Intentional

In addition to talking to "men's room only" at the recent frisbee tournament, I was also casually aware of another one of the players trying his damnedest to stick it in pretty much anything that met his very strict criteria of being female and within his immediate vicinity.

P.S. If you're not picking up on the sarcasm in the last part of that sentence...

Tommy Boy. Applicable always.

He and his girlfriend are doing the on-again, off-again thing, and this particular weekend happened to be an "off" period. Which, I guess maybe I shouldn't use the word "girlfriend." Does she count as an "ex" for those 2 days that he's going to try and get frisky with somebody else before going back home and recommitting? I don't know. I didn't ask him all these questions. Sometimes I'm just too tired to sass. 

Sometimes I think about going rapidly from "on" to "off" and then this happens:

But in seriousness, there's a lot of confusing ways that straight people put their relationships together. This sort of, "we're together until it's convenient for us not to be, but then we'll be together again after that" format is soooo close to being non-monogamy. It's incredibly frustrating. There's no reason to not own up to wanting to bone other people or admitting that maybe you're not the "together forever" type of couple but that's okay and you don't have to use terminology like "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" if you don't want to.

Instead, a relationship gets hash-mashed together because two people happen to be in a similar geographical area and have a modicum of similar interests. Then nobody's actually happy because the intent of the relationship hasn't been considered. 

A lot of flack gets thrown around about how harmful the "ideal" partner is. Disney princes, the manic pixie dream girl, and the like. I'll take it one step further and say it's actually the set-up of the entire "ideal" relationship that's the problem, not just the people involved in said relationship. In the standard trope, two individuals (whatever their character affiliation) sort of orbit around each other until their faces smush together. Then they're officially "in a relationship." There might be arguments along the way about how the relationship isn't what one of them though it was going to be (this usually gets remedied in some large romantic gesture). On the flip side, sometimes there are loving comparisons to how much better this relationship is than any previous relationship. But there's never any moment where the two individuals sit down and figure out what "the relationship" means to either of them.

In a discussion with Now-hubby about his new girlfriend, I advised thinking more about the "how" of the relationship than the "what." How do they want their relationship to look? For example, are they going to visit every other weekend? Once a month for a longer period of time? (She lives about 5 hours away, so travel considerations will be significant if they continue seeing each other.) How as opposed to what. When you ask questions like, "What do I want in a relationship?" the answers become more easy to rigidly define. It's easy to quickly discount an entire segment of people or types of relationships that might otherwise be interesting or fulfilling, just because it doesn't fit into the "what" you've envisioned the relationship being. I've found it infinitely easier to meet people on equal footing and then figure out the "how" of them within my life.