Pheromoan.

Back in my early twenties, before Brad had entered the picture and when all I really wanted to do was a) drink copious amounts of brown liquor and b) make out with everything in pants, a friend and I were discussing the challenges of the New York dating scene.

“You know,” she said, “it's not even that I can't make a relationship work – it's that I can't freaking meet anyone. In bars, on the street, in the subway... it's like no matter what I do nobody ever even tries to talk to me. You know what I mean?”

“Um,” I said.

Because while I definitely had my share of dating disasters – from bad first dates to terrible relationships to the time that I accidentally menstruated on an architect – the “meeting people” part was never really a problem. Neighborhood boys would chat me up while we waited in line for hangover bagels; friends of friends would ask for my number at parties; men in suits would drop business cards into my purse with a wink, mouthing, “Call me!”. I'd step on the train at 14th Street, and get off at Houston having traded digits with the guy sharing my subway pole. And once, in a moment which pretty much made my entire decade, a Hugh Jackman look-alike strode up to my table at a Thai restaurant, grinned, and actually dropped a note with his number on it next to my water glass.

And lest anyone think I'm using this as a precursor to claiming that I am, in fact, the hottest woman in New York (because really, at best, I might rank as “kinda cute”), my friend quickly put her finger on the truth of the matter.

“Well,” she said, “you're very... approachable.”

Which is a nicer way of saying that when I am out in public, I ooze a sort of friendly chemical-based Eau de Slut, which creeps up behind the backs of male strangers and taps them on the shoulder and shouts, in an oozy-chemical sort of way, “Hey, you see that girl over there? If you talk to her, she'll totally have sex with you!”

As a single person, oozing Eau de Slut had obvious and myriad benefits.
As a married person, it... doesn't.
And I can't stop oozing.

Not that this is happening all the time, okay, because it isn't, and I'm also not pretending that I don't sometimes like the attention, because... duh.

But too often, added to the fact that I rarely interact with other people anymore, and also the fact that my flirt-detecting skills are totally atrophied from disuse (“Wait a minute... is this guy talking to me, or is he TALKING to me?”), the result of any male approach is an increasingly awkward conversation that ends with me realizing too late that, oh fuck, we are TALKING, at which point I frantically attempt to defuse the entire situation by suddenly shouting, mid-conversation: “By the way! In case you are hitting on me, I am married!”

I also sometimes hold up my left hand, rings out, as supporting evidence, which is so obnoxious that I kind of can't believe nobody has torn my arm off in retaliation.

I need a better method, here.

I mean, apart turning to my friends at random intervals throughout the night and saying, “Hey, do I look like I want to have sex with you? No? Okay.”

Because I am already doing that.