Vol. 1, Post #33 A whole drawer?!?!

Making space, again. My ongoing sex tips for girls* (*girls who are holding on to mid-life by a thread). A modern dating odyssey for Young Olds, AKA, people with readers.

Before we dive in to what’s happening in my bedroom, let me say MAZEL TOV to the FOUR different readers who reached out last week after reading my post about masturbation, new sex toy tech, and orgasm after 50 — each of you took the time to tell me that you went shopping for yourselves after reading. Hooray for you! I also realized that posting on September 11th (I post on Wednesdays and try not to deviate for many reasons) was most likely a dumb move, given that attention was (properly) elsewhere, including on the aftermath of the ass-whooping, I mean, the presidential debate. For that reason, link above if you want to go back and peruse…

Now! Let’s get down to business…I’m standing in my bedroom, moving around piles of black T-shirts. Why, you ask?

Apropos of nothing else, I need to be practical. The Boyfriend is spending 2-3 nights here on most weeks and when he’s not here, it makes sense that his sweats, etc., have a place in which he can stash them. I have the drawer space. The bedroom furniture that was purchased towards the tail end of my first marriage gives me ample space for my foldables, lingerie, bathing suits, blah blah — and in fact, as those of you Dear Readers who also have gone through the shift from Coupled Up to Singledom, one of the first things that you can do to “reclaim” your bedroom after a split is to reorganize and spread out.

Ah, the joy in deciding what to do with all of this newly avail drawer space — for those who found no silver lining happiness in this whatsoever, please know that I am not minimizing your pain. Breakups are hard no matter if you are the Leaver or the Leavee; what I’m suggesting is that as part of moving on, getting all Queen (or King) Of Your Castle can be enjoyable and healing.

Around these here parts, the two ample bureaus have held my stuff and my stuff alone since 2022 when I broke with B., although prior to that, since we also cohabitated in Astoria, he only occupied a few drawers in my upstate house, and about a quarter of my wall of closets.

In the two-plus years that have unfolded after that, I’ve luxuriated in all the space in my bedroom. That means not one, but two drawers devoted to everyday lingerie as well as “these go to 11” lingerie, FOUR drawers devoted to my uniform of black T-shirts (divided by necklines, by sleeve length, oh my god Abbe, you are a maniac), a drawer for stretched out workout tees and running tights that I should throw away but pull on again and again with a groan when I go to the gym, bathing suits (more groaning of a different nature). You get the idea.

And since I’m guilty of piling my own clothes on the upholstered chair in my bedroom, The BF has just gone along with that habit, until I told him last week, “I’m clearing out a drawer for you.”

There is something adorable about that first drawer gifting, isn’t there? It’s a rite of passage, another “savor the possibilities” moment that comes in established dating when it’s sort of a given that you’ll end up under the same covers on a regular basis. Um, it also sort of scares me a tiny bit, but more on that at the end of this.

As a Young Old in this chapter, the Clearing Out Of The Drawer has come after the arrival of The BF’s contact lenses and reading glasses, which appeared about a week or so ago — it was only during my vacation in Provincetown that I learned that he even wore contacts! He was sleeping in them here, mentioned that over brunch with friends at the beach, and I looked at him and incredulously asked, “Whaaaaaaaa?” So upon return, he stashed extras in my bathroom.*

*The BF is the son of a dentist, and as such, has access to these sensational Swedish toothbrushes by the busload. Here is my sink:

As I moved around stuff from drawer to drawer in my bedroom, I thought about the various relationships I’ve had as an adult and how/when this moment occurred in each one.

With my ex-husband, our office romance was somewhat under the radar for the first few months, but this was during the 1990s commuting-in-sneakers-and-changing-into-pumps-in-the-office days so carrying a larger tote on the regular never gave anyone an occasion to bat an eye and as we had been inseparable pals for a few months prior to falling for each other, stashing stuff at each other’s place happened quickly. Post-divorce, I was almost immediately in residence in my Woodstock house, which had been a former vacation home. My stuff was already there and now I needed to make room for my NYC life to also migrate upstate, plus, it was a year into my next relationship with my then-girlfriend/now-ex-wife, as she was also moving in, so that was a bigger deal. For one thing, she was, as you might expect since she’s my ex-wife, another woman, and while she had an entirely different style of dressing, she needed almost as much space as I did. Divvy things up we did — one bureau for her, one for me. One closet for her, one for me. We were together for almost a decade although for some of it, she had moved out into her own home, partially emptying some of the drawers that had been hers, yet not entirely releasing them to me to refill with my stuff. Fraught, like much of the later years of our relationship, to be honest.

Partner S. arrived on the scene two years after my ex-wife and I had split. Prior to S., I had been dating a man in the city (a doctor — a Jewish specialty cardiologist who lived on the Upper East Side — had my parents been alive, this might have killed them) and I had both schlepped a weekly bag as well as been given a closet in his apartment for the six months or so that we dated — it was the kind of connection that moved fast, too fast. That ended somewhat abruptly when he told me that our age difference (he was markedly older) was fucking with his head; he was sure I would leave him for a younger man, so he did the leaving first (ironically, all of my partners since have been younger than me). On the day that the doctor dropped this bomb, I gathered ALLLLLL of my stuff and tearily hopped a cab to my pal Debbie’s hotel room. Debbie had been in the city for a spa/esthetician conference (Glo Woodstock Day Spa is TOP NOTCH, for any of you who visit the Hudson Valley!) and I dumped my overflowing bags on her hotel room floor, sobbing, she taking such loving care of me until we both headed back home. So when I met S., and we started dating, I took my damn time before I left anything more than a toothbrush in his Westchester apartment. After about a year and a half of back and forth, S. moved to Woodstock just as I was downsizing to a smaller house. He lived small, economically, no-nonsense, so even though our bedroom was less spacious than the one in my previous house, I had plenty of room for all my girly shit and he was happy with the space and set up afforded him.

S. was gone by the time COVID hit, my bedroom governed by me for the first time since living in this house, and as sketched out above, you already know how B. and I did with two homes. Over the last three years, I saw my most recent partner on his turf, and while I had the prerequisite bathroom stuff at his place, I oddly left very little else in my wake when I’d leave at the end of a visit (his ex and he had not formally divided up the stuff in their home, although she long lived elsewhere, and I didn’t feel entirely welcome to spread out. Fuck that shit, by the way.)

It’s still “getting to know ya” times here with my new BF. We met three months ago here in Kingston, NY — as I incredulously reported at the very end of this post) — and as such, it’s been easy to see each other quite a bit and, for that matter, zip back and forth between our homes. We default to my house for a bunch of reasons, primarily because I have a dog, and it does not feel too early to clear out a drawer for him. It was my idea, after all.

And, there’s this…

All of the stereotypes about meeting pivotal people, about KNOWING when you’ve met a pivotal person and moving towards that person with a slightly sped up pace as you age are, like most stereotypes, true. It felt very, very correct when I met my now-boyfriend; our time together has been sort of effortless. We grow closer each week and I don’t think that either of us have put up any barriers to that closeness. If anything, we seem to welcome each other into our various circles with both a sense of wonder (very sweet at any age but especially sweet at this age), and maybe some pride (I love it when I run into a mutual acquaintance who already knows that I’m dating The BF because, duh, he immediately told them when he saw them last).

You know how you read in those NYTimes Wedding section sentences like, “The couple met at the Bronx Zoo while each babysitting their grandchildren. Six months later, both of them widowed for a few years, they knew they wanted to get married”? NO WE ARE NOT GETTING MARRIED. But I have a feeling that in the same strangely fortuitous manner in which we met, in a local restaurant with zero fanfare beyond a glance in each other’s direction, we somehow seem to have forged an important connection. We’ve met each other’s families and the thought of buying concert tickets six months out is not remotely daunting. Today (it’s September 15th as I write this, a few days ahead of my usual Wednesday pub date), I bought him a present for his late October birthday.

So basically, it’s time for him to have a drawer.

I mentioned this to my therapist last week without rolling my eyes as the sentence came out of my mouth. I sometimes do a little eye-rolling when I’m telling others about this new relationship — NOT eye-rolling at the relationship itself, which is wonderful, but just the idea of OK, here we go…to a place I’ve been before, and for that matter, a place he’s been before as well (the eye-rolling is usually followed up with me telling myself to not be such a cunt**.) And then I also remind myself that my eye-rolling is a defense mechanism that I’ve put in place to protect myself, and currently, I don’t need protection. From this, from The BF, or the gift of an Empty Drawer.

**Ahem

Up above, I wrote that some of this scares me a tiny bit. I’m looking at those words that I just typed here — scares me a bit. Ladies, how many times have we bashed someone for saying that something in a relationship scares them? Granted, sometimes it IS bullshit, sometimes a pile so high it could fill a haunted house of Are You Fucking Serious? This is not like that. I think that what I’m feeling is some trepidation, or maybe some acknowledgement, that I’ve met someone to whom I’m opening myself in a way that seems meaningful. Like a rose. Like a drawer.