Love and desperation don't mix

Some realizations come too late.

He was always a user. He was always acting, pretending to have emotions he never really had. I see that now. I see it clearly. Too clearly for comfort.

You see, I wasn’t sure. I knew there were red flags, but I also knew he was a giant nerd, not to mention his many mental health and depression issues. I thought he deserved the benefit of the doubt.

He wasn’t my type in any way shape or form. In fact, I highly doubted most women would find him attractive. But there was something about him, something that pulled me toward him. At the time, I thought it was a soul connection. What else could it be? We had nothing in common aside from mental health issues. I found some of his beliefs to be abhorrent. His history with women was concerning and questionable. I wasn’t attracted to him.

So, why did I choose to be with him? Why him? Seriously, there was a point mid-way between the year we met and this year, when we broke up, that I was physically nauseated by the idea of him, not to mention the knowledge that I had actually dated him, not once, not twice, but multiple times.

In fact, after the second time I broke up with him, I all but lost my mind. To be fair to me, I had gone off my medication several months prior, thinking I was fine and past needing them. To be fair to him, the second time I broke up with him was the same weekend he buried his grandmother.

I broke up with him – every time – for one reason – I thought he couldn’t be trusted. I believed he was lying to me at best and cheating on me at worst. But – every time – I would start to question myself. Why did I think that? Did I have any proof? Was I simply overreacting? And then breaking up with him when his grandmother died – that had elicited a reaction from him, genuine emotion. I began not only second-guessing myself, but also chastising myself. I felt ashamed of my behaviour. I felt ashamed for being so cruel and unfeeling.

As the weeks went by, I thought about it over and over. Other things were happening in my life, big things, hard things. I was off-balance, being tossed around ‘to and fro’ to a dizzying degree. I started to believe that he real was my soulmate. I started to believe that I had just hurt the one person I could ever be truly happy with in a relationship. I started to believe that I needed him because he was THE one, the only one who would ever be able to truly make me happy. And I believed I could do the same for him.

I started messaging him. Sending him emails that I knew he’d never read. I begged for his forgiveness. I begged him to give me another chance. I somehow believed he was my last chance at true happiness. Somehow, he held the magic key that would unlock the door to a genuinely happy and fulfilling life, one where I would no longer be in this nightmare of aloneness, trying to figure out all by myself what to do, where to go, how to be. I would have a life partner again but this time it would be forever. I just needed to make him see how sorry I was for being such an enormous and unfeeling bitch. How could I have doubted him so much that I would break up with him the same weekend he buried his grandmother?

I broke up with him in September 2015. I didn’t hear from him again until early March 2016.

A lot happened in the six months in between. Too much really.

If you’ve been reading my blog all along, you will know that I was raped January 18, 2016. It wasn’t the only nightmare that happened in those six months, but it was probably the largest. And it happened because I was desperate for love. Desperate to not be alone anymore.

You see, the man who raped me had originally contacted me in October via Match.com and I had turned him down cold – he was younger than me and I didn’t see the point. Plus, I didn’t like some of his answers to my questions. By early January, he had continued messaging me and I think I had finally reached a breaking point, so I agree to talk to him. We started chatting on the phone for hours. There were red flags, which I pointed out, but he always had plausible answers for all my questions. He appeared to be a good man. He’d done volunteer work in third-world countries. He had completed a masters in ethics and was currently pursuing his doctorate. We became friends on Facebook. I checked the things he said. They were true. And he had this way about him when he spoke to me, he made me feel safe in the way that my ex-husband had made me feel safe. It was the thing I’d been searching for ever since my divorce. (To be clear, this in no way has anything to do with my ex-husband. He was not responsible for the choices I made. That was all me.)

If I had been on medication. If I had been stable. If I had been confiding in my friends. If I had contacted my doctor or my former therapist for help. Maybe things would have ended differently. But I didn’t do any of those things. I ignored the warning signs. I ignored the voice inside my head. I so desperately wanted to be in a relationship again, a real one, one where we were partners, that I consciously overlooked all the reasons I should have run in the opposite direction. I was so lost. I felt like I was drowning in sorrow and hopelessness. I felt as though I could barely breathe, like I was several leagues deep underwater, struggling and kicking my way toward the surface, but to no avail. No one could hear me. I was alone.

And as I’ve already said, if you’ve been following along, you already know the rest of this story. You know that I went to his house to meet him in person for the first time.

What I didn’t tell you was that he had to talk to me on the phone all the way there because I had turned around to go home at least once. He had to calm my fears and lead me to his door. His voice, I trusted the voice. Getting out of the car, walking up the path to the front door where he was standing and waving me inside, I felt a tugging. This isn’t a good idea. You shouldn’t be doing this. You should turn back now. But I didn’t. I wanted a life partner. He was intelligent and kind. He was looking for the same things as me. This would work.

But it didn’t.

If you want to know the rest of the story, go back, and read my previous blogs. For now, this story isn’t about the sexual assault that took place that night in January. This blog is about my desperation to find love – any love, at any cost – because I felt as though I couldn’t breathe without it.

I’m telling you this, so you’ll understand how I fell into the trap with my ex-boyfriend – the one from my first blog – so many times. The pattern remained the same with him each time. I’d believed that my trust issues – which are a story for another day (or not) – were the reason I questioned his motives or his actions. I thought he deserved an opportunity to show me I was wrong, but I also, probably more so, I simply, and desperately, wanted a life partner. I wanted him to be the man I needed him to be. I wanted to believe he could be and that he was – under all the muck – the man I so desperately wanted him to be. Each time, I convinced myself that the breakup was my fault, that he was innocent, that I was the big bad bitch, who had completely misunderstood, at best, who he was and why he did the things he did.

This last time, though, things were different.

I went into this knowing that there was a good chance he was a player of the nerdy, underestimated variety. Once again, I was in a significant amount of inner turmoil, and so I was vulnerable. More vulnerable than I allowed myself to acknowledge. But not vulnerable enough to not be paying close attention and taking mental notes. I was determined that this time I would either find out that he was genuinely amazing, and the relationship would work OR I would discover that I had always been right, and that he really was an asshole, disguised as a fellow depressive, in which case this would be the last time we ever dated. I made a promise to myself.

I’m happy to say that I’ve kept that promise. Yes, it has only been just over a month, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I will never be with that man again. If I’m right, and I truly hope that I am, this pattern of mine is now, finally, broken.

Of course, I can’t know this for certain until I start dating again. Will I fall into the pattern of desperation with a new partner? I’m hoping not, but I’m not going to find out any time soon. I need a lot of time to work on myself, to work on discovering why I’ve felt so desperate for someone to love me that I was willing to settle for someone I knew was so totally wrong for me, someone who could treat me so disrespectfully and cruelly. Until then, I’m not dating. In fact, I may never date, and for right now, I feel exceedingly good about that – instead of focusing on finding someone to love, I can focus on loving myself and finding out what I can do to share my love, and whatever gifts God/Goddess may have bestowed upon me, with the world.

But there’s more to say.

Now that I’ve finished talking about me yet again, I want to say something about my many sisters out there who are doing the same things I’ve been doing – desperately trying to find love in all the wrong places, lowering our standards to such a degree that there’s really no possibility of happiness anyway.

I’ve been getting lots of friend requests from men on Facebook. Men I don’t know. Men who, if you look at their profiles, are clearly not who they say they are and who have upwards of five hundred friends themselves, all of them women. I have my account set so that only friends of friends can send me a request. Women I love – yes, there’s more than one – are falling for the lies that these men are telling. Are they using that Facebook dating app? I don’t know. I have no idea how these men are finding these women, but I recognize a desperate woman ready to settle for lies when I see her because I’ve been there too.

I’m also part of a women’s support group, where many women have been sharing stories similar to mine – almost identical, in fact. Women – all of us – desperate for someone to love us, so desperate for someone to love us that we overlook gigantic red flags, that we excuse behaviour we would never allow in someone dating our mother, sister, daughter, or friend. For whatever reason, we seem to think that we aren’t worth more than that, that we don’t deserve someone who is good, kind, honest, and trustworthy. That for whatever reason, we somehow deserve the bottom of the barrel, the worst of the worst, the meanest most cruel charlatans out there.

Well, I’ve decided we don’t. We don’t deserve assholes.

We deserve better, much better.

I don’t care who you are or what you do or what you’ve done or haven’t done. We are all born worthy of love. We all deserve to be loved for who we are despite our past, despite our circumstances. More so, we deserve to be the person we love the most.

Yes, you read that right. We deserve to be the person we love most.

We must find a way to love ourselves – the good, the bad, the ugly. We must embrace our shadow selves and allow for us to be as human as we allow others in our lives to be. First and foremost, and always, we must show ourselves both compassion and unconditional love. If we don’t do that, how can we expect anyone else to?

To all my female friends who consistently fall for bad men, please stop. Please focus on you. Focus on loving yourself until you know for sure you will never again settle for less than you deserve. And you deserve the best – honest, authentic, kind, compassionate, trustworthy, respectful… and so on.

For those who will undoubtedly ignore this advice, please, at the very least, make a list. Make a list of red flags you will not ignore and when one shows up, end the relationship, and move on. Move on until you find the person who doesn’t raise any red flags at all. Put you and your well-being first. You’re worth it.