I'm Sorry, I Can't, Don't Hate Me

Me: Part of me just wants to go ahead and marry [Don Juan de Morocco].

Mom: That part of you needs to shut the fuck up.

I'm still stymied on what to do about Don Juan de Morocco, so I decided to distract myself by going to see Sex and the City. I hadn't initially wanted to see the movie because I had serious problems with how ridiculous it is that Carrie and Big end up together when they are so clearly wrong for each other. ("Reformation of a cad" is one of my least favorite themes in film, TV and movies.) However, in the midst of all my blubbering, I came away with something from the movie that I think I can apply to my own life. In one scene, Carrie and Miranda take food from Pret a Manger (I love to eat there) to eat in Central Park and discuss Miranda and Steve's progress in couple's therapy. The therapist has forbidden Miranda and Steve from having any communication with each other for two weeks at the end of which, they have to turn up at a predetermined meeting place and leave the past behind if they still want to be together. Miranda, as she talks to Carrie, is agonizing over what she wants to do and whether she can show up to meet Steve at the appointed time and says she has a lot to think about. Carrie, in essence, corrects her by saying she has a lot to feel about. Carrie reminds Miranda that, as a lawyer, she can argue both sides of any argument but that she's ultimately going to have to follow her heart. Oh, Carrie. It's like you're talking right to me, girl.

In my own situation, my instincts with respect to Don Juan de Morocco are not to trust him. My heart says no, but my mind is trying to argue both sides. I was talking to Shorty, a friend of mine I met on the trip who accompanied Don Juan de Morocco and me on our date, last night about this issue. Shorty hated Don Juan de Morocco, but now that we're back in the U.S., she feels more sympathy for him, as do I. He's a young, well-educated, intelligent man in a country not exactly awash with opportunity. It's not hard to imagine why he might lock on to a woman that he likes from a first world country and try to leverage a mutual attraction into a ticket to a better life. I rarely think of myself as patriotic, but in thinking about Don Juan de Morocco's unfortunate and unfair situation, I have never felt luckier to be born in the United States. I don't think Don Juan de Morocco is a bad person or that he doesn't actually have fond feelings for me, and I don't fault him for wanting to take advantage of his window of youth and hotness to take a shot at better opportunities abroad (it is telling, in my opinion, that his previous girlfriend was British and that his Facebook friends are almost all women from first world countries), but that doesn't mean that I want to be the stepping stone he uses to get to the life he wants and probably deserves. I don't think that would be the life that I deserve.

Considering how little time I spent with Don Juan de Morocco, I have spent a lot of time thinking about him and I think he's changed me more in one meeting than other men have in far longer periods of time. He reminded me that I am not invisible to the opposite sex, and he made me feel good about myself. He also made me realize that I'm not as desperate as I feared I was, because I don't want to marry him even though I think I probably could. I was worried that my heart had turned into a cynical corn husk, but maybe there is still a little bit of romance pumping through there after all because I'm not ready to give up on the idea of meeting someone who is genuinely as excited about me as Don Juan de Morocco says he is and about whom I feel the same way.

Shorty asked me if I was sure that I didn't want to be with Don Juan de Morocco, and I am.