In three weeks I am turning 30 years old. This is apparently a big deal, or so says everyone around me, and I am feeling a lot of pressure to celebrate it as such. But for some reason, I can’t really get worked up about it—either in a positive or negative way—and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

As many times as I’ve tried to recall the evening, I don’t remember the first time I met Marc*, although he seems to remember it well. He claims we met in a hot tub at a party that my then-boyfriend was throwing. Apparently, he thought I was “hot,” but I only had eyes for my BF Rick*, who was a friend of Marc’s. That was six years ago.

Marc and I saw each other again many times over the years. He was a peripheral part of my circle of friends—one of those people that pop up in your world every once in a while. The first time I actually do remember meeting Marc was at a get-together at a downtown NYC bar. It was a few months after the hot tub night. Rick and I were still madly in love. Marc showed up at the bar alone. I was wearing a short skirt – it was a humid summer night.

On yesterday’s episode of “The Tyra Show,” Tyra spoke with a married couple who were barely having sex because the woman no longer felt attracted to her husband. She said she wasn’t attracted to him since he put on weight and admitted that when they did have sex, all she could think about was getting it over with. The audience seemed to be expecting a big ol’ whale when her husband walked out on stage, but the guy was actually pretty average looking. As a result, the experts on the panel concluded that there must be other issues in their marriage, if the wife was that repulsed physically, and the audience agreed. So do I.

I recently met David through my blog. He was charming, witty and funny. After a bit of friendly Twirting (flirting via Twitter, the equivalent of computer footsie), he said he thought I was pretty funny too and even admitted to being a bit intimidated when I told him how strong my physical disability, Freeman-Sheldon Syndrome, had made my arms. This bone and muscular disorder has resulted in more than 26 surgeries to correct joint contractures, scoliosis and to straighten my leg muscles. You’d be amazed how strong my arms could get just from using a walker for 20+ years. They’re like giant muscles of steel, only smaller and dotted with cute freckles.

Well, this was a first, so feeling a bit bold, I asked him to guest-post from the male perspective on a question that has nagged me since my days in high school when I’d look at other girls and how the guys easily flocked to them. The question: Why are guys so reluctant to date – at the very least, approach – a woman with a disability? 

If you thought your friend was about to make a mistake—say, buy a computer that gets a ton of viruses or stay in a really dodgy hostel in Rome—you’d try to convince them to do something different, right? Well, I feel a little guilty because I have a friend who might be making a mistake by getting married this summer and I tried to talk him out of it.

My plane landed after midnight last night. I could use about six more hours of sleep, and I’m not sure where, exactly, I stashed my hairbrush or my deodorant. Maybe I took a bath two days ago, but I honestly don’t remember. In any case, I haven’t shaved my legs and armpits for a week and my werewolf-ian brows need a good, thorough tweezing. But no matter! I’ve got on my leopard-print leggings and a hot pink t-shirt to, uh, deflect attention from all that. 

I wouldn’t go into the office looking like this. Hell, I wouldn’t leave my apartment looking like this. So why is my boyfriend—the person I regularly depend on for oral sex and foot rubs—sitting just 10 feet away from me? Because I have gotten comfortable in our relationship. Perhaps too comfortable.

Aren’t we single ladies always on the quest to find the perfect man? Just yesterday, I was on that quest. And then I met him. For the sake of this post, let’s call this perfect man John. John is smart, nice, good-looking, Jewish (which matters a lot to my mother), and would spoil me rotten as my boyfriend. He’s not just your average amount of smart; he’s employed at a top web company (one you use on a regular basis) and is destined to be more successful than anyone I know.

He’s not just your average amount of nice; he has mastered chivalry to a T and is so caring that it makes my judgmental soul squirm. And he’s also not just sort of good-looking. Rather, every time one of my friends meets him, their first response is: “Wow, John’s hot.” I can totally tell they’re eying him for themselves. Oh, and did I mention that John’s after me like Tyra on the search for “America’s Next Top Model”?

I should be in heaven, right? But I’m not. Because as perfect as he is, John just doesn’t make me want to rip my clothes off. And I don’t know why.

Because I’ve been single for so long, my married friends often like to give me unsolicited advice. “I know what your problem is!” Elinor had a sudden revelation as her newborn baby suckled at her breast. Now that she is a wife to a man and a mother to a boy, her new favorite thing is to live vicariously through my love life. But what seems titillating to her is just plain old depressing to me.

“What is it?” I replied.

“You need to start dating men.”

Two weeks ago, my gentle and loving boyfriend of three months held me down and forced me to have sex with him against my will, and then told me I had asked for it. And technically, he was right.

Jacob and I had only been dating about a month and a half when I intimated that I had a rape fantasy. Over the years, I’d had my share of experience with role-playing and rough sex. I vividly recall a male friend of mine in college telling me that I had a distinct air of “sexual prey” about me, and me thinking that this was a huge compliment. Being dominated and playing the innocent who secretly wasn’t had been my currency and had guided the sexual dynamic I forged with partners for the last 10 years. But only for the last few months had I allowed myself to entertain what I considered to be the final frontier— a simulated rape.

I committed one of the cardinal sins of dating recently. I somehow found myself in a heated conversation about the B word. As in BABIES. With someone I’ve been seeing for two weeks. I know. Upon realizing the foolishness of this move, I considered putting my suicide windows to use. But hear me out.

Men of the world, in case you missed the memo detailing all of the things you should understand about women, let me give you a refresher on item # 503: Food is just as important, if not more important, to [most of] us as love – oh, and we often use one as a substitute for the other.  It is just as important to me that we are compatible at the dinner table as we are in the bedroom. At the end of the day, I’m just looking for someone to eat with. If you want to date me, there will always be someone else on my mind. If you want to work your way into my heart, accept my other lover – food. Acknowledge me, acknowledge my food allergies. Love me, love my delicate palette. Understand me, understand that I eat olives with every meal. Really want to find out what makes me tick? Share a meal with me.

I’ve had Terrible Girlfriend Syndrome (TGFS) for years. It all started with Matt Noonan in 6th grade. He was the new boy and all the girls wanted him. But I got him. Clearly, we were going to fall in love. We were going to hang out on the playground and go with a bunch of other snot-nosed 6th graders to PG-13 movies and the whole thing was going to be glorious.

Or so I thought. Instead, I showed up at school on the Monday after our epic decision to “go out”— his friend called my friend to ask if I liked Matt, mine wrangled the same info from the friend, etc.—and one of those bitchy 8th grade girls who was similarly smitten with Matt asked me if we were “together.” Images of the two of us skipping around hand-in-hand flashed through my head, and I quickly blurted out, “God no!”

Confused? Me too.

One of the first times I went on a date with a girl, she asked me, “Are you bi or gay?”

“Well, I’m still figuring that out,” I told her.

Her response was: “I knew you were too good to be true.” I then fell all over myself in an effort to explain to her that, although I was unsure about how to define my sexuality, I was definitely into girls, more so than I’m into guys. I am not and have never been bi-curious, bi for attention or bi only when men are around. Since then, I’ve figured out that I’m solely into girls. So I guess I wasn’t too good to be true, huh?

But, alas, in parts of the gay community, being bi or being a lesbian who has hooked up with guys in the past is like having horns or an incurable disease.

The man I was engaged to was my first real adult love. It was mutual, it was committed, and it was mature. But there were other “loves.” Adam, the long-haired hippie in 8th grade, who held my hand once and played the acoustic guitar; Rob, the twenty-something video store employee, whom I stalked for the entire summer before I turned 15; Jesse who gave me emotional support when my parents divorced the summer after freshman year of college; and lastly, Aidan*, a fellow staff member at my college newspaper whom I fell for—HARD—my senior year.

As a redhead, I’ve often been told I resemble, well, anyone else who also happens to have red — or even reddish — hair. When I had a pixie cut, people told me all the time I looked like a young Mia Farrow from “Rosemary’s Baby,” and before that, when my hair was longer, I always got compared to Lauren Ambrose from “Six Feet Under.” About two years ago people started telling me I looked like a character on a new series called “Mad Men.” I’d never seen the show, but a friend soon emailed me a picture of Joan Holloway and wrote “Your doppelganger!” in the subject line. I had to admit — we did kind of look a little alike.

It’s one thing to switch on the TV for “Mad Men” each week, vicariously sip whiskey and smoke stogies with Don Draper and Co., and experience (or re-experience) life in the 1960s. I, like most other women in America, jumped at the chance to give my look a makeover complete with red lips, the pencil skirts, the swooping coifs, and the tight cardigans that give Joan, Betty, and Peggy their sexy, vintage sizzle. Hell, I even found myself harboring the urge to tie on a frilly apron and bake something wholesome for my husband. It’s fun, escapist even, to dabble in outdated social stereotypes and play the victim to those womanizing ways that dominated the “Mad Men” era. We’re safe in the knowledge that times have changed, and we can go back to being empowered, successful, respected alpha-females whenever we feel like it. Or so I thought.

There’s no question that I find Don Draper sexy. If I lived in “Mad Men” land for a day, I would totally screw him on his Sterling-Cooper purchased desk. In real life? Not so much. At least not anymore.

I could have just said “I don’t know” or deflected the question. I didn’t have to say anything. But when my boyfriend’s parents asked me over a family dinner the other night what I might want write a book about, I answered honestly: my struggles with depression.

Surprised, I think, neither parent said anything in response, which made me feel nervously awkward. But then another relative chimed in with her own depression story. She said when she started taking anti-depressants, she would sleep all day, so I shared that Lexapro used to make me conk out, too. Then the relative kept on talking, and pretty soon, the dinner convo had veered onto other topics entirely.

I’m not ashamed that sometimes I feel unbelievably sad and my life is temporarily derailed. My extended family knows about it, my roommate knows about it, even my boss knows about it. But I woke up the next morning and asked myself, “Did I really just tell my boyfriend’s parents that?”

It’s undeniable that marriage and relationships in general look nothing like they did 40 years ago. What’s happened? Women’s lib, skyrocketing divorce rates, the death of the nuclear family—and that’s just for starters. The whole game has changed. Sometimes I think that each generation exhibits a reactionary trend to their predecessors. I am part of the “divorced parents” era. Although my parents are still married, about 60 percent of all people I meet my age come from broken homes. While this phenomenon didn’t necessarily make us “anti-marriage,” it has certainly made us “marriage cautious” or “marriage disillusioned.” As a modern woman I know the statistics – if I ever do tie the knot, I know it ain’t gonna be all sunshine and roses. And that’s why I plan to be as sure as I can possibly, possibly be. Before I exchange any vows, I’ve made a vow to myself: I MUST live with someone before I marry them.  I’m not alone in this thinking. About 70 percent of couples are cohabitating before marriage these days.

Yesterday, two of the other lady blogs wrestled over the politics of asking victims of domestic violence why they stayed with their abusers. Are you a bad feminist if you ask someone—say, someone like me—why she stayed with the guy who beat the crap out of her, nearly murdered her, and raped her on a regular basis?