Heather Toshiko

I’m not a completely risk averse person. Sure, I’m afraid of heights, and I don’t get crazy with the stock market, but I’ll throw money on a craps table and drive fast cars at double the speed limit. Taking risks with my life and finances is something I do with educated caution and for the most part, I make good decisions. Taking risks with my heart is something entirely different.

In general, I like to think of myself as pretty heartless. It takes a lot to fluster me, upset me or hurt me. Sure, like everyone else, my family is my main source of emotional vulnerability. If something is happening to one of them, my heart is 100% involved and I’m completely distracted and overwhelmingly concerned until their issue is resolved. Although I wish I had no vulnerabilities, I’ve learned to live with the fact that my family is my Achilles heel, and I deal with it.

Every once in awhile, I think about letting someone else into the inner circle. It isn’t often, but a handful of men in my life have meant enough to me that I have let them in, and trusted them. For the most part, that trust hasn’t been abused. The problem is, in the last year or so, I’ve found that the emotional ethics of some men aren’t what I’d expect them to be, and as a result I get burned. It’s not a bad burn, mind you, more like an unpleasant scrape. Modern single men have sexual ethics that range from Little House on the Prairie to Sex and The City, and everywhere in between. Even my close friend BRUIN and I have had discussions about dating ethics, and we totally disagree on some issues. Believe it or not, his rules and ethics are more stringent than mine, and he’s a man.

I’ve also noticed another disturbing trend. Men like to bill themselves as “nice guys,” when in fact they are anything but. A self professed “nice guy” that I briefly dated, turned out to be a stubborn, selfish, closed minded, controlling, arrogant prick. I even called him out on it, and challenged his “nice guy” moniker, and he had the audacity to argue. Asshole. I mean seriously, just own it.

So now, I’m starting to consider self preservation for the first time. I’ve never really gone to great lengths to protect myself from getting hurt in relationships. Frankly, I’ve pretty much done all of the dumping until recently. About a year ago was the first time someone actually said THEY didn’t want to date ME anymore. I was a little crushed at the time, but now I think that it was a great experience for me to learn what it’s like to be on the other side, and also for me to start seriously considering the fact that I need to be a bit more cautious with my emotions. The guy who dumped me wasn’t in the inner circle yet, and I hadn’t gotten to the point where I could be emotionally devastated, but it really made me start to think…when is it ok to let down your guard?

In the past, I’ve known women who go on two dates, fall hard, and then are devastated when the guy breaks it off after a few more dates. They were already mentally picking out china, and he was just on a test drive. As much as I want to fault them for their stupidity, I realize that while there are many hard and fast rules to dating (no sex on the first date, unless you’re really, really drunk and can believably blame it on the booze) but not for when it comes to figuring out when it’s ok to put your guard down and let someone in. Some would argue that you can leave it up almost inevitably, but I believe that that prevents you from connecting on a deeper emotional level, and for a relationship to progress, don’t you need to connect? So how then, do you know? And no, the answer is not somehow related to sex. Sex is something that happens in modern dating culture sometimes as soon as the first date. Is it after a set amount of time? That’s doesn’t really apply either, since some people see each other more frequently than others when they first start dating. So when is it? How do I know its ok? Will I always be concerned that I’m sharing too much during pillow talk? Will I always wonder if it’s too soon to let someone in?

In general, I’m a guarded person. By necessity, I’m precluded from talking too much about my job and what I do at work. Sometimes, this overflows into my personal life, and I am very guarded about the people I love most, my family. I recently met a man who wanted to know some specific details about my family. I was vague, but gave him the gist of what he needed to know. He pressed harder, practically demanding to know a specific that would compromise their identity, and frankly, I wasn’t ready to do that. I barely knew the man. At that point, he was dead in the water. I gave him the “this isn’t going to work out” speech, and moved on. Nobody bullies me into talking about my family. I know that I did the right thing, but I had to ask myself, when does being cautious turn into being paranoid? Obviously, in the world I operate in, you can’t be too cautious, and I don’t believe that I’m paranoid (what paranoid person does?) but again the question arises, when is it ok to open up?

Emotional ethics, relationship ethics, sexual ethics…what a pain in the ass. You’d think that as you get older and more experienced, dating would get simpler. Not so much. I long for the simple days when my first boyfriend, who was almost as innocent as I was, could be allowed into my heart so easily and without suspicion or concern. Now, there’s an exhausting vetting process that still leaves room for doubt. Perhaps if I’d gone into another line of work. Perhaps if cynicism hadn’t worked it’s way into my heart so long ago. I guess I’ll just have to keep trying to figure out the answer through trial and error…with maybe a few scrapes and burns along the way.