I get it… please let me know when I don’t…

Before I started dating my wife I had an unsettling experience.  I was a passenger in a truck and a woman who was a casual acquaintance of mine was sitting in the center seat next to me.  She scooted over close to me and started unexpectedly started rubbing the side of her body against mine.  I had no romantic intentions towards this woman nor did I have any awareness beforehand that she had any towards me.  I never was an opportunist when it came to “making moves” on women.  When like me you know you can’t read people very well the idea of accidentally doing something unwelcome and dishonorable seems terrifyingly possible.  I had no positive or healthy sense of relationship with my own physical desires and here was a woman seemingly at random arousing me because… why?  I had no idea, I just froze, not knowing what to do other than to scoot a little farther away from her on the bench.  I got home and tried to imagine role plays in my mind where I could do something to stop the advance.  I felt guilty about being caught in a situation where I didn’t know what to do.

A week or two later I recall she announced she had a new boy friend, after having previously announced that she was feeling frustrated because she had no romantic prospects.  This felt very confusing to me, how do you go from being frustrated that you have no prospects to going steady with someone within about a week?  And didn’t that mean that she was already well into the process of entering a romantic relationship with someone else when she pulled a move on me?  Did that mean she made a pass at me for her own amusement, either her own physical enjoyment or enjoyment at watching me squirm?  Did that mean that she had been desperately lonely and was trying to get me to pay romantic attention to her?  Was this what my sisters meant by saying men were so blind they had to be hit over the head to see or understand things?  Was it all a misunderstanding?  I doubt it, since it is one thing to lean against someone and another to squirm back and forth in a snuggle.  The fact of the matter is I have no idea what motivated her behavior.  If she had just asked me if I wanted a hug or a back rub because she noticed I was lonely I probably would have happily accepted because those were types of physical touch I have a high craving for, can understand at a platonic level of relationship, and I had no real way of getting at the time.  It would have felt like she was giving to me rather than taking.  I still don’t know if it was meant exploitative or if she just thought that a casual opportunistic snuggle was a great way to flirt.  People rarely make intuitive sense to me.

As a man I can recognize I rarely have had to worry about these kinds of experiences.  I spend more time worrying that my clumsy social skills will make me do or say something really sexist and I won’t realize how it is going to sound until just a little late.  But I do know a little of what it feels like to be taken by surprise by an unwelcome touch, to freeze up, and then feel guilty about it afterwards.  I even know a little bit about what it feels like that nobody would really believe you.  I doubt many people who don’t know me well would believe that this is how I reacted.  Men are “supposed to” always be looking out to “get some” so how could that possibly go wrong?  So please, understand that while I might not really have felt anything like the extent to which you have experienced verbal and physical assaults I do understand some of the pieces of what those experiences are like.  And if I ever say anything that comes across just wrong, please let me know so I can do better.