Boys again. (braindump)

January 24, 2009 at 10:29 pm | Posted in dating, relationships | Leave a comment
Tags: , , , , ,

On November 30 I had my first date with a 22-year-old math/CS senior at Berkeley. Monday will be, I expect, the last time that I see him; he’ll be crossing the bridge into San Francisco from Oakland to meet me, for the first time in the almost two months we’ll be dating, so that he can drop off my space heater. Woo.

Not that we’ve actually had the breakup talk. No. While he likes to advertise himself as valuing communication very highly in a relationship, I’ve gathered that his ideal communication style involves his partner being able to read his mind so that he never actually has to say what he thinks or feels. (God I fucking love Scorpio men. What the hell was I thinking?) So the fact that I’ve indicated that I want my space heater back, while expressing no interest in actually spending time with him, seems to be enough “communication” for him about the status of our relationship.

The thing that has infuriated me about him — the same thing I initially found really compelling, naturally — has been his apparent apathy toward me. While there’s something to be said (by assholes, to aspiring assholes) for “playing it cool,” this, I think, has been extreme. And because I experienced my father as indifferent, emotionally unavailable, and unable to express any kind of love or affection toward me, of course I jumped at the chance to get romantically involved with someone who bore all these qualities. In fact, my first thought when we started dating was, “Oh, I bet he just has to warm up to me, and then he’ll totally drop his guard and be this great, affectionate, concerned, loving boyfriend.” Again… was I fucking high or something?

So anyway, the fact that he is letting things go at this — not expressing any disappointment, sadness, or really any emotion at all, not even confusion! — without any discussion is making me even crazier. While I can’t tell whether his indifference is genuine or feigned for the sake of protecting himself, his lack of reaction to this gesture of closure is making me think he really doesn’t give a shit at all. And that feels just plain crappy to me. I mean, I liked this guy a lot (or thought I did). What the hell is wrong with him? Why does he feel nothing for me whatsoever? And if he does feel nothing, why has he continued to string me along and see me for two months? What the fuck?

I don’t even think I want to know the answers at this point. I think it would be too devastating to find out for 100% certain that he really just didn’t care, and didn’t like me all that much, or whatever. I don’t need this kind of bullshit. The real question is why I let things get this far in the first place.

Happily, I seem to have found the answer in the form of a book called Getting the Love You Want, by the psychotherapist Harville Hendrix and his wife, Helen Marie Hunt. A little introduction to Hendrix’s theory of romantic relationships, and why we tend to fall for the people who are best equipped to hurt and disappoint us, is available online. I strongly recommend the book for anyone who has noticed their destructive relationship patterns or is in a particularly painful (but not abusive — that’s a whole other can of worms) committed relationship.

So that’s been distracting, but I look forward to having that ugliness out of my life in a couple of days. Meanwhile I am still dating Luke and Seth, and still questioning what it is I’m trying to get out of those relationships, and what’s reasonable to ask for and expect, given that I’m pretty much dead set on getting the fuck out of this city by the end of the summer.

MFA programs have already begun notifying admitted students, which has created a new kind of stress in my life, exacerbated by my helplessness in the process at this point. The best I can hope for is to find some healthy obsession to dive into for the next two months while I wait for programs to call (or not call). It would be nice if I could actually start writing again…

I know I’m unlovable

September 10, 2008 at 8:00 pm | Posted in relationships | 5 Comments
Tags: , , ,

My ex Jon, from this spring, told me tonight that the primary reason he’d ended things with me is that he’d met someone else. In fact, they’d met before we had ever officially started dating. I even remember him telling me about their first date. He was disturbingly ecstatic about it, considering he had already told me about a week prior that he was sure he wanted to start dating me when I moved to San Francisco. When he broke up with me, he told me it was because I was too much work: I didn’t immediately open up emotionally on our first date as an “official couple,” and the fact that I didn’t pick up a phone call after he stood me up for our second date was enough reason to consider me “melodramatic” and “difficult.” (I was driving when he called.) So tonight when he told me about his now-girlfriend and the fact that he’d fallen for her before he broke up with me, I told him it was pretty shitty for him to tell me the breakup was my fault instead of just letting me know he had feelings for someone else. His response was, “Well, all of those things were true. I just might not have had the nerve to tell you if it hadn’t been for Sara.”

So Awesome.

I just ripped my hand open while punching the living room couch and screaming until I was dizzy.

You know, these kinds of revelations are not the best thing for a girl who’s already PMSing. Beyond that, it seems to be a trend of some sort. Lately I just can’t seem to get enough harsh truth from my exes about why I am impossible (or, at best, unpleasant) to be in a relationship with:

  • I’m emotionally closed off.
  • I’m a drama queen.
  • I’m too anger-driven.
  • I have difficulty being up-front about what I want and need.
  • I compromise too much.
  • I’m not compassionate enough.
  • I can’t tolerate enough pain during sex.
  • My vindictive streak is frightening.
  • I’m myopic in my pain.
  • I get adversarial very quickly.
  • I don’t allow people to get to know me.

All right, I fucking get it. I just don’t know what the fuck to do about it.

Meanwhile, this past weekend I went on my first date since my breakup in July. (Sorry, not via CrazyBlindDate.com, just through regular ol’ OkCupid.) The guy was a lot of fun, and we’re seeing each other again this weekend. Caveat: he’s poly and has been with his primary partner for a decade and a half. Which means, of course, that whatever happens between us has no chance of turning into anything Serious (by my definition). This is fine, since with everything else going on, I can’t justify getting into a Big Relationship right now, and I’m feeling too fragile to really open up to anyone. Some of my friends may (with good reason) doubt my ability to get into a casual relationship with this dude. I’m open to the possibility that I won’t be able to, in which case I’ll just get trampled one more time. What’s the big deal? Suddenly this new information from Jon is making me feel like I’d be doing the world a favor by giving up on even pretending that I can be anyone’s girlfriend.

A general-ish update

September 6, 2008 at 12:58 am | Posted in reflections, relationships | Leave a comment
Tags: , , , , , , ,

I’ve been busy this week with writing assignments, classes, and my new job – all excellent and yummy things to be spending my time on. My blog has meanwhile become harder to post to because I’ve been getting caught up in page hits and this sort of thing – not exactly inspiring, at least not for me. But not posting at all is definitely not going to get me more readers, so what the hell, I’ll just post the drivel that’s been sloshing around in my head for the past few days.

I started reading Augusten Burroughs’s memoir Dry today. I have to say that 100 pages in, I don’t much care for it. I picked it up because I had the sense that it would be sordid, and substance abuse issues are perennially fascinating for me (as you might guess, it’s about his recovery from alcoholism). There’s even the gay male angle, which I’m always weak for. But the actual writing is sloppily done, and poorly edited to boot. My experience with memoir is very limited, though I understand that it’s a genre that has gained a large readership among the masses, and being the elitist I am, I naturally assume that this means memoirs in general can be poorly written and still make assloads of money because most people don’t care about that sort of thing. Which means they are, more often than not, poorly written and barely edited. This Burroughs piece only strengthens my ill-informed notions to this effect. So sad, so sad. It makes me want to avoid the genre altogether. Getting too close to that pulse of celebrity and commercialism is bad for my health, and I suspect it’s bad for my creative process as well. And yet I so love talking about myself that you’d think it would be perfect for me! 😥

In other news, this weekend I have my first OkCupid date since my breakup with Poly Dude and Kristen. It occurred to me only tonight that it would in fact be my first date since the end of my last relationship, which should be, like, a big deal or something, right? I don’t know. But it isn’t. I’m not really excited in that “oh god I need to look flawless and be funny and smell great and get my cunt waxed” kind of way. If anything I’m just interested in encountering another human being who has shown himself to be fairly intelligent and witty. I don’t think I could possibly feel less sexual than I have these past few days. I just want to know how people operate; I want to dig into the tender bits. Maybe this is a result of my stupid couple of weeks talking to Luke – I’m not sure I mentioned how that ended, by the way: he finally decided he would give his relationship with his girl-thing an actual chance instead of being a sleaze about it. Congratulations, Luke, on choosing (eventually) to be a decent human being.

As the loyal (and attentive) among you may recall, Luke and I had a purely physical cyber-fling for about a week before he busted out the “I’ve been dating a girl for 3 months but I really want to get to know you as a person before or while we have filthy, violent sex in real life” line. There are just so many things wrong with this sentiment. But the one I want to talk about at the moment is the getting to know me part. Because for some reason I didn’t really believe him, or maybe I just didn’t want to, because it only highlighted his inability to commit to the girl he was seeing and his cowardice in dealing with that situation. And so, strangely, while he at least superficially expressed an interest in understanding me as a person, I felt used by him. On top of that, I just didn’t see him as being very interesting, or nearly emotionally aware enough for me to feel safe exposing myself that way. And that’s a terrible feeling for me. I want, more than anything, to feel understood and accepted; conversely, I fear being regarded as alien, or perverse, or freakish. Sometimes I can handle this in small doses and even provoke it, but that’s all under my control. There’s no vulnerability there. So maybe what I’m saying here is that I encountered someone who professed to want to get to know me, and because of my gut reaction of “he totally won’t get it,” I walled myself off from him and maybe from all other potential suitors. Who needs that kind of rejection? I suppose it just goes to show that I’m not ready to put myself on the line again yet.

It’s probably for the best, as I don’t really need to be expending so much energy on looking for someone to share naked-time with. I have enough going on, particulary in the realm of grad school applications. And apparently the vague possibility of attraction/sex/intimacy, in the form of first dates with Internet men, is enough to tide me over until my craving for High Drama finally returns.

And he has no idea what’s going on

August 30, 2008 at 10:47 pm | Posted in relationships | 1 Comment
Tags: , , , ,

Photo by Hamed MasoumiLast night I dreamt about my most recent ex, Poly Dude. In the dream I had an opportunity to see him, and he almost canceled on me at the last minute. This made me realize that I was actually really excited to see him and that I would have been sad if I hadn’t gotten the chance. He was moving in a couple of days and I wanted a last afternoon with him to be his friend and enjoy his company. I still liked him, and respected him, and appreciated all of the things he brought into my life. I actually told him all of this in my dream, face to face. His beautiful stupid face.

When I woke up I noted that:

a) he was actually going to be moving in the next day or so, if he wasn’t already gone;

b) I really did still like him and maybe I wanted to see him, and wished that he could still be in my life without causing me a great deal of pain.

This pissed me off.

After I break up with a lover – it doesn’t matter who initiated the separation – I go through a period of vilifying him and refusing to think about any of his positive qualities or my tender feelings for him. Maybe this isn’t entirely healthy, but it does help prevent me from spiraling into the “What did I do wrong? Oh god, I’ve ruined this great relationship and no one will ever want or love me” nonsense. Temporarily blaming the other person relieves me of obsessing over all of my own shortcomings and my worth as a girlfriend/human being. Even as it’s happening I know it’s a distortion of reality, but that’s okay with me. After a month or so, the storm of unruly emotion passes and I can go about assessing the relationship and the breakup more calmly, seeing what went wrong, noting how I contributed to it and how I can do better next time, and then remembering that I did (and probably do still) care about my ex, that he was a good guy in some ways and worthy of my love.

I don’t know whether I’m really ready to step into that space with Poly Dude yet. It’s been about a month since the breakup and I’m still feeling hurt and rejected and unworthy, so I’m thinking probably not. But then why did I have the dream? Why did my unconscious feel the need to remind me that I do still have feelings for him, that I don’t just think he’s a complete asshole who is completely responsible for how shitty I feel and all the things that went wrong between us? God damn it. I don’t really know what to make  of it, though I do think it’s sort of funny that my unconscious seems to be taking on Poly Dude’s old role of pushing me into doing things I’m not comfortable with, in the name of accelerating my personal development. It was easy enough to flip him off (even when I took him seriously), but dismissing my own psychic impulse to speed the healing process is more difficult.

Anyway, I’m definitely too stubborn and fragile to contact him and tell him I still have feelings for him. Let him think I still want him to rot in hell. Most of me does.

Photo by Hamed Masoumi.

Next Page »

Blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.