Surviving the man in your life.

You want sex. You want pleasure. You want to come screaming your brains out. When you come (if you’ll pardon the pun) to examine it, your options are fairly limited.

You could use a vibrator - most of us do at one time or another.

This isn’t a bad option. A jackrabbit is always erect, needs no special treatment, will never ask for a blow job and doesn’t give a damn how much your love of chocolate is making your backside spread. It stores neatly away when you don’t want to be bothered with it, doesn’t expect you to feed it or do its laundry. It never hogs the bedcovers. It never sticks its head in the fridge and yells out “Honey! Do I have any beer left?”

You could decide to pursue the idea of another woman. There are lots of advantages to this one. A woman understands why you need five pairs of black shoes, knows what a clitoris is and where to find it, doesn’t lift the seat on the toilet and never leaves wet towels on the floor. Given that another woman in your life means the chores actually would be divided fifty/fifty it is surprising this option isn’t taken up more frequently.

Unfortunately, for some of us, only a man will do. This is not as strange as you may think...look at the increasing popularity of BDSM. Having a man about the house is pretty much the same thing. The pain is there but we keep going hoping to get to the reward.

You can opt for the casual approach, working your way through a variety of men who are never allowed to stick around for more than a week or two. This certainly means you won’t have to move your clothes, crushing them into one side of the closet so he can have space to hang his clothes if he ever decides to pick them up off the floor. However you have to be prepared to have your razor borrowed on Monday mornings, and it has to be admitted in the throes of passion it can be damn hard to keep track of the name you should be screaming this week.

There is the problem of availability. A good lover is in demand. If you are going to go this way, beware the man who is ready, willing and eager to come on over any time day or night. Chances are you’re looking at someone who has been rejected by many other women, probably because he thinks being a World of Warcraft level seventy Nightelf Druid makes him irresistible. If you are in fact a virtual person this isn’t bad; not so good if you are a flesh and blood woman who wants foreplay that is not on line.

So, this leaves us with the live-in man. The partner. The love of your life. If you have decided, for reasons that continue to defy the rational, to let a man move into your life, you are going to need a detailed survival guide. A list of instructions and tips to allow you to rise above the temptation to scream every time he picks up the remote and just flick, flick, flicks from channel to channel; to wait patiently for the game to end so he remembers you exist; to explain why he cannot go more than ten minutes without checking that his equipment is all there and in working order; to tell you why he thinks farting under the sheets is hilarious.

I have really bad news. There are no instructions. There is no list. Nothing I can say or do will get you any closer to understanding the alien you have invited into your life. The only consolation is this. God made women incredibly strong ...Because we need to be.