This one's for my female readers...

I was dancing (read: twisting) to the new Danity Kane song, Damaged, when I really stopped to listen to the lyrics.

"Damaged, damaged
Damaged, damaged
I thought that I should let you know
That my heart is
Damaged, damaged
So damaged (so damaged)
And you can blame the one before
So how you gonna fix it, fix it, fix it?"

Be it the dating experiences I've had in the past year or the accidental studying of the male species I've done since I've been single, I have learned a whole lot about the opposite sex. I've grown up. And I know that unsolicited advice is the junk mail of life, but I can't not write about this. Forgive me.

"I thought that I should let you know". There have been many moments in my life where I thought to myself, perhaps I should let him know that my last boyfriend ripped out my heart and stomped on it. I'm delicate. Ladies, don't let him know. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. If you're still single, it's apparent that you've been hurt. If he wants to know, he'll ask. I promise.

"My heart is damaged." Whose isn't?

"And you can blame the one before." They don't want to blame the one before. In fact, they don't want to know anything about the one before. Guys want a clean slate! Shouldn't we?

"So how you gonna fix it?" Call me regressive, call me an anti-feminist, call me whatever you want. But I don't think this is fair. Why do we expect the new guys we date to make up for whatever the last guy we dated did wrong?

I understand and appreciate that this song is supposed to speak to girls who are hurting. But if we don't change our thought processes soon, we're going to keep bitching to one another in cyber space about how we can't find a good man. Well, you know what? They're out there. We just have to stop expecting them to be so damn perfect. Why should they be? We're not.

This is me formally accepting that men are men and women are women. I may never understand why they are the way they are, but I fully intend to try. All I can do is keep giving them a shot and let go of the hope that they'll try to peel the band-aids off of my heart. Frankly, I'm beginning to realize that I'd rather do that myself.