My friend Mark and I have a long talk on the phone. He's comparing our careers. I'm kind of shocked to discover how he's seen my last few years, as I've begun dating.

He thinks my love life's not about love OR sex--it's mainly about making money! Mark just knows I'm a seducer who gleans private information from my dates, and then makes killings through insider trading. It's not just illegal but sadistic, since it often wrecks women's careers--I buy/sell enough to shift prices, spook investors, upset deals, and inevitably expose that my dates confided in me. Somehow, I avoid both jail and a reputation--I do this over & over, yet get away with it!

It doesn't bother Mark that I'm wrecking my dates' lives, because he has a grudge against women in general for being the seducers they are. If I'm outsmarting them in the seduction game, good for me. "It's a dog-eat-dog world."

Except... I'm doing none of this. I don't play the market at all. I bought one social fund years ago and live quietly off its earnings. I'm dating because I like to; I haven't exploited any of my dates. Why should I?

How on earth did Mark get the idea I'm living off... Insider Dating?

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• Mark the cynic, and insider trading: Mark IS more cynical than I am, but not THIS cynical. I suspect another source. I've been rereading one of my favorite books, Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw. In it, two of Avan's wealthy, respectable friends try to bribe him; they're so sure insider trading's just the way of the world that they're baffled, even a bit shocked, that Avan says no.
• Seduction for financial gain:
  1. In Tooth and Claw, Parson Frelt tries to ruin Selendra's reputation so she'll be have no other prospects and be forced to marry him (ugh). He uses sex to fish for money--her inheritance.
  2. In the Tooth & Claw scene that comes AFTER I put down the book & sleep, a scene I didn't read till this morning after the dream, a rich couple urges Avan to woo a beautiful but chilly heiress for her money & connections; they'll help, in exchange for inside information on a redevelopment project. But honest Avan says no. That poor heiress eventually ends up with (ugh, ugh, ugh) Parson Frelt! The dream clearly recalled the book better than my conscious does. This kind of unconscious photographic memory-feat is called cryptomnesia.
• Dating without commitment: My mom, who hated men, taught this was callous--in a man! But a woman shopping around was just sensible. A double standard! Tooth and Claw has such a situation. Avan carefully never asks if his lover Sebeth has others--he knows her history, how much she needs freedom. In the dream, I reject my mom's double standard at last, and claim the same freedom as Sebeth.
• I'm focusing on love/sex over the money/scam angle because a second bizarre dream the same night did so: Solnit's Dog Fixation.
• ACTION: face that like Sebeth, I need sexual freedom--but to get it, I must correct my mom's sexism--dissing men but NOT women for following their hearts. Or other organs.

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