One of the Girls
It is not just soccer that he is passionate about. His favorite NFL team is the Chargers. His favorite college football teams are the University of Kentucky and the University of Manitoba. Chelsea Carey is his favorite female curler and John Shuster is his favorite male curler. For a professional basketball team, he can not pick a favorite between Golden State, the Raptors, and San Antonio Spurs. He is not really into teams for basketball as he prefers to cheer for individual players. He managed the Bisons Basketball Team for 5 years. I think I have heard about every minute. At least three times.
Golf. Baseball. Rugby. Hockey. Boxing. Swimming. Skiing. Cycling. There is probably no sport that he does not like, and does not know trivia about. Try to stump him. Ask him any trivia question in any sport. I guarantee you will not ask a second question. He has been to known to go off for a long time giving you more information than you would ever want to know.
He has an interesting story about Phil Jackson, who was the Coach of the Chicago Bulls back in the 90s. When the team went on a West Coast road trip, he would assign a book to each of the players and have each of the players submit a book report by the end of the road trip. He would chose the book matched to the player who he thought needed to learn a life lesson. On the first session back, the book reports were read and discussed. He did this so that the players wouldn't have time to be distracted by other things. It must have worked. The Bulls won 6 titles between 91-98. Some extraordinary players on the team were Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippen, Steve Kerr, Dennis Rodman, Jim Paxton, Stacey King, and Canadian Bill Wennington. He also knows which book was assigned to each player and took it upon himself to read each of the books. Yes, I found that story interesting the first time I heard it. Now, I can tell it better than him.
Anyway, so you get the idea. He loves sports.
Despite this, what he really wanted was to be one of the girls. He always thought women think differently than men and he wanted to be able to communicate better with women. When I first got involved with him, he had a subscription to Cosmopolitan magazine. He explained he would read it to get an idea of how women thought.
That was a mistake. Cosmopolitan magazine doesn't give any insight to how a woman thinks. It is insight into how men wish women thought. In reality, we don't spend hours obsessing over our hidden G spot. We are actually too busy living our lives. We are the ones balancing career, kids, house, and the rest of our lives. When we do have time to get together with friends, our sex life may come up but we also spend the time talking about our lives and not sharing our best orgasm stories. We don't fantasize about the size of a penis, we fantasize about someone who will do all the house cleaning and bring us our morning coffee in bed as we are waking up.
Now that he is in his 50s, he is finally one of the girls. He is in a group of women and he has learned a lot about communicating with women. It turns out some women like sports trivia. It turns out we talk about our lives and our goals. We don't see any value in pretending to be something we are not because that is a lot of work. We are authentic. Masks don't get us too far. We also will support each other. Every Monday, I start a diet and my group of girls support me every Monday.
He still loves sports but he has also gained so much happiness from now understanding how women think. Like men, only more uninhibited. We don't let someone get away with their BS. We call them out because we want each other to grow.
The circle of women is powerful. Just ask the Republicans how the last election worked out for them. The circle of women is also inclusive and we occasionally tolerate a male.
And, because I do make jokes at his expense, I feel that I am going to say this publicly. I love Andrew wholly and completely. Hopefully, this will get me coffee tomorrow morning as I am waking up.
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