Sacrificing too much

                                                

   Since I last posted, D and I have agreed to start dating again and we’re in the midst of taking things “slow”, whatever that means. So when I woke up this morning, after I threw up (im suffering from food poisoning) and called her to wake her so she could get ready for work, I took a look at the date on the calendar icon of my IPhone. Today is the 27th!

    I text her while she was just settling in at her job “it’s the 27th” I said

   I was expecting a “Happy Anniversary!” text, a “How could I forget?”, a smiley face. ANYTHING! But instead, i received an “Ik”…her quick way of saying “I know”. There was no Happy Anniversary, no sweet comments, and there damn sure wasn’t a smiley face in sight.

   It’s only our 7 month anniversary so i’m not sure what I expected. Usually, im not a stickler for anniversaries. At the 6 month mark I begin thinking we may go the distance so I MAY plan something romantic, but the big deal romance stuff doesn’t happen until the one year mark. I KNOW I didn’t expect a gift. It would have been silly to think there would be one of those after everything we’ve been through and considering the small amount of time we’ve been together.

    I guess I just expected for her to be as excited as I was about another month.

   Often times when I bring up how emotionless she is, she retorts by saying that not everybody is like me. She has her own way of showing affection just like I do. So I put up with the affection-free days and the lackluster emotions out of respect for her way of doing things. But respecting her way is one thing…..I dont HAVE to put up with it!

   By my age, girls pretty much know what they want in a mate. I’ve decided a long time ago that affection is important to me. Not only affection, but feeling like Im an important part of my mate’s world. Compromise is one thing, but COMPLETELY giving up something I know I truly want is called a sacrifice. And I dont think this relationship has been worth the sacrifice of one of my biggest desires in a relationship: affection.

    So I finally put on my big girl panties and realized that there will never be a day when D wakes me up with breakfast in bed because that’s not her style. There will never be a time she will surprise the hell out of me by doing something utterly romantic because again: that’s not her type of thing. She will always be herself, and I should never set out to change that because that’s doing nothing but setting out for failure. But I shouldn’t settle either. Because there will never be a day that I wont want to be woken up one day to breakfast in bed and there will never be a day where I wont dream of some utterly romantic thing happening to me. Because I will always be myself and I shouldn’t let anything or anyone change that.

   After I realized this, I sent her a “Happy Anniversary” text (the same one I had been wanting), took some pepto bismol and went back to sleep. Sometimes sacrifices are too big to make. Sacrificing the love i’ve always wanted for the love I didnt even know I could tolerate may be too big for me…

Perfect vs. Problematic.

    There’s a guy i’ll call Blue that I’ve been knowing for quite some time now. Since ive met him i’ve had a boyfriend and a girlfriend and he still wont budge, not that I want him to. He’s what most women would call perfect: he has a good job (he’s a cop), a nice car, looks good, a body made by Milk (mmm), nice smile, respectful, opens doors, kisses like a movie scene, my family loves him, he says all the right things (he actually told me that nothing and no one would keep him from loving me…wow), and he’s smart as a text book! My god, he’s perfect.

   Then there’s D. She’s beautiful, has a body most men lust after and most women wish they had, pretty smile, but a bad attitude. She can be sweet when she wants to be but hardly ever wants to be, breaks my back in the bedroom, but breaks my heart outside of it. She knows just what to say to get under my skin, and reminds me by doing so. D is- in a nutshell- problematic.

    When i’m with Blue I feel a rumble in the ground. When im with D my whole entire world explodes! WHY IS THAT?! Why is it that mister perfect gives me some insignificant feeling of temporary happiness and D is like the equivalent of being connected to an IV drip of feelings 24/7! Why is Ms. Problematic winning over Mr. Perfect???

    I tried to imagine it was because the sex was better but all in all i’d suffer through years of mediocre sex just to get the kind of love ive always wanted. Sex is something you can easily teach. How not to be an asshole, is not. Then I thought that it was because I spend more time with D since we go to the same school and basically lived with one another last semester, however, I had known Blue almost a full year by the time D was even a thought, so he’s even got her on time. I simply do not know why she wins! I can not, for the life of me, figure out why i’d rather be with D than Blue any day.

    I blame Romance novels and movies. Ask any average romance novelist the formula for their story, it’s usually: boy meets girl, girl meets girl, or boy meets boy (hey, I’m in no place to judge) they fall in love, only to be met with a big problem to overcome. Either girl or boy makes a sacrifice to overcome that problem (i.e. cancels his wedding to be with you in the style of the wedding planner) and the pair lives happily every after and thats why we read and watch, for the great story that makes. Bottom line: I dont feel like im part of a romance worth having unless theirs a big problem i’ve got to overcome with the one I love so that I can tell the story to the kids one day! There’s nothing to tell the kids about how Blue and I got together and have been a perfect dating pair since day one, and never even had the slightest disagreement, not even over what movie we were going to see. But I will always be able to tell the story about how D’s ex girlfriend lived down the hall from me at school and how our relationship became the campus soap opera after D left me to go figure out where her heart was and went right back down the hall, only to come back down my way again after a couple of weeks.

    Bottom line is that if there were not conflicts in romance novels we wouldn’t read them because then it would just be a book about a stupid couple boasting about how good they’ve got it. And who wants to read that? Women deal with the Mr. or Ms. Problematics of their lives not for their love of torture or for their desire to have a good fight every five minutes. They deal  with it because if they’re following the formula right, there will be a great ending through all the madness. Someone will be standing outside their window with a boombox playing their favorite love song, there will be a kiss in the rain, they will have actually changed the one every one said would never change, someone will stop them before they get on their flight and propose to them in a busy airport….it will end perfectly. And right at that perfect moment, all the problematic CRAP would have been more than worth it.

    But what if we’re not in romance novels? What if we’re just in nightmares we’ll never wake up from because we’ll never realize we’re alseep?

     THAT’S my question….

The Alternate

    There’s a guy I met about a year ago i’ll call V. V and I met on one of those corny dating sites back when I actually had the desire to put my effort into that kind of thing. We dated for a while (not exclusively) and I was really feeling him at one point in time. That was until my most current ex, i’ll call her D, stepped onto the scene. Needless to say, V and I sowly stopped dating as D and I became more serious. Eventually, V was pushed into the friend zone since he had never made any effort to be put elsewhere and I had found someone who I felt was worth the risk of starting another relationship after having a long relationship-free period.

     V could have been bitter and removed himself from my life completely, especially since I had not only dropped him like a hot potato, i had done the biggest ego-brusing no-no a girl could do to any man: I had dropped him for another woman. But he was a good sport about it. And we reamined friends throughout my relationship with D. In fact, we became best friends.

    D never liked him because she knew our history and had gone through my phone and read a few texts between V and I about how much we missed one another (as friends, of course, but that wasn’t easy to explain).  She figured he was spending every waking moment of his time trying to get me back, and even though he often made a little sideways comments about how we “could have been a great thing”, I assured her it was nothing like that. And conciously it wasn’t. Conciously, i respected every aspect of me and D’s relationship and would not stand for anyone trying to get between that. But now that the relationship is over and I find myself leaning on V a little bit more than I should, im starting to wonder if I had subconciously made him my alternate.

    Almost every girl has an alternate, and that’s fine. In life, there should always be a plan B. But the element that makes having an alternate okay in the relationship is the distance you keep between you and your alternate while you’re with the main star (i.e. your boyfriend or girlfriend). Alternates are the kind of people you keep just close enough to monitor the moves their making in life (an email every month or so will do) but you dont talk to an alternate every day. I talked to V almost every day, sometimes for hours.

    Last night I was lying in bed trying to doze off when my Iphone buzzed in the bed next to me. It was V. He was drunk, which isn’t at all rare since he likes to drink with his guy friends  on weekends. I was prepared to disreagrd any curse words and listen to any slurred conversations he tried to have with me for the next 20 minutes until he either forgot he was on the phone or found something better to do with his drunk self than talk to me!

    My mother always told me that through a drunk mind speaks a sober heart. So when V began to ask me if we could  have sex, I became highly uncomfortable.  It became apparent to me that somewhere along the lines I had made it seemingly okay for him to ask me such a thing. Somehow I had given off the impression that there was more between him and I than phone convos and laughs. Which meant that D had had every right to worry even though I told her not to and I had kept my Alternate disrespectfully close to me. I quickly told him I had to go and I would call him the next day. we hung up. I did not call him the next day.

     This situation made me wonder: was I so afraid of D and I failing that I never fully gave us a chance by holding on to V more than I should have? Was I so convinced that my main star would get sick the night of the play that I had only taught all the lines to the alternate so there was absolutely no other choice but to let the alternate perform on opening night?

    Had I sabotaged D and I?

Single again…

I’m no stranger to the single life. We’ve met a couple of times, actually. The single life is an acquaintance I always try not to run into on the street….but somehow it ALWAYS finds me and forces me to act like I like it when I secretly hate it.
So here I am, face to imaginary face with the single life. Just this morning my girlfriend of almost 7 months broke up with me via text after three weeks of uncomfortable pre-brake up behavior. I saw it coming, I spotted the signs, and after a few days of drowning in my sorrows, I’m sure I’ll be at peace with it.
What bothers me is how at peace I am with losing a woman I almost wanted to marry! Shouldn’t I be crying instead of lying in my bed watching a Bridezillas marathon? If I’m not upset, was she just a waste of my time?
Well….it looks like I’m back to being me instead of half of a we! You know….it kind of feels good! I have a feeling this is only the beginning of my world….welcome to Love and Lipstick!