I Want a Friend With Benefits. Badly.

I wish I wasn't borderline agoraphobic. I might have an easier time meeting new people. It's just so hard... I feel like I'm constantly being judged (isn't everybody, though?) and going out in public and interacting with other people just seems like a bad idea once you've seen women pull their children away from you because you're nearly six feet tall and have purple hair. I've never actually given strangers a reason to think I'm going to murder their children, so why do they act like I'm just about to snap and start taking out all my rage on a four-year-old?

Mostly, I just want to be in a long-term relationship. I do want to get married one day- it's the traditional, hardcore romantic in me- but I want to experience things a bit before I settle down. I'm twenty-one, I have some years. Love is the thing I want most in the world, because I feel like outside of my family, nobody I've ever known gives a shit about me. Not really. I always try my hardest to give my friends everything I can, until I've got nothing left to give. If I care about you, you'll know. You'll never be lacking a sympathetic ear, a shoulder to cry on, company when you want it... But the problem with that is, I always end up as the Agony Aunt and I'm fucking sick of it. I have only known of two men in the world that saw me as a sexual being; one was Mister Gumby, Pinkie's drug-addled, semi-retarded uncle, and the other, G.I. Joe, was the boyfriend of an ex-roomate that was still dating the girl I used to live with when he asked me to have sex with him.

The worst part?

I almost did it. I came this fucking close because I figured, hey, I'll probably be a virgin until I'm thirty otherwise. But I managed to get back to reality and the fact that I would hate myself forever, even if this girl never found out about it; I didn't enjoy living with her and I was happy when she moved out, but I didn't hate her and I certainly didn't hate her enough to fuck her boyfriend. I mean, I'm not even attracted to the guy. At all. He might as well be smooth as an actual G.I. Joe down there. I'm really not into Southern guys- either they're dickless little church boys or they're good ol' boys that hunt and fish and do other things I'd rather peel my eyelids off with a rusty can opener than do. This one was the latter.

That's pretty soul-crushing when you realise that you had to stop and think about it before you nearly, while completely sober, gave your virginity to someone you're not even halfway close to being attracted to in any way. It shouldn't have even crossed my mind, but since I'm so lonely and horny and confidence-less I almost took him up on it. And it wasn't even, "I want you, I've always wanted you", it was, "You wanna fuck?" Just tossed out like a small comment on the weather. I'd thought he was joking in the beginning but after he asked a second time I realised he was serious. My friends almost didn't believe me when I told them about it the next day, until I showed them a note he'd left me on my windshield apologising for his behaviour, he was being a jerk, blah blah blah... I still have it somewhere because I know it's all bullshit and I'm still not entirely sure, after more than a month, how it makes me feel.

Something always pissed me off about a couple of other girls I lived with. We'll call them Blonde Skank and Anorexia. Both of them were so slutty and yet they seemed to have such high standards as far as physicality goes. The most I ask for is someone who's not a toad. Neither of them was any better-looking than me, but because they aren't shy and insecure, men were all over them, and if I went out with them I'd just end up receding into the shadows. I recall a particularly offensive conversation with Anorexia (who, by the way, wasn't skinny but she never ate) when, after a date with a drop-dead gorgeous guy (6'7", long blonde hair, incredible body, ice-blue eyes, showed up in a Punisher T-shirt), she told me she wouldn't go out with him again. Why? Because he had a big scar on his arm from a motorcycle crash. She was also pissed that he'd made her wear a leather jacket (during the summer, granted) so, in the event they crashed, she wouldn't end up with a chunk taken out of her arm, too. That made me ill. If I'd thought I would've had a snowball's chance in Hell of getting him, I would've stolen his number off her phone when I realised that she'd left it on the counter. Instead, this picky bitch was saying shit like, "I'll never date a man that has gray hair" or "Uncircumcised penises are gross".

Blonde Skank was no better. She was dumb as a post and kept going back to a guy that:

1. was a White Supremacist
2. beat her
3. got her addicted to meth
4. used to date her mother
5. beat her

I had to change my number because they thought it would be funny to start harassing me. I got a phone call at 7 AM, just before I normally woke up to go to school, that was this dude jacking off and telling me he wanted to come in my eyeballs. I also got voicemails that were loud slurping noises, and many, many others, to the point I was scared to answer my phone. All this from a private number. I had never even given Blonde Skank my number in the first place- she took it off Anorexia's phone. I went to the one shop in town for my cell phone carrier and asked if there was any way they could pull this private number up and block it for me, or if they could give me some information so I could press harassment charges, but they just looked at me as if I were singing Hare Krishna and spitting nickels.

So I would sit there and get made fun of on a daily basis because I'm still a virgin. I probably knew a lot more about my own sexuality than they did about theirs, even more so now, but somehow it's not okay to be a virgin until you meet someone you at least trust enough to share your body with. Yeah, it's fucking hilarious that I don't know what cum smells like, laugh it up, bitches. I won't be the one with every STD known to man by the time I hit twenty-five.

These two would also make fun of me for not fucking any of my male friends. I've had a lot of dicks around, it's true, but I never touched or even saw any of them. All of them were either gay, taken, or uninterested. I got the impression the straight ones would probably rather have sex with another dude than me. Oh, but I was respected. Great. That's fucking awesome. I can totally masturbate to the memory of my getting all respected. One of them, I'll call him the Lizard King (Lizard for short), was telling me about one of his fuck buddies that he didn't like very much and I actually said, "Oh, so you'll do stuff like that with her, someone you barely can even stand, but not with me?"
"Well, I have a lot of respect for you."
"Uh... Okay..." Not the answer I was looking for. And it's not like Lizard didn't have an open at any point. He had me alone in his room on several occasions, and clearly I was interested because what kind of moron just keeps talking to you after you give them every fucking reason not to and giving you shit all the time (I lent him books and movies, and made him CDs a lot because I didn't have any other friends that shared those interests) without any sort of ulterior motive? I fucking loved him and either he's the dumbest motherfucker on the planet and didn't know, or he did and chose not to address it until our friendship imploded just before I moved away. Probably the latter, he was a smart guy. He certainly made me feel stupid.

So all this being ignored by the male (and, let's face it, with the exception of one, female) population, it's made me feel like I'm really unattractive. I already had ten million pounds of Insecure I was hauling around, I didn't need anyone else to make it worse. And, like I mentioned before, I get looked at like an escaped circus freak. That's mostly why my hair is platinum now, so I don't even have to deal with the baggage that comes with having black hair. I got so many nasty stares when my hair was green (God, I loved that color though, it was dark, oceanic blue-green when I put it on and it faded to an incredible emerald shade), more than when my hair was rainbow-colored. And, sorry, I like, no, I love my funky eyeshadow. My favorite color is green, of course I'm gonna have about twenty different shades. I like every color but brown. And I like matching my eye makeup to whatever I'm wearing. I figure, if I'm gonna bother putting makeup on every fucking day, I'm gonna have fun with it. My sense of style is Goth-punk-steampunk-casual, and I can't go anywhere in my stompy boots without mothers pulling their children away as if they're afraid I'd go on a Godzilla-like rampage and smash them underneath my enormous (women's size 10) feet. I would love to know why it is that people can't look like individuals, rather than carbon-copies of each other.

And the things that people look at in a positive light, I can't even handle- I can't take a fucking compliment to save my life. I've gotten so used to derogatory comments and nasty looks and generally feeling like shit about myself, that I can't stand for anyone to say anything nice. Immediately, I just wonder what the Hell they want from me. What their motives are. So I'd probably still freak out if someone I was actually interested in were to, dare I say it, flirt with me.

Almost every day, I think of something Blonde Skank once said to me. "God will give you somebody when you're ready for it." Now, my first thought was, big talk from someone dating a guy that beats her. And now? I feel like I'm ready. I'm no less ready than she was, for sure. I don't understand why, when I've always tried to better myself in some way, even just small ways, and there's no way that someone I was with would ever want for love and affection... Why do I get passed over in favor of someone who's simply got a better body than I do? I know that men are men and all that, but there has to be somebody in the world who'd rather have someone like me than some skinny girl that has nothing else going for her.

Oh, and P.S. on that whole "You wanna fuck?" business... The only way I would've said yes (emphatically!) would be if it was someone who looked like this:

The only words out of my mouth would've been, "You got a condom? Cos I'm totally into safe sex."

I mean... could you resist this smile?

UPDATE: I just realised I never explained something I referred to up there. Just after my junior year of high school, I was still dressing all shlumpy and still had my long, boring, dishwater-blonde hair. I went to the mall before my guitar lesson one Saturday, and while I was in Hot Topic looking at the T-shirts (I have like a million T-shirts. When I lose weight I'm gonna make some other kinds of shirts out of them because DAMN I can't wear them all.) I was approached by what I thought was a twelve-year-old boy and soon realised was a very boyish-looking girl.

Now, I hadn't even really sexually awakened yet, but I knew that butch wasn't my thing, so I kind of freaked out. All she said was, "Hey, do you think I'm cute?"

As the guy working in the store that day recalled (in front of one of my friends I hadn't told about this incident yet) I turned white, tossed out some weird combination of "I'm straight" and "I have a boyfriend" and then I tore ass out of there.

Needless to say, it wasn't really a step up from the Human Blob I'd been stalked by freshman year. And that wouldn't have been so bad had he not been a total creepazoid about liking me.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the one and only time I've ever been hit on by a woman. Before I'd even turned seventeen.