Monday, September 27, 2004
Further to previous posts...
So I tell Rob that apparently, we have to go back and actually spend some time with my parents wherein they will be able to speak with him to assess him. Luckily enough, he agreed without even thinking too much about it, so we went and had lunch with them on the weekend. I will make the one comment that traffic in this town has gotten so horrible that I’m thinking of buying some sort of flying device so I can get places on time without being trapped on the road for hours at a time.
However, during our various conversations prior to the lunch, I asked Rob why he had been single when we met (!), and he answered (with a good answer) and threw the question right back at me. I glibly replied that if he had six or seven hours, I could probably tell him, but that did set me to thinking about it. Why was I single? What had happened? Should I shake my fist at the sky and scream “why?!!”?
The answer is no, it’s all OK. But I can chronicle my romantic life, which has been far from romantic at all, and there might be some clues here:
Boyfriend No. 1 – The Skid
When The Mac and I were chatting the other day, he said that all of the guys I brought home were instantly assessed by himself and my father to earn the inglorious badge of “wimp”, I did not remind him of Adrian. The relationship was short-lived (good thing, too), and as I actually remember the end of it before I went off on summer vacation, I recall he broke down crying more than once, so it wouldn’t have done any good to try to use him in my defense. But I was young (17), rebelling against my parents, and selected one of the shadier characters I could find at my high school to go out with. He probably dealt drugs. He smoked. He wore very torn clothing. After about two months of that, I was sorely disenchanted with him.
Boyfriend No. 2 – The Wimp
The original one, the one who probably initiated the term in my father’s and brother’s minds forever after, Craig was a very sensitive guy. He was nice. He was kind. He was gentle. He was responsible. He was everything that Adrian was not. But again, this was right around the time I left to go to University, so the relationship was short-lived. He probably had more potential than some of the others, though.
Boyfriend No. 3 – The First Serious One
Ah. This one. Darren. I met Darren in University, at Carleton. He was great. We got along well, had the same sort of sense of humour, and hit it off, despite the fact that Darren had dated my best friend at the time. Girls aren’t like boys, in that even if they don’t want you to date their exes, they won’t freak out about it, they’ll just trash-talk you behind your back and then get over it. Anyway, things with Darren went well for about a year or so, but fell completely apart when his parents moved back to the country from an extended period of service in Mexico (his father was a diplomat of some sort). When they moved back, Darren moved into the house with them, and we saw less and less of one another. In a completely self-defeating move, he agreed to move in with me for the summer nearly a year after he have moved in with his parents, but neglected to tell his parents. Torn between two sets of very high expectations (partially my fault), he was unable to deal with it, and presumably broke down at some point. His parents sent him off to Toronto, and I never saw him again. It was, at the time, a fairly devastating blow, but as you can see I survived and am totally better off for it. I mean, come on. You don’t want to end up with a Momma’s boy…
Boyfriend No. 4 & 5 – The Pair Who, Together, Would Have Made One Fine Guy
Ok. This is going to sound totally bad. I had just moved back to town after the horrible summer of despair after Boyfriend No. 3. I was working as a receptionist for an aerospace engineering firm, and there were two guys there interested in me. Yes, I know, it sounds completely absurd, but there were two of them. I dated one (Brian). We broke up. I dated the other (Frank). We broke up. I dated the first one again. We broke up again. I moved in with the other. Everyone was confused. It was terrible. As it turned out, I picked the wrong horse, and Frank turned out to be still married to his not-so-ex, and I moved out as quickly as I could.
Boyfriend No. 6 – The Lesson I Refused to Learn
So a couple of months after Boyfriend No. 5, I met this guy who was a friend of my cousin (the dope-smokin’ hippie). I was told how great he was, and how misunderstood he was, and I was wooed. Seriously, people, I was wooed, and I totally fell for it. There was even a midnight drive, and a gentle doe walked up to the car when we stopped to look at the freakin' stars... Again, in my defense, I can only say that I was young, and apparently completely stupid. This guy was married. Not divorced, not separated, not even just moving out for a few weeks to think about it. He was married. However, that didn’t stop anything, and we moved, he and I, to Toronto so he could pursue a career in disc-jockeying. Oh yeah. We got to The Big City, and he had no job, so I found something that would pay the rent (have I mentioned how stupid I am?) and paid all our bills. The first two weeks in our (MY – I was paying for it! It was MINE!) apartment were the toughest, because we had spent MY SAVINGS to get to Toronto (again, I am soooo stupid). We were down to our last two dollars (my last two dollars), which I gave to him with the instructions to buy bread and milk so we could survive until I got paid at the end of the week. However, when I returned to the basement suite at the end of the day, I found no bread, no milk, but an EMPTY BAG OF DORITOS AND A HALF-DRUNK PEPSI. His wife showed up about a month later, and he left (thank goodness). Sure, I was sad. I was still stupid. After she ditched him another month later, I let him move back into the place, and even gave up my job in The Big City to move BACK to Calgary with him so I could temp, yet again. The relationship ended very badly with me moving myself back into my parents’ house after he spent a weekend on an LSD bender with my cousin (the dope-smokin’ hippie).
Boyfriends Numbers 7 through 10
Yeah, yeah, I realize they’re adding up here, but I’m trying to be honest. After Boyfriend No. 6, I moved back into my parents’ house and went back to University. I was 23. I was good for a short while, and then it all sort of fell apart, which I blame entirely on being involved in PC Youth Politics. The conventions were bad. Take a large group of youth, shove them all into hotel rooms, set up HOSPITALITY SUITES (where free alcohol is foisted upon them at all hours of the night) and then see what they do. They smoke. They drink. They carouse. They have sex. That’s the way it goes. None of the guys I fostered relationships with during this time are worth detailing, except possibly the one who shaved his chest (McAllister). I really liked McAllister, for some reason. But I shook it off, and moved on.
Boyfriend No. 11 – The Mud Man
And after moving on from McAllister, I went to a bar one evening with a friend, and picked up this guy. Yes, probably a stupid thing to do. Yes, probably also dangerous. Yes, I would never do it again. I get it. But The Mud Man turned out to be really, really nice. We dated for about six months. His job prevented the relationship from progressing any further. How can you get things going with a guy who is never there? You can’t, is the short answer.
Boyfriend No. 12 – The Jackass
So I go to this party being thrown by one of my old political friends, and The Jackass is there. At the time, I did not realize he was a jackass, he was, in fact, quite charming and pretty nice to me. We laughed a lot, we talked for hours. I was on hiatus from drinking at the time, so I ended up driving everyone around that evening, including The Jackass. It’s right around Christmastime, so everyone is in a festive mood, and I give this guy my phone number. He calls me a couple of weeks later, and we spent about a month in a sleep-deprived haze of late nights. When the fog lifted, he became possessive, driven, jealous, conceited and generally unpleasant to be around. There were instructions issued at every turn. I was “not allowed” to go out with friends. I was discouraged from talking to others, especially about him. It deteriorated from there, and eventually, things got so bad that he went back to his ex-wife (anyone seeing a trend here?). That was not the end of it, though, because he stalked me for about three months after that, driving by my place late at night. You’d think that would be tough to do because there was one alley that went by my place, and I could see his car coming from about five blocks away. There were late-night phone calls. The phone would ring as soon I turned the lights on in my place after just getting home. He didn’t do anything, but it was enough to be irksome. After that, I swore off men for a while.
Boyfriend No. 13 – The Very Unlucky Number
Bear with me, folks, we’re coming to the end here. No. 13 was a bad one. I had been single for, oh, about three years after The Jackass. No men at all. I had been doing so well! But I worked with this guy, and developed feelings for him (yuck!), and sure enough, eventually I couldn’t resist asking him out. He was strange about it. He was all “Oh, you don’t want me…” and that should have been the first clue. Because if he says that, then he’s probably right, girls. Did I listen? NO. I thought he was nice. I thought he was cute. I thought he was great, at the time. He had two little girls he was raising by himself. Oh, how responsible! How endearing! Oy. I’ll continue. We started seeing each other, on the down-low, because he didn’t want people to know he was in a relationship (ANOTHER CLUE!!). After a few months, I started asking questions like “why don’t you want people to know?” and he stonewalled me (“if you love me, you’ll leave that alone…”). After about six months (look, I’m a really slow learner, here), I asked if he ever thought he’d want me to meet his family (including his two children), and he said he didn’t think he could do that. So we broke up. I’m not THAT stupid. But apparently, neither am I that smart, because about five months later, I ran into him again, and things sparked back up, and I said “I’ll do this if you can tell me that eventually, you’ll share the other parts of your life with me…” and he acquiesced. Only not really, because I only met the kids about seven months into it, and by then, I was disenchanted again, and stressed-out, and not enjoying things with him at all. He did not respect me one iota, and eventually, that’ll get to a person. It wasn’t just the thing with his family (although he did say that his parents never wanted to meet me because they were hoping he’d just get back together with the ex, who had abandoned her children, so maybe it wasn’t just him, maybe he was raised improperly by bad people), it was that he disrespected me with everything he did. He would be late, and not call. He would fail to show up entirely, and not call. I stuck with the whole horrible mess until one time, he just didn’t call or answer my increasingly worried calls for a week. That about did it for me. You know, if you don’t want to see someone any more, just tell them. There's no need to make stuff up about being committed to the mental hospital...
And that brings us to where I was about a year ago. I had many a conversation with The Mac about whether it was even feasible for me to find someone I could stand, let alone fall in love with. I have poor judgment, I admit it. I do stupid things, I admit it. I fall for guys and then ignore all of the gigantic, neon-arrow signs pointing out the fact that the relationships are not going to work. However, I am also very glad I have done so in my life, because it has gotten me to where I am now. I’m happy to have found Rob or that he found me – however that works out. I’m amazed by him each day. Bla bla bla mushy, mushy, mushy. I reel, just thinking about how NOT-terrible he is. He has never tried to hit me with a chair, and I don’t think that he would. He doesn’t seem to be secretly married (from what I can tell – hey, I’ve been wrong before…). He isn’t jealous and overly possessive. He is not controlled by his family, but rather seems to have a healthy relationship with them. I realize all of these are probably baseline acceptable to most of you, but coming from where I’ve come from, this is all gravy!!
The moral of this story is: be happy. You are where you are today because of what you did yesterday.
However, during our various conversations prior to the lunch, I asked Rob why he had been single when we met (!), and he answered (with a good answer) and threw the question right back at me. I glibly replied that if he had six or seven hours, I could probably tell him, but that did set me to thinking about it. Why was I single? What had happened? Should I shake my fist at the sky and scream “why?!!”?
The answer is no, it’s all OK. But I can chronicle my romantic life, which has been far from romantic at all, and there might be some clues here:
Boyfriend No. 1 – The Skid
When The Mac and I were chatting the other day, he said that all of the guys I brought home were instantly assessed by himself and my father to earn the inglorious badge of “wimp”, I did not remind him of Adrian. The relationship was short-lived (good thing, too), and as I actually remember the end of it before I went off on summer vacation, I recall he broke down crying more than once, so it wouldn’t have done any good to try to use him in my defense. But I was young (17), rebelling against my parents, and selected one of the shadier characters I could find at my high school to go out with. He probably dealt drugs. He smoked. He wore very torn clothing. After about two months of that, I was sorely disenchanted with him.
Boyfriend No. 2 – The Wimp
The original one, the one who probably initiated the term in my father’s and brother’s minds forever after, Craig was a very sensitive guy. He was nice. He was kind. He was gentle. He was responsible. He was everything that Adrian was not. But again, this was right around the time I left to go to University, so the relationship was short-lived. He probably had more potential than some of the others, though.
Boyfriend No. 3 – The First Serious One
Ah. This one. Darren. I met Darren in University, at Carleton. He was great. We got along well, had the same sort of sense of humour, and hit it off, despite the fact that Darren had dated my best friend at the time. Girls aren’t like boys, in that even if they don’t want you to date their exes, they won’t freak out about it, they’ll just trash-talk you behind your back and then get over it. Anyway, things with Darren went well for about a year or so, but fell completely apart when his parents moved back to the country from an extended period of service in Mexico (his father was a diplomat of some sort). When they moved back, Darren moved into the house with them, and we saw less and less of one another. In a completely self-defeating move, he agreed to move in with me for the summer nearly a year after he have moved in with his parents, but neglected to tell his parents. Torn between two sets of very high expectations (partially my fault), he was unable to deal with it, and presumably broke down at some point. His parents sent him off to Toronto, and I never saw him again. It was, at the time, a fairly devastating blow, but as you can see I survived and am totally better off for it. I mean, come on. You don’t want to end up with a Momma’s boy…
Boyfriend No. 4 & 5 – The Pair Who, Together, Would Have Made One Fine Guy
Ok. This is going to sound totally bad. I had just moved back to town after the horrible summer of despair after Boyfriend No. 3. I was working as a receptionist for an aerospace engineering firm, and there were two guys there interested in me. Yes, I know, it sounds completely absurd, but there were two of them. I dated one (Brian). We broke up. I dated the other (Frank). We broke up. I dated the first one again. We broke up again. I moved in with the other. Everyone was confused. It was terrible. As it turned out, I picked the wrong horse, and Frank turned out to be still married to his not-so-ex, and I moved out as quickly as I could.
Boyfriend No. 6 – The Lesson I Refused to Learn
So a couple of months after Boyfriend No. 5, I met this guy who was a friend of my cousin (the dope-smokin’ hippie). I was told how great he was, and how misunderstood he was, and I was wooed. Seriously, people, I was wooed, and I totally fell for it. There was even a midnight drive, and a gentle doe walked up to the car when we stopped to look at the freakin' stars... Again, in my defense, I can only say that I was young, and apparently completely stupid. This guy was married. Not divorced, not separated, not even just moving out for a few weeks to think about it. He was married. However, that didn’t stop anything, and we moved, he and I, to Toronto so he could pursue a career in disc-jockeying. Oh yeah. We got to The Big City, and he had no job, so I found something that would pay the rent (have I mentioned how stupid I am?) and paid all our bills. The first two weeks in our (MY – I was paying for it! It was MINE!) apartment were the toughest, because we had spent MY SAVINGS to get to Toronto (again, I am soooo stupid). We were down to our last two dollars (my last two dollars), which I gave to him with the instructions to buy bread and milk so we could survive until I got paid at the end of the week. However, when I returned to the basement suite at the end of the day, I found no bread, no milk, but an EMPTY BAG OF DORITOS AND A HALF-DRUNK PEPSI. His wife showed up about a month later, and he left (thank goodness). Sure, I was sad. I was still stupid. After she ditched him another month later, I let him move back into the place, and even gave up my job in The Big City to move BACK to Calgary with him so I could temp, yet again. The relationship ended very badly with me moving myself back into my parents’ house after he spent a weekend on an LSD bender with my cousin (the dope-smokin’ hippie).
Boyfriends Numbers 7 through 10
Yeah, yeah, I realize they’re adding up here, but I’m trying to be honest. After Boyfriend No. 6, I moved back into my parents’ house and went back to University. I was 23. I was good for a short while, and then it all sort of fell apart, which I blame entirely on being involved in PC Youth Politics. The conventions were bad. Take a large group of youth, shove them all into hotel rooms, set up HOSPITALITY SUITES (where free alcohol is foisted upon them at all hours of the night) and then see what they do. They smoke. They drink. They carouse. They have sex. That’s the way it goes. None of the guys I fostered relationships with during this time are worth detailing, except possibly the one who shaved his chest (McAllister). I really liked McAllister, for some reason. But I shook it off, and moved on.
Boyfriend No. 11 – The Mud Man
And after moving on from McAllister, I went to a bar one evening with a friend, and picked up this guy. Yes, probably a stupid thing to do. Yes, probably also dangerous. Yes, I would never do it again. I get it. But The Mud Man turned out to be really, really nice. We dated for about six months. His job prevented the relationship from progressing any further. How can you get things going with a guy who is never there? You can’t, is the short answer.
Boyfriend No. 12 – The Jackass
So I go to this party being thrown by one of my old political friends, and The Jackass is there. At the time, I did not realize he was a jackass, he was, in fact, quite charming and pretty nice to me. We laughed a lot, we talked for hours. I was on hiatus from drinking at the time, so I ended up driving everyone around that evening, including The Jackass. It’s right around Christmastime, so everyone is in a festive mood, and I give this guy my phone number. He calls me a couple of weeks later, and we spent about a month in a sleep-deprived haze of late nights. When the fog lifted, he became possessive, driven, jealous, conceited and generally unpleasant to be around. There were instructions issued at every turn. I was “not allowed” to go out with friends. I was discouraged from talking to others, especially about him. It deteriorated from there, and eventually, things got so bad that he went back to his ex-wife (anyone seeing a trend here?). That was not the end of it, though, because he stalked me for about three months after that, driving by my place late at night. You’d think that would be tough to do because there was one alley that went by my place, and I could see his car coming from about five blocks away. There were late-night phone calls. The phone would ring as soon I turned the lights on in my place after just getting home. He didn’t do anything, but it was enough to be irksome. After that, I swore off men for a while.
Boyfriend No. 13 – The Very Unlucky Number
Bear with me, folks, we’re coming to the end here. No. 13 was a bad one. I had been single for, oh, about three years after The Jackass. No men at all. I had been doing so well! But I worked with this guy, and developed feelings for him (yuck!), and sure enough, eventually I couldn’t resist asking him out. He was strange about it. He was all “Oh, you don’t want me…” and that should have been the first clue. Because if he says that, then he’s probably right, girls. Did I listen? NO. I thought he was nice. I thought he was cute. I thought he was great, at the time. He had two little girls he was raising by himself. Oh, how responsible! How endearing! Oy. I’ll continue. We started seeing each other, on the down-low, because he didn’t want people to know he was in a relationship (ANOTHER CLUE!!). After a few months, I started asking questions like “why don’t you want people to know?” and he stonewalled me (“if you love me, you’ll leave that alone…”). After about six months (look, I’m a really slow learner, here), I asked if he ever thought he’d want me to meet his family (including his two children), and he said he didn’t think he could do that. So we broke up. I’m not THAT stupid. But apparently, neither am I that smart, because about five months later, I ran into him again, and things sparked back up, and I said “I’ll do this if you can tell me that eventually, you’ll share the other parts of your life with me…” and he acquiesced. Only not really, because I only met the kids about seven months into it, and by then, I was disenchanted again, and stressed-out, and not enjoying things with him at all. He did not respect me one iota, and eventually, that’ll get to a person. It wasn’t just the thing with his family (although he did say that his parents never wanted to meet me because they were hoping he’d just get back together with the ex, who had abandoned her children, so maybe it wasn’t just him, maybe he was raised improperly by bad people), it was that he disrespected me with everything he did. He would be late, and not call. He would fail to show up entirely, and not call. I stuck with the whole horrible mess until one time, he just didn’t call or answer my increasingly worried calls for a week. That about did it for me. You know, if you don’t want to see someone any more, just tell them. There's no need to make stuff up about being committed to the mental hospital...
And that brings us to where I was about a year ago. I had many a conversation with The Mac about whether it was even feasible for me to find someone I could stand, let alone fall in love with. I have poor judgment, I admit it. I do stupid things, I admit it. I fall for guys and then ignore all of the gigantic, neon-arrow signs pointing out the fact that the relationships are not going to work. However, I am also very glad I have done so in my life, because it has gotten me to where I am now. I’m happy to have found Rob or that he found me – however that works out. I’m amazed by him each day. Bla bla bla mushy, mushy, mushy. I reel, just thinking about how NOT-terrible he is. He has never tried to hit me with a chair, and I don’t think that he would. He doesn’t seem to be secretly married (from what I can tell – hey, I’ve been wrong before…). He isn’t jealous and overly possessive. He is not controlled by his family, but rather seems to have a healthy relationship with them. I realize all of these are probably baseline acceptable to most of you, but coming from where I’ve come from, this is all gravy!!
The moral of this story is: be happy. You are where you are today because of what you did yesterday.
