Boys again. (braindump)
January 24, 2009 at 10:29 pm | Posted in dating, relationships | Leave a commentTags: breakups, dating, harville hendrix, MFA, psychology, relationships
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…
when the evening’s thin
October 26, 2008 at 8:50 pm | Posted in reflections | Leave a commentTags: bullshit, love, melodrama, relationships
okay, can we just not do this for one goddamn second? i am not wearing a face right now, or at least the one i’m wearing isn’t anything i’m proud of. i am going to write something and i don’t know what it will sound like — maybe foreign, maybe like everything else i’ve ever written, and i could analyze what those two outcomes might mean but i don’t care. just, ok, ok, ok.
i have worked through the weekend. technically there is one more day of weekend but it is booked solid for working. weeking workend. i don’t miss my social life because it’s tenuous on the best weeks. i do miss cheeseburgers with sam, and sunny days on hawthorne, the easygoing ambience of portland. but i don’t know what else i miss. the last months of portland i was clawing to get out. i kept wishing to be unnamed elsewheres. sometimes i named them after boys: LA, boston. what a fucking joke.
everything is closing in, flattening, so that nothing can look only good or only bad–all the facets merging to make a lightless gray.
i am compiling possible pieces for my writing sample and i have nine that have some hope, and only one of them is not about botched romance, and of the other eight, only two others are not about some very real piece of my history. broken boys in rows like dolls. i read travis’s livejournal as i sometimes do and as of two weeks ago there is some girl, some crazy-about-him girl, and he is overwhelmed with joy and gratitude and his ever-present fear. my old professor tells me that his latest ex-wife is sending him emails twice a week, saying stupid shit, and that all he wants is to have a real conversation about the end of their marriage, and all she can do is pull this adolescent passive-aggressive bullshit. sam is dating a girl and he is happy and excited and, i’m sure, good to her. a friend in portland goes through the same motions, meeting boys, losing them, walking away in disgust, wondering what’s wrong with him. i tell him, you’re fine. your standards are reasonable. other friends find no one, and keep waiting and dreaming. others talk about romance, about commitment, and their partnerships make me want to run thousands of miles away from their bicker, bicker, bicker. a famous okcupid couple has it out on their journal posts, airing their ugly secrets for their bloodthirsty friends. i read through all six hundred comments.
it doesn’t matter what the story is. i feel like i am drowning in them, they are all sounding the same. right now, i don’t feel like i believe in this kind of happiness. it either doesn’t exist, or it is far out of my grasp, and quite possibly i am kicking it away at the same time that i reach for it, exhausting myself at both ends, pushing and pulling.
this is what i get for spending the weekend alone.
i’m tired of myself now.
it is the hope that kills me. i have put it aside to make room for other things, and now i’m afraid to pick it up again. tell me: is it worth it?
Lukewarm is not sexy
October 9, 2008 at 11:37 am | Posted in dating, relationships, sex | 5 CommentsTags: boyfriend, dating, girlfriend, luke, relationships, seth, sex, STDs
I’m on vacation this week, which in theory would mean that I should have lots of time for idle reflection and that sort of thing. Well, this isn’t actually the case, but I’m going to pretend it is for just long enough to write this post.
I saw Seth a few days ago for the first time in over a week, since he had been sick the week before. I wasn’t feeling much like going out with him, since I had a lot of shit I needed to get done and anyway I seem to be perpetually in a state of talking myself out of the relationship. But I showed up and then he showed up and the first thing he did was give me a mix CD for my long vacation drive. Aww! I’m a sucker for gifts. And it was a kinda cute thing to do. So the date went decently. After dinner we wandered over to Mitchell’s for ice cream and while we were eating it, he asked me, “So are we dating yet?”
“We’ve always been dating. We go out on dates,” I told him.
“I guess that’s true!” he responded, though not exactly happily.
“Are you trying to bring up the girlfriend/boyfriend thing again?”
“I was mostly kidding,” he said.
“OK.” I ate some more ice cream. “Wait — mostly kidding? I almost let that slip.”
He grinned at me uncomfortably from behind his sugar cone.
“I have to say I really don’t get the difference between a girlfriend and someone you’re dating when it comes to the polyamorous lifestye,” I admitted.
“That’s a good point.” He thought for a moment. “I guess it has to do with the expectation of continuity.”
I told him my only real hangup at this point is the whole sleeping-with-a-million people thing. We talked about STD testing and such. I told him that I knew it was my thing at this point, and that I just needed to decide whether I wanted to continue to accept so much risk to my “sexual health,” as they say.
He said he understood. “You haven’t decided whether you are committed to poly as a lifestyle or whether it’s just a passing thing, so it makes sense.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Well, if you were committed to the lifestyle you might be willing to take more risks for it because it’s a principle around which you organize your life.”
I looked at him. “Are you saying you want me to organize my life around you?”
He laughed at that and apologized for pushing so hard. I asked him why it was so important to him. And then he told me that it was because the last girl he’d dated from OkC had just up and disappeared after a month of dating. He was trying to prevent that from happening again.
Unfortunately, I failed to take this opportunity to reassure him that I would not disappear without warning. Honestly, it’s something I’d consider doing in general, but he’s been too nice to allow me to justify it.
Driving home that night, I realized that he was probably sticking with me — and interested in dating me in some consistent, reliable manner — for reasons that had little if anything to do with me as a person. He wants to be wanted; he wants to be able to consider this experience stable. And I guess that’s what I want, too, or at least the most basic level of it. Which is why it’s okay right now that we don’t have very much in common, that no crazy sparks are flying. We are, perhaps, just serving each other’s narcissistic ends in a perfectly complementary way.
Listening to his mix CD on the drive yesterday, I skipped about half the songs. Approximately two-thirds of the way through the compilation I began to seriously wonder whether this was just some random travelling music mix he’d had on his computer that he had simply burned and given to me — not made specifically for me, but presented that way in order to endear him to me. Am I unreasonably suspicious? Granted, he really has no good sense of my musical taste, nor has he had much of an opportunity to get one. But then why make a mix CD? The songs, for the most part, clearly aren’t about him, or me, or “us.” This possibility of having been given a generic mix CD depressed me. I’m also not sure whether I should bring it up, and how I could do so without seeming like an ungrateful bitch.
In other news, last night I received my first message from Luke in something like six weeks (i.e. whenever I last posted about him). It said:
Hi Jana,
I haven’t heard from you in a while. How are you doing?
Luke
What the hell? Luckily I was tipsy when I got this, and responded with:
i took an update in your profile a while back to mean that you and the girl had decided to take things between you more seriously. given that you wrote that you were looking only for new friends, and that you and i had already established that you wanted something more than “friendship” from me, i concluded that any possibility of interaction between us had been voided. the fact that you’re writing me now suggests that something has changed on that front, whether or not your girlfriend (or however she’s currently labeled) is aware of it. so what’s the story? in other words: what do you want?
This morning I got his reply:
Yep, the girl and I tried to take things more seriously. It turns out we were just meant to be friends. We left things on good terms. The result is that I’m single.
What I want is to take you out sometime. If you’re available, that is.
If not, no worries. I hope you’re well!
Ugh. Of course, being the person I am, I’m considering letting him take me out, despite the following red flags:
- He was willing to lie to the last girl he was dating regarding sleeping with someone else, which means
- He didn’t respect the last girl he was dating, and
- He was willing to risk her sexual health for this secret fling. Furthermore,
- He didn’t have the balls to tell me that he’d decided with his girl-thing to take things more seriously; he left it up to his OkC profile to inform me. Fucking lame. Finally:
- He doesn’t seem very interesting as a person.
I’m not sure I have it in me to date two guys at once with whom I am far more sexually than intellectually/emotionally compatible. It might get… tedious. And depressing. ALSO, for all I know he could be lying about having broken up with the other chick! Christ.
The reasons I might let him take me out:
- Free dinner. (And he’s a foodie = excellent free dinner.)
- The sex would be good, most likely.
- I am technically in a “poly” relationship and the amount of risk I’m taking being in it is totally stupid because I am not even reaping the benefit of that risk, which is that I get to sleep with whomever I want. So, like, I should start sleeping with more people.
That’s all I’ve got. Oh wait:
- My life is a sociological experiment focusing specifically on male-female relationships. More data!
So, it’s time to vote! Should I let him take me out? If yes, should I include caveats/conditions? Which?
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