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Not at All What She Had in Mind
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He hadn’t been at all what she had in mind for a life partner. She grew up into a functional feminist maturity having developed the idea through a spate of Womyn’s Studies electives she took at Stanford during the late seventies. She intended this instruction as a means of both acknowledging and assessing the weaknesses of the glass ceiling hovering a few feet over her head. She eschewed equality, certain the Second Sex harbored some massive physical and intellectual differences —though not inferiorities — from their counterparts of the First. But she soon realized she’d need a very specific type of man in order to achieve her dreams.

The ideal structure for her daily existence would have been to align herself with some considerate guy who’d make the bed upon rising from it, prepare wholesome meals, and wield a mean mop and vacuum cleaner, while she holed up in front of her PC, battering the keys with brilliant code.

And so, her dating life consisted of a series of auditions. To be empirical about the act of mating, she tried them all on for size: The sensitive male from the aforementioned gender courses, who proved a tad too emotional for her taste. The alpha in her computer science courses, who viewed their interactions as a constant competition. The hardbody swim team captain, with whom the physical intercourse was phenomenal, but the intellectual less than stimulating. The cowboy poet on campus on fellowship, who came the closest to meeting her needs, but who absconded with her heart in the middle of one dark night of the soul, only to turn up again on the rodeo circuit, where the groupies presented a less intimidating and more pliant lot.

What she got out of this last experiment, however, was a relationship that would last a lifetime. Cowboy poet taught her how to ride.

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