Ever since I became the second half of my first relationship, I’ve had an imaginary sword blocking me. Every. Single. Boyfriend. has been suspicious of me. Thought I was too flirtatious, playing with fire constantly, jealous of practically any other boy who would come near me or talk to me. Every one of the other halves in three long-term relationships has been called on it – his affinity for assuming there was something, where there was nothing – and in response, every one of them tried to instigate the, “I trust you, I just don’t trust them” defense.
Then, they’d try to educate me about how guys work. And if I were an attentive student in the university of ex-boyfriends, I’d have written my honour’s thesis on men never being able to be just friends with women, because of an apparent Freudian need to have sex with them. I would have aced it and it would have been fucking published in all kinds of psychological and medical journals.
Yes, everyone from the person who raised me, to my ex-fiancé, to my daughter’s father has rubbed it in my face that I am so naive and that no man would want to be my friend without wanting to fuck me. At least, eventually.
Imagine the complex that might build up. Especially when that message is repeated over and over with some form of proof as to how you, as the woman, are leading them on.
Further confounding this ideology is my complete confusion as to why men have wanted me. I mean…what’s so great about me to be lusted after, or to even get, I dare say, addicted to? I didn’t get it. And because I didn’t get it, it was easy to attribute it to maybe men just assuming (mostly wrong, but sometimes right) that I was easy and an effortless release for them. For, oh, about 15 years.
Last week, someone clarified it in a way that I could compute – why do guys like me? And pieces fell into place. Attitude was named, not as an aside to boobs and looks, but as the main component. Exuding pheromones was another mention, and that I really understood. You know how sometimes you meet someone and they’re not anything that you would usually be up for, but there’s something about them that makes you wanna zigga zig ah? Pheromones, babe.
I got it. Figured it out, without feeling like I was being conceited, which then would have driven me in the other direction, to immense pits of self-rejection. I even started to feel a little peaceful about it, maybe. It’s a new lesson I can absorb, ya dig?
I have this guy friend and we occassionally get to hang out, but usually it’s just been in groups. Maybe, just to be safe, I should mention that the guy has a girlfriend he loves and that’s all there is to us – friends. The ex’s initial knowledge of this guy came a few weeks after I met him online about six months ago, which progressed into the ex babysitting while I went to said guy’s bday party on new years.
Remember that? When I came home at 7am?
Before I left to go to the party, a parade of pouting from his direction eventually divulged that he was feeling jealous, as if I was in love with this guy friend. And I didn’t want him anymore.
We didn’t get along so well for a while after I came home that morning. Then we started to be friends again, then the sleeping together, again, then the daily communications between us, again. Pretty much by a couple of weeks ago, it seemed evident that the ex was moving back into the brain of the no-longer-ex and just as I was wondering how I was seriously going to stamp that down, he met my guy friend this past Saturday.
After the ex put two and two together that: ‘we’re going here, they’re there’ meant that we’d be meeting up with my friend, it seemed fine. Initially, there was sudden silence and a few jaw muscle clenches, but, we moved on quietly, without drama. And he met said friend and other friends with no apparent problem.
Then, I guess I’m supposed to feel guilty because on Saturday night, I did the unthinkable: I didn’t sleep with him, even though he stayed over. And he’s going camping next weekend. Which means he woke up fairly pissy about the realism of not getting laid for a total of three weeks straight. Poor baby.
He had planned to take Isobel out during the day on Sunday, to tackle two Mother’s Days at a time – lunch with his mom and a present for me. He came home afterwards with Isobel and my friend was here.
The temperature in the room dropped. Suddenly, he was quick to get his stuff together, had to leave, had nothing to say. Suddenly, he didn’t want to be where I was or talking to me, even though nearly daily for the past two weeks, he’s called and texted me no less than twice a day. And I didn’t get a present. And he said goodbye to my friend, all casual-like.
And he’s still not. Talking to me, that is.
In the past, this might have flown a little better, but let’s still examine some of the “past” issues, for audacity and my stupid acceptance of them:
- going out for drinks without him was frowned upon, since apparently men would want to buy me one and that would mean that I’d end up, what, running away for the night with them? Or worse, owing them.
- I used to have to get off of buses ahead of him, in case any one planned to look at my ass. Seriously.
- He never outrightly, but still obviously, has refused to call me getting raped, rape. Because I’m me, and apparently, I have a way of making things seem…like they’re going to happen. (Psst. That is when No means Yes, I guess.)
- When we broke up in 2004, two months later, he saw me walking down the street with a guy friend, someone I’d met that day who was a friend of a friend of my best friend. He didn’t talk to me for weeks except to rage at me for being with someone else, and how disrespectful I was for not going somewhere where he wouldn’t see me, because I should have known he’d assume I was dating the dood.
- I’m still not allowed to mention the guy’s name that I dated for nearly two months, after we’d been broken up for four.
- I’m also not allowed to say anything positive about the rockstar ex in his presence, unless I want to listen to him shit talk the guy – not even knowing him, mind you – and then get yelled at for ‘defending him’ and asked ‘well, why are you wasting your time with me? Why don’t you go be with him, then, since he has so much going for him.’
I’m not going to go on. But there’s more.
I know the ex came to me with baggage. I know he has little to no confidence. I know he’d been cheated on, multiple times, and that can definitely fuck with a guy’s head. But for fuck sakes, two days ago, I was his best friend and lover and now, he won’t return a simple text message (or two).
When I was younger and stupider, this was a self-esteem booster because it meant that the boyfriend assumed I was in such demand that they had to protect me. And it meant that they cared enough to protect me.
You know what it is now? Fucking juvenile. It’s fucking ridiculous, that the ex that can talk on Saturday evening about all the woes in his life, including the need of a girlfriend, can still behave in such a disrespectful, cold way. It’s asinine that I would have let his silence bother me and even a little, feel guilty for having my friend over. It’s mentally deficient for him to think, what so fucking ever that he has any kind of an ownership on who are my friends, when I see them and where, and what genitalia they have. Especially in my own damn apartment.
I was reminded, even though I was already thinking about it a little, that in 15 days it’s the anniversary of the hugest fuck up he ever fucked up: The morning that he left, after the night he almost hit me in front of our daughter, while I was bleeding (nearly to death), losing what would have been our second child. He never called to find out if I was (or we were) okay. He did email me, like, five days later, one line about needing to talk. But still.
He can never ever in his lifetime make up for that. I mean, yeah, there’s a lot he can’t make up for – for instance, the crack about me being a the stupidest cunt he’d ever met, and how my father would slap me (two weeks after he died) was a zinger – but I can forgive, to a certain degree, a lot of those things. There’s always two sides and all.
That morning, when he left, I can’t forgive and won’t and honestly, if I ever do, I’ll have caused myself so much disappointment. Why?
Because he never apologized. Because after he was done being full of rage about me taking him to court and refusing to give him joint custody, he just snapped back into our cycle, as if it was some little big fight we’d had.
He finally computed that I’m completely okay with the thought of him finding someone else, yet he’s turned down the one opportunity that’s come his way. He’s acknowledged his desires to have a girlfriend and move out on his own and be a grown up in every sense of the word, yet he remains stunted, living on the floor of his mom’s one-bedroom apartment, unable to move forward in his life.
He’s impotant in life, with the libido of a 14 year old.
I’m just so tired of having two children, sometimes.
