Lauren’s Opinion: Derby
Disclaimer: This is an opinion.
While we ventured into chlorinated wars in England, Love Ledger Entry No. 2 – Derby – brought a whole new challenge to the beloved Kentucky race.
Horses with blinders on will continue running their best race – that’s straight facts. This was Derby’s original advantage. He was focused solely on me. Even though I mentioned on Love Ledger his “antics”, there were multitudes of flags I kept bypassing as red and calling them yellow.
This love ledger wasn’t written to defame these men. It was written to spotlight how my experiences with dating men in general have changed my outlook on relationships and how it impacts my fictional writing.
Writers write what they know – cliché but true. Not every writer takes their own personal experiences and imbibes them onto characters. But sometimes people impact me so much that I declare with pen in hand, “Lauren must write!” and then… I write.
Derby was very much a frontrunner for the trophy in my mind.
He was tall, good-looking, sweet, and read history for pleasure. If you know a straight way to my heart, it is to read for pleasure – regardless of what you’re currently reading. While he held a lot of potential for being a summer romance, this man’s behaviors were problematic in the end.
He loved sleeping over so soon in dating. That is the first flag for the race.
While he was fun, when he slept over, I felt pressured to have sex with him. I never did, but it seemed to fill in the tension because of things he’d say, which cannot be mentioned on this blog for his sake – and for mine. It was a lot for me, especially because, contrary to popular belief, I am sexually abstinent and have been for over 2 years. I have serious guardrails around who comes near my body.
Derby did not and could not respect those guardrails. I get it – he was 29. Sex in a relationship was important to him. However, the feeling I took away from our sleepovers was that he would not wait for us to even be together or serious or even in love – much less just in general my fairly firm no. While he said he respected it and me, he definitely attempted other ways (which were unsuccessful) to infiltrate my Strait of Hormuz.
Now, this did become a huge factor when he decided to discuss me getting him coffee at the coffee shop the day after I moved and he slept over – before we even got there. He, in fact, had parked in my apartment garage and wanted me to drive him to the coffee place and bring him back. I had to go to my daughter’s school event that morning, and could barely find clothes in my boxes scattered around my apartment. So I also was not in a great mood.
READ THE ROOM, CARL.
None of it sat well with me. So it wasn’t just one thing – it was all three things colliding at once – sex before commitment, equal pay, and disregard for what I had done the day before (which he knew took 9 hours and cost $1600!) after staying over at my place and attempting humpback whale adventures.
That led to the final flag where Derby’s horse had to be retired.
All these led me to observe my own boundaries. I said it was a mistake to let him sleep over, which was true. It’s not because I felt compelled to do anything – pressure is different than being compelled to act. This is why we needed to be in a committed relationship and know each other better. Why? Because Derby would’ve known that pressure for me leads me to firm up my boundaries and become even less inclined to act than before. It does the opposite of its intent.
It’s not because I felt compelled to do anything – pressure is different than being compelled to act.
In his case, it gave me the physical ick – it made me want to sleep with him even less than I already did. I also felt the emphasis on sex so early on isn’t how I wanted my relationship to be with anyone. The commenting on my body was unnecessary. When any man tells me how pretty I am, how hot I am, how people should be telling me this often – it is a huge turn-off for me.
Why?
Because I’m sure, as my blog England mildly divulged, I find restrained men extremely attractive. I would even go so far as to say England had me in a chokehold without ever even touching me. Derby, who had kissed me, had given me the ick.
Does it mean that Derby did anything wrong?
Yes and no – that’s the interesting part. Other women find men who are extremely forward, tell them all the time how pretty they are, and may not have minded paying for coffee. But that just isn’t what speaks to me at all as I’ve grown older. A man who I know wants me horizontally but restrains himself is what I find to be the most alluring. I like what is unsaid to remain as tension versus being explicit.
A man who I know wants me horizontally but restrains himself is what I find to be the most alluring.
Does it mean I never love compliments?
Of course not! That would be crazy. At times, I want to be told I’m beautiful just like anyone else. I want to be told how much a man wants me at times.
But that cannot be the main event.
It’s because I truly believe in the fruits of the spirit and how self-control holds them all together. If a man lacks self-control, I will ultimately find him destructive to the relationship through his actions and words – eventually. It doesn’t mean he’s intentionally destroying anything. It means that by not being able to control himself, he violates the very relationship we are trying to build. He’s using sand, and a real relationship is built from bricks and stone to survive the fire.
I also think it leads to the idea that traditional men and women are becoming more and more rare.
I consider myself highly traditional. I want a man to court me – like Victorian-style courtship. I am talking that his behavior speaks to me first, then our conversations, then his faith which coincides with his character, and then our bodies. It’s that order. This means he pays while he is trying to “woo” me and make me his exclusively. He puts himself in my proximity, eventually acts, takes me on dates, and prolongs sex until we both agree. It’s consensual in every aspect of that word. He doesn’t have to convince me of my desire for him because he’s created the foundation to build that desire into something meaningful.
His character also severely matters.
He can do all those things and still not be respected by his peers or have a “Rake” reputation. Nobody wants to bring a “Rake” home to their father on Christmas. His character will usually be evident by his generosity as well. Self-control and generosity are often character traits that traditional men exhibit without speaking about it. They don’t wave around a flag saying who they are because their actions speak for them. They open doors, they walk on the outside while on a sidewalk, they foot the bills, they work hard, and they get things done.
But as Derby illustrated – he called himself traditional – the term wasn’t how I would define it. Does that mean his term was wrong? No. It means the difference in our definitions ended up being a dealbreaker.
That’s why Derby made it to Entry 2. It wasn’t just his antics or his behavior, but overall. I learned sleeping over meant one thing to me and another to him. I wanted to talk more and spend time together. He felt invited into sex. I learned that equal pay was important early on to him, where not paying got me coined as “princess”.
It wasn’t intentional on either end but a misunderstanding of traditional in real life.
Do we even believe in traditional courtship anymore?
I don’t know that society really honors courtship. If a relationship is slower to evolve, it’s deemed something to throw away, usually because it’s not meeting our needs quickly enough.
For me, that was the ultimate reason I ended it with Derby. Yes, the lack of sexual self-control, the compliments, and the argument over coffee and equal pay annoyed me. But I ended it because our views on what traditional meant were vastly different when acted out in a relationship.
I also have children. I do not have time to teach a man self-control or to respect my boundaries. I believe the best relationships are when people show up as they actually are at the beginning. It creates a revelation of whether the relationship can be birthed or simply die off without much intervention.
While Derby did create opportunities and really liked me, he wasn’t willing to respect my boundaries in really any area of my life. He desperately wanted a relationship – in fact, he told me he was ready for one and would wait. But he wasn’t actually wanting to take the steps to get there – dates, comfort, richness of conversation, all of that. He wanted to fast-forward to the parts he would get to enjoy without taking the time to build the relationship from bricks.
Sand relationships never work out. They just don’t.
Our eyes and our roaming of what we want end up destroying the very things we want to cultivate. That’s the final dating takeaway.
“Death and destruction are never satisfied, and neither are human eyes.” Proverbs 27:20
So why did I truly end it with Derby, and what did this mean for my dating outlook?
Derby did violate many of my boundaries even after being explicitly told. He definitely made me vastly more angry than England ever did. I felt that even though he was younger than me, he should have known better. But he also would engage with why I was upset even if he didn’t agree. He stepped into the conversation to have it versus retreating even when he was uncomfortable.
However, the friend who was doing the group text, he commented on a date how “he took all the girls his friend wanted to date” usually. Something about not just the competitive nature of what he said but how casually he said it made me feel uncomfortable. I wasn’t a trophy to be won or a prize between men. While some women love that, I had met his group of friends. I thought he was trying to defend his actions more than actually get to know me well.
Derby wasn’t a man who, in the end, honored me. He wanted the experience of me instead of who I actually was as a person. He wanted – in my mind – to consume me.
What led me to that potentially harsh conclusion?
He told me he loved the fact that I was a writer and wanted to be a fan… then after he stayed over on the first date and I gave him a book, he forgot it on my end table. In the few weeks we were “talking”, he never purchased my book at all.
He surely wanted me – my writing, my beauty, the cover of my book. But wasn’t curious enough to open the pages.
And that is where I had to retire his horse.