single girl pet peeve

from deep in the drafts folder

At the risk of sounding like I've been reading too much Chick Lit, I have to vent this--it's been bothering me for months now.

If I bring a date home, here are the photos they'll see: me, my parents, my grandparents, my friend Princess, Snufkina laughing with her hands over her mouth, and some guy's hands holding two mouse lemurs. But that's it. While I have some decent shots of old boyfriends, or of myself with old boyfriends, those photos are all in albums, or shoeboxes, or cleverly hidden in an envelope labelled "nudes" in inch-high black letters.

The point is, a man sleeping in my bed is not going to wake up to find himself staring into another man's eyes watching from the nightstand. You feel me? Who needs the aggravation? Yet I seem to be getting the aggravation myself a lot; over the past couple years, I've slept with men who had anywhere from one to a dozen photographs of other lovers, past or present, in various stages of dress or undress, prominently displayed in the bedroom. What's up with that? Do guys not understand how profoundly uncomfortable that can make a girl?

I think about all the nights and mornings I've spent wandering around strange bedrooms while the gentleman has been off brushing his teeth or whatever. I look at the photos, try to figure out when they were taken, whether the woman is a friend or sister or girlfriend or ex-wife or what. What really gets me are the four-photo strips you get in those booths at the mall. Sometimes those can break my heart.

Word to the wise.