from "pick-me" to misandrist to grown-up

or how I learned to make friends with good men in middle-age.

Last week I met an old friend for coffee. He’s a man I have known for twenty-five years and have stayed in touch with because even though our lives look nowhere near the way they did when he wrote VICE articles about the debauchery of our youth, we have somehow ended up in a similar life phase all these years later. He was also one of the few friends I had in those days who didn’t completely disappear from my life when I became a mom.

Over coffee we talked about his separation. We talked about dating and writing and love and having kids and that somehow, we woke up and became forty-somethings and remember that time when we …. oh wait… those years were such a blur I actually can’t remember that at all.

I am sure I have written about this before but before I was married I lived solely with men. I had two female friends in those days and the foundation of our friendship was the fact that we were the only other girls in the room. We were guys-girls who went from feeling threatened by each other to best friends — a lesson I didn’t even realize I was learning until years later. (It’s usually those you feel most threatened by who you’re most compatible with.)

Anyway.

I was recently talking to my kids about my history of “guys-girl-ness” when they interjected that I was what GenZ now calls a “pick-me” and they are absolutely right. I was a “pick- me girl” but, for me, it was more than needing male validation. I became dependent on boy's’ dependency. I gravitated toward and was attracted to boys and then men who were raw and lost and needed mommies, even though it would be years before I had kids of my own. If everyone around me was fed, sheltered, hydrated, and loved, I felt worthy.

Over time I went from a “pick-me” to whatever the opposite of a “pick-me” is and that’s part of what tanked my marriage. Because when you are someone who goes from seeking male validation — to rebelling against it in every possible way, it will have an effect on the entire trajectory of your life, relationships, and work. At least it did for me.

But I am getting ahead of myself.