Glass Half Full

As a rule I’m a fairly positive person, I try to look on the brightside and always see the good in people. I’ve always viewed this as a good thing (unsurprisingly) but found myself questioning this approach earlier this year.

I decided to dip my toe into the world of dating and found what I thought was a nice guy. This is where my glass half full attitude let me down, so determined was I to view him in a positive light that I ignored my gut. My gut told me fairly early on that something wasn’t right but I kept silencing her with my “he’s a nice guy, it’s all fine, you’re just out of practice with how this all works.” Of course my gut turned out to be right, he wasn’t such a nice guy after all.

When everything came to light, although I was angry at him, my overwhelming annoyance was at myself. My glass half full attitude had made me ignore my instincts. After a couple of days of berating myself I put it to bed, promising myself that in future I would listen to my gut and not let my need to look on the brightside warp reality. It seemed like a sensible approach but in practice not so much.

I didn’t think I was going to have to worry about it for a while, I wasn’t planning on returning to dating sites any time soon but then something unexpected happened.

One DM led to another and suddenly there’s a new man in my life and while this is definitely a wonderful thing it quickly highlighted some flaws in my previous plan. Without my positive outlook I was left feeling fairly cynical, fearful of letting someone in to just have the rug pulled from under me; but this is incredibly unhelpful when you are trying to get to know someone and massively unfair on them.

So I’ve scrapped the old plan and instead am going for what is always the best option, honesty. I explained to him what had happened, why I initially seemed so guarded and of course, because he’s a goodun, he got it; he reassured me and I believe him. And not because I’m just putting on positivity goggles but because I’m listening to my gut, and she is giving me only happy vibes.

I can’t and won’t let one bad experience turn me into a negative grump, that isn’t me and I have to be true to who I really am. I am a positive person with something to be happy about and that is a wonderful thing.

50 Shades of Positivity

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last couple of months you will have no doubt heard about the 50 Shades trilogy and as seems to be the pattern, you will have heard one of two things. Either, you will have had women gushing about how they couldn’t put the books down and they have told all their friends and they are now all at different stages through the books etc or you will have heard the opposite camp telling you they are sick of hearing about these bloody books, that are badly written, badly edited and completely unrealistic.

So where do I sit when it comes to the 50 Shades divide? As much as I agree with many of the points made by the anti 50 shades brigade I can’t fully get on board, because I can see too many positive possibilities coming from these books and here are just a few of them.

The writing style of this book is not fantastic but by bringing erotica to the mainstream instead of it being a tiny section hidden away on high shelves in bookshops, it will give better opportunities for some of the fantastic writers of erotica. People are finishing the 50 Shades Trilogy and wondering what else there is out there that isn’t some trashy book that has no story line and is just about the graphic details of the sex the characters are having. On Twitter alone I can think of plenty of writers whose capabilities, given the opportunity, will completely outshine E.L.James.

Early on in the trilogy we are introduced to the world of Dom/sub relationships. OK it probably isn’t done as most people in the Dom/sub community would like, I have heard the grumbles about the amount of alcohol consumed etc. However for a lot of the people reading this book I think they have found themselves discovering an interest in an area they didn’t know existed and for those that perhaps already felt drawn to the idea, it may well help them gain the confidence to voice their interest. There are many people in the world that would view these kinds of relationships as taboo but 50 Shades has made it more acceptable. Surely anything that allows people to learn about their sexual desires can’t be all bad can it?

Still slightly on the theme above, I have experienced personally, that women are finding a new sexual freedom having read these books. Women who didn’t like to talk about sex are suddenly opening up, talking about bits mentioned in the books that they would like to try or ideas that have developed from reading the books. More sex for everyone? I don’t think anyone will be complaining about that.

At this point I really could go on and on but I won’t I’ll just say something about the claims that this book is unrealistic, yeah it is unrealistic. A pretty, 21 year old virgin, lacking in confidence falls under the spell of a handsome millionaire battling demons from his past and finding release in his red room of pain. Can’t say it’s ever happened to anyone I know but then again I also don’t know anyone who owns a mansion and ended up shagging the gardener in his cabin, nor for that matter have I ever known anyone who has fallen in love with a vampire and had his baby. There is a reason for this, its fiction! We read books to escape into a world unlike our own where things happen, that we may not ever imagine.