less about sex anymore/their partners wouldn't notice at this point if they stripped naked and did the merengue anyway.

I say "over 30 and/or have been with their partner more than 5 years" because I hear this kind of crazy talk from women still in their 20's! In fact just yesterday I heard a girl {27 years old!!!} at work talking about how one day she got all dressed up to go out with some friends, but her plans fell through, so there she was in the kitchen making dinner in a miniskirt and stilettos, bent over pulling a beautiful roast out of the oven, when her boyfriend of 7 years came in and didn't even notice. Just walked past her and started talking about stupid bullshit, until she announced casually that she was going to change into her pajamas, at which point he finally actually looked at her and simply said "How do you cook in shoes like that? Aren't you scared you'll fall when you're carrying something hot?" AND THIS WAS NO BIG DEAL TO HER! She quite literally said to me "Once you've been together that long, sex is something you can more or less take or leave." To help prove her point {and try to make the look of terror on my face go away} another woman told a story about how her husband turned down sex because it was late and he had just gotten all ready to clean the oven.....CLEAN THE OVEN.

How are these women not hurt by this? How do they not care?! How can sex become something so casual and unimportant between two people, that it's something you talk about maybe doing after you load the dishwasher if you're not too tired?!

Is this really what happens in normal relationships? Is this really what happens to all women as we get older? And in that case, what is it more related to, age or how long you've been with your current partner? And does the desire kind of leave you altogether, or do you just stop finding that one person as desirable, but your sex drive is still just as high?  

Basically what I'm asking is HOW DOES IT ALL WORK AND DOES THIS HAVE TO HAPPEN TO ME?!

Maybe it's because I'm only 24, or because Bill and I have only been "officially" together a few months, I don't know, but I would be crushed if I was all slutted up and making dinner for Bill like something out of a Skinamax movie, and he didn't even NOTICE. I would be seriously depressed if I offered him sexy time and cleaning the oven took priority. And I would be calling every guru, psychic and relationship counselor in the state if I felt like I could simply take or leave sex with him....

The Fear is that I don't want our relationship to become....that. Whatever that is, good, bad or indifferent, and I'm just terrified that maybe there's no avoiding it.

But as long as I'm shit scared of it maybe I can put it off a while longer, right?

RIGHT?!

When I panicked and made Bill promise he would never chose to clean the oven instead of having sexy time with me, he agreed almost too quickly.
At first I felt relieved, and then I realized that he probably just hates cleaning the oven, and if it made me feel "special" for him to abandon that chore in favor of playing "hide the saltine" with me, then that works out swell for him.
Well played, Bill. Well played.