Do you mind me asking how things eventually turned out for you? I mean what situation you are in now, only if you want to say. As you said it have been there, where I was, I guess you understood that and moved on somewhere, I would be curious what changes it brought on in your life.
I grew up without my father and was a fat nerd kid (history, computers and languages) with glasses, who due to a significant difference in some aspects of early development couldn’t interact with most of his peers without that turning into a nightmare. I faced ridicule and the ‘creep’ kind of treatment (in all sorts of contexts, not just wooing the ladies) in my early to mid teens. I was clumsy enough to lose the phone number of the only girl who treated me right.
I suddenly became tall and handsome and otherwise eligible and supposedly charming in my later teens, but contrary to the going opinion I was unsuccessful, unhappy and ended up twitterpatted with problem girls or just being alone. And once I saw and complied with a rejection that wasn’t even there.
This continued into my late teens and early twenties, with the ladies changing and shifting their minds, or discovering that it wasn’t a good time for them to start a relationship, or whatever, often demonstrably untrue. Or just not having time for me when in a relationship or headed towards one, despite having plenty for other guys, for friends etc. That time thing became a major pattern, along with unilateral control of the time, frequency and length of meetings by the women’s caprices.
In my mid and later twenties, just as everybody was praising my education, character and manner and good looks (even those were remarkably good back then according to women’s comments, in contrast to before and after) and so on and so forth, I was on an epic streak of bad luck, rejections, unhappy relationships and everything else like my friends just couldn’t believe and I actually — in my mid teens — began to find it funny, looking at it from a distance.
But before that, in the latter half of law school, I was involved with another girl with whom that problem popped up, after another long-term relationship in which it had been an issue But, and this is important, the table turned the moment I adapted and learned to live without my then-girlfriend being in touch or available. She started feeling bad about the new distance and my new emotional independence. Perhaps seeing the table turn did the change for me and allowed me to look at it in a different light. (But that relationship could not be saved.)
To some extent my upbringing was responsible for that problem. It was full of chivalry etc., reinforced by history being my dominant interest ever since I could remember, often quite advanced for my age, largely the middle ages era and then seventeenth century, also fiction literature and roleplaying games relating to those periods, you know, knights and ladies and dragons and ogres and cavaliers and roundheads. I sure got involved in terse altercations with the ladies sometimes, but to just speak out my demands or expectations, that did not fit my imagination. However, disappointments were major negative events.
I am more mellow and tolerant about that sort of thing these days, and perhaps more in need of my own time alone also, but on the other hand I would definitely be faster to act and more outspoken if I saw the whole relationship operated out of just one person’s calendar, or a pattern of avoidance or some kind of runaway bride behaviour. I would probably be more inclined to cut it early than to let it drag on and desperately try to save it while clinging to illusions. So this is where I’m at right now, having also done a lot of reading and thinking and so on.
Things also changed when I finished law school, saw some courtroom action, then changed jobs, opened a freelance business in a different but related field and had to work till morning hours with myself as the nominal boss but in reality just the one person against the whole world responsible for the whole thing.
So one day, or rather one night, one of many such nights, strolling on the pavement looking up at the moon and absorbing the chill to stay awake and be able to finish my job back home upon returning, I thought (apologies for the coarse language, but it’s an important part of the story): ‘I’m not going to be killing myself spilling over my guts till 3 a.m. to throw it at the feet of someone who doesn’t care to talk to me.’ Talk to me or say thank you for a gift or show any appreciation for something else, I don’t even remember whatever exactly I was on about at that night.’
And that ‘someone’ was a woman who had actually herself called me at 1 a.m. after parting ways after an 8 p.m. meeting, claiming she had to pull my tongue to hear it that I liked her company (nine fresh long-stemmed deep pink roses the second time I saw her in my life apparently had failed to convey the message). What followed later in the evolution of that non-relationship was a flashback to the same old story I knew from my younger years, complete with her telling me we were ‘just friends’ but still not finding it improper to initiate flirting with me minutes after. Repeatedly. Crazy stuff, wasn’t it?
What I did was just not call her. It broke my heart for a number of reasons but was well worth it. It was at that time that two different friends, each a generation older, alerted me to the possibility of my childhood still messing me with my head. That was what made me do a lot of reading and thinking but also try harder to let go of things and give myself a clean slate.
None of the other opportunities or attempts since then have turned into anything serious (probably none had the markings of it anyway), but things have become markedly more civilized and sane.
