Communication

I’m a man when it comes to dating women. No, that doesn’t mean I wear the tie, spike a Mohawk or drive a truck the size of a small house. Let me explain.

My oldest sister Eve swore up and down after having three babies that gender qualities were fixed at birth; that we’re all young “Adams” and “Eves” right out of the womb.

Offended, I told her in detail about my gender studies classes up at the University of Utah. I spat out how environment is the only cause for gender variants, our culture’s obsession with placing men and women in specific gender roles from birth: pink blanket for girls, blue blanket for boys. And our culture doing this while being blatantly oblivious to the one in 100 who are intersex and all of the trans people who were born in the wrong body. (I completely agreed with the trans people; they didn’t need the hormones except to enhance certain physical characteristics.)

But then there’s me.

When I came along in the late 70s, ultrasounds were heartbeats; the faster the beat the more likely to be Adam. My mom said I learned how to run before I could walk, so it makes sense my heart rate was faster for my gender. I kicked in the womb excessively and gave her bubbly indigestion, so she wasn’t surprised to hear the doctors say she’d have her first little boy.

She was surprised at first when she saw me, but then she got to know me.

My dad and I are on the same communication wavelength. Take this exchange:

I pointed to the TV and asked, “Remember him?”

“Yah, that movie.” He glanced at the television before turning back to his double computer screens.

“Good one,” I mumbled, before asking, “Did you get that done?”

“It’s online.”

“Please talk in English,” Mom said, throwing up her hands and thus dropping a few of her grading notebooks. “The two of you speak in riddles. It makes me insane.”

It was no secret, after all of this, why my mom spent a lot of time at my sister’s house a mile away. To comfort myself, I tended to look for women who hauntingly shared my mother’s qualities. They were attractive, outgoing and leaders. But unfortunately, their need for ‘control’ and constant ‘dialogue’ made me run out the door, back my car out at top speed and scream the Tom Petty song “Free Falling” at the top of my lungs. I looked exactly like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, only a little less gay.

It was not that I wanted to be a guy or felt I was one. Actually, I wanted to be Eve — not the Bible character, but my sister. I envied her with a passion. She was the peppy cheerleader who had boys (or girls) stalking her. She dated the quarterback and waved her arms around. I thought her biggest and only fear was falling in love with a boy named Adam.

Eve performed fancy flips and screamed cheers in a packed stadium. When I spoke in high school, teachers had to almost lick my ear to understand what I was saying. And I jumped because I didn’t want them or anybody touching me.

Even when I grew out of being painfully shy I still had trouble, especially in my dating life. With men it wasn’t so much an issue. I oddly picked men similar to my father and so the grunting and monosyllables I practiced with my dad came in handy. I even took on the feminine role because I expressed my feelings once in a crescent moon.

But with women it was a whole other story.

I wanted to do the mature, assertive thing. I wished I felt comfortable sharing my emotions right up front, but a part of me lived back in elementary school, where I swallowed my thoughts to the point that I didn’t even know what they were anymore. I debated over and over about whether to say this thought or the next one. Then by the time I realized what I wanted to say, it was either too late or I blew up like I had a disease of the tongue.

Every time the woman I dated said, “We need to talk,” I turned catatonic and felt painful pressure to open up. I couldn’t breathe and I slowly suffocated for days. I shivered under my covers — and all because she only wanted me to tell me I needed to start doing my own laundry.

Even though my therapist thinks I’m relatively normal now and ready for graduation, I have asked him to hook me up with speech classes. I figured I had to so I could one day have a relationship with a woman that lasted longer than six months. I’m not looking forward to a return of the gagging and spitting syllables thing, but at this point, I’m willing to try anything.