Short Shelf Life Relationships at Midlife

THE "ONE NIGHT STAND" AT MIDLIFE
October 5 , 2007
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At the time of starting to date Debbie, I was very busy at work … traveling all over Southern California via the freeways … traffic … heavy 60+ hour/week workload, etc. The week after our Saturday romp, Debbie was all over my cell phone … she was calling me three or four times a day, and (when I answered) she would tell me a lot of naughty things. This was entertaining for about one day – and then it became annoying. I tried to explain to her that I was really busy, and that she needed to give me some space until later in the week – but no. By Wednesday of that week, I had decided she was a nut case (see Types of Women - Psycho) … and I stopped returning her calls. By Saturday, she had left me a handful of hysterical messages. She was done. Her shelf life had expired. She had become somehow an unintentional “one night stand” for me.

Here’s another example – this time with a woman from work at the time named Michelle. Michelle was a really pretty redhead who was very nicely put together. I somewhat knew Michelle because we worked at the same company, but in different yet related departments … so I’d say that we were already friends, and were able to skip the casual first-level dating scenario that I mentioned in the previous example. After our first night out together, Michelle and I wound up back at my place – and things started to happen pretty quickly. Things heated up … the clothes came off … we started to have sex … and then something weird happened. She started crying, and said she didn’t feel comfortable having sex with me because I had had sex with other women … and she felt like she would be getting sloppy seconds. Huh? I remember asking her what in the world she was talking about … because I was a serial dater … which means I didn’t sleep around … I only had one girlfriend at a time … never multiple partners. I think I had maybe been with three women that year … and it was November-ish when all of this was happening. To make a long story short, even though we had started to have sex – I didn’t finish … and the night ended very abruptly and strangely. She wound up feeling bad the next day, and (just like Debbie) started to hammer my cell phone with calls that week. And just like with Debbie, I simply couldn’t take the harassment … and so I politely told her that I didn’t think we were meant to be with one another. Anyway, I’m still counting this as a “one night stand” because a certain level of sexual contact was achieved … although it was not “finished”. That’s the only time THAT has ever happened to me!

Common Attributes of Super-Short Shelf Life Relationships
I could go on with several more examples, but you get the idea. All of these midlife one night stand scenarios share several things in common:

I had sex with the woman before I really knew her
I had sex with the woman on the first or second date
The woman assumed or presumed too much about our relationship in too short of a time
The woman would not give me the space I needed in order to get through my work week (which is a very bad sign if it is happening the first week you are involved with someone)
The woman turned psycho on me when I did not respond the way she wanted
Several of the women that have had such short shelf lives with me happen to have had Brazilian wax jobs … which really doesn’t have anything to do with anything … except that I find that very entertaining, and am now thinking about it as I write this.

Back to the original intent of this article – to explain the phenomenon of "one night stands at midlife". I don’t know if I’ve explained them, but I’ve at least characterized them via items 1) through 6) above. Really at midlife the "one night stand" equates to a relationship that for whatever reason has an extremely short shelf-life. “Short shelf-life relationship” sounds so much better than “one night stand”, too. ;o)

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