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To know where you’re going, you must first look at where you’ve been.

Hello friends, family, future book agent.

Miss me? I went on a bit of a hiatus to pursue flights of fancy. As you can see, I’m back here. So that worked out well. It didn’t seem genuine to me to “see about a guy” and continue to blog about dating. ( Gold star to anyone that gets the movie reference). So my apologizes if you were waiting with baited breath and ended up collapsing from lack of oxygen.

While reflecting on my most recent adventure, I start to look at where I started, and how I got to where I am today. For the most part, each relationship, and each heart break, has made me the person I am at this very second. This very moment. And I don’t think she’s too shabby.

So in an effort to be honest with not only myself, but with anyone who reads this; whether the reason be for humor, for advice, or to feel validated that they are not alone, I decided to do a bit of reflection on my past relationships. I am hoping this helps me figure out what I should do next because this whole thing is f*cking exhausting.

Up until recently, through no fault of my own (duh), when I date, I date for the long haul. YEARS, of my life with the same person. I have never been a serial dater. In part, because I was never single long enough to even try but also, because I don’t know what I am doing. Yes, there have been random flings in between, but nothing of significance or worth reporting on. The longest I have been without a boyfriend is a year. I haven’t had many boyfriends or “ guys who act like my boyfriend but won’t say the word ‘boyfriend’ but basically are my boyfriend”, but I devoted my time, efforts, emotions, feelings, and heart to these guys. I try not to regret single moment of it. I even let them touch me (literally).. which most of you know.. is a BIG deal.

—

AC

Ahh, first love. June 23, 2001 at 8:23 pm ( yes I know the time and date.. get over it.) I started dating my first boyfriend. We dated for four years. You know how they say that opposites attract? As anyone who saw us together can tell you, we were opposite in every way. He was religious. I wasn’t/am not. He liked to hunt and kill things. I didn’t. He enjoyed Tupac and believed he was going to rise again. I didn’t (weird, right?) . But somehow we got along…very well.

He was my first everything. My first hand hold, first ''I love you'' , first meet the parents. I met him the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school. I thought it was a sign because that’s when my parents met each other. They were high school sweet hearts. He was a year older than me. It was such a whirlwind of newness for me. This was before cellphones and texting. We would see each other at school, talk on the phone, and spend every second we were allowed, together. I don’t even know why, because all he did was play Grand Theft Auto. But I was happy.

I was a naive girl who thought that all I had to do was follow this path laid out clearly in front of me and I would be married with kids by the time I was 25. (That’s apparently what I wanted at the time..thank goodness that didn’t happen.) Especially because he told me that he wanted to marry me. I had stars in my eyes.

The first 2ish years were great. He went to college a year ahead of me and even though I vehemently denied it, I followed him to college. ( Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I didn’t make that decision.) My friends were his friends.. his friends were my friends. Life was good. But life caught up to us, as life tends to do.

One night, I was at a party for New Years Eve. I had drank a bit too much, and had fallen asleep on the party hosts bed. I woke up to the host (his now wife) running in the room naked with him close behind trying to cover her up with a blanket. That night he slept in bed with me and the girl.. with him in the middle. That was the beginning of the end. Rumors started to circulate that he was cheating on me. Even though he denied it, they never stopped. I would get phone calls from people all the time with things they saw, things they heard. But for some reason, I stuck by him. I believed him no matter what evidence there was to the contrary. Then I started to catch him. There was moment where one of the girls had to lock herself in her car at Walmart because I was in a blind rage… but I digress. But I thought I could fix it. I thought I could make him want me. But in the end, that wasn’t the case. He ended it with me via a phone call, but I severed ties all together about a year later. Took about a year after the breakup to decide that I didn’t want him in my life anymore.

I learned so much from that relationship. I learned what my breaking point needs to be. I learned what I should tolerate from the people I care about. I learned that everything is not always sunshine,roses and happiness. Most importantly, I learned that if someone wants to cheat on me, to let them go the second a whisper of it starts. Because no one that deserves me will cheat on me. I grew a hard shell around myself after that one. He was the first scar on my heart. I have him to thank for a lot of who I am and he knows it.

—-

JL

This one is a bit questionable I will admit that now. Looking back at a lot of red flags that I ignored and pretended weren’t there. I met him on Facebook, probably a month or two after I finally called it quits with AC. He was from Lexington, KY. He was a year younger than me. He was very handsome, and kind, and everything I wanted in a guy. We were in a pool game together. Remember when Facebook first started their games? It was then. We started talking on hotmail messenger after that an we never stopped. For eight years. He called me that night and almost every night after that. We talked until the sun came up. We texted. We messaged. We talked.. and talked..and talked. Again. complete. polar. opposites. We were both stubborn and head strong and willful. We were friends for the first two years and it developed into something more. It was on and off over those six years. It is important to note that I may have been catfished. I never saw him. I never met him in person. I only knew him from Facebook photos he would occasionally update. He claimed he didn’t have a cell phone with a camera. I was supposed to meet him when I went to KY for a trip for work a few years ago, and he cancelled on me last minute. For someone who spent every waking second talking to me, and told me that he loved me, he didn’t have a lot of answers for a lot of things. He said he had cancer. Stomach cancer to be exact. He would call me in the middle of the night crying in pain. But he wouldn’t/couldn’t answer a lot of questions about it. Then he developed a problem with his brain. We started to drift apart because I just didn’t believe him. We fought about everything. I tried to pretend like the blaring warning signs weren’t there. Coincidentally, as soon as the texts on his phone turned from green to blue (not iPhone..to iPhone) he stopped answering my texts. He stopped calling me. He never answered the phone when I called him. He even blocked my number. I try not to think that I wasted a lot of the good years of my life on a guy that didn’t actually exist. But the reality is… I probably did.

This one didn’t break my heart as much because it was a slow fade. It was expected. It still stung because we always talked about being in each others lives no matter what. I learned from this one I need to trust my gut and when my gut tells me something is off, it’s right. I learned that I need to recognize when I am wasting my time.

—–

JH

This one… although the shortest of my relationships burst my heart into confetti when it ended. I met him in April of this year. About a year-ish after JL and I stopped talking. It was the longest stint I had without being in a relationship. We met on Tinder. He was a truck driver from West Virginia. He was just doing the trucking for the summer to pay for grad school. His opening line to me was what got me. It was funny and creative. It was something along the lines of “ Helloooo you’ve just won the chance to talk to JH… press 1 for English (but he spelled English wrong) and press 2 for spanish.” Something like that. And knowing me, I jumped on the fact that he spelled English wrong. We talked for a bit, exchanged numbers, said goodnight. Didn’t talk for a few days and then one friday night in late April, he texted me and then he called me. We didn’t stop talking for a month (sensing a pattern here?) He was tall (6′6′’) and handsome and thought I was the best thing since sliced bread. He told me every day how special I was. We skyped ( so I knew he was real) and the way the looked at me was the way every girl should be looked at by a guy. As my friends said, I was like a puppy with a constantly wagging tail. I’d never fallen so hard so fast. I talked about him.. a lot. He asked me to be his girlfriend because “he had to have me.”…it was like a freaking fairytale come true. There were somethings I was ignoring, he was former army ( not that there’s anything wrong with that), very opinionated, very alpha male, lived in West Virginia and had a daughter. Despite all of those thing I had the “this is it” feeling. I thought that the universe was finally paying me back. Boy was I wrong. He was supposed to come see me the weekend he broke up with me. His mother had fallen and broken her ankle and both her wrists ( Facebook photos verified this.. I stalked). He was quiet all weekend but I figured it was because he was dealing with his mother. He called me Sunday night and wasn’t himself from the second I answered the phone. He sounded monotone and disconnected. He said that he decided that he wanted to get back into the military.. it was his “calling” and because our relationship was so new and he saw it going places, that he was making the decision that he didn’t to bring me along the ride through his life in the military. He said “no good woman deserves to be put through that kind of stress”. I told him that it should be my decision to make regarding what I can and cannot handle. He said his decision was made..the end. He told me that it wasn’t goodbye.. it was “talk to you later”. I wrote him a letter on Facebook. A week later I was blocked and I never heard from him again. I have never gone from such a high, to such a low in my life. I fell into a deep depression. I was not fun to be around for a good month. I ended up going to therapy to try to get out of my funk. It was BAD. To think that from the end of April to the end of May, that my life could have been rocked so hard makes me realize how much more growing I still need to do.

I don’t talk about that one much to anyone because it broke my heart in every sense of the word.

I think he is the reason I am so hesitant about online dating. Because it works.. it works very, very well. But then it also explodes in your face. I try not to be jaded. But how can I not be. I wonder how I can trust again? I wonder how I can let someone get that close again? I wonder how I can believe anything any guy says to me again? I have so many unanswered questions

It is important to note that I have some abandonment issues from past friendships that ended in similar ways ( the ‘just stop talking to me’ way.. super fun, let me tell you) and this solidified those issues in stone. I know I am still recovering from it. Even though he sits in the back of mind now, instead of the forefront, I know that this is a wound I will be licking for a long time.

—

The most recent guy didn’t break my heart. I have no stories to tell. He is my friend. That’s all.

—–

I guess that whole thing was just as much for me as it for anyone reading this. Like the title of the entry says “ To know where you’re going, you must first look at where you’ve been.” I think I needed to reflect out in the open, in writing, for all to see, what I went through, and what I learned, and what I’m afraid of. Instead of it working it out just in my head, it’s in front of me on “paper”.

I think one of the lessons is: Don’t date anyone whose name starts with J.

Another lesson, it’s probably a bad idea for me to talk about a guy out loud to other people. That’s when it seems to all go down hill for me.

I am still questioning if I am ready to date. If I should keep trying. I’ve deleted tinder because it has too many bad memories associated with it. I wonder what I should try next.. if I should try. I struggle a lot with continuing to on through the trenches. I wonder how much I can take. But as I stated in my first blog, I am such a karma/universe/fate kind of girl that I would be remiss to think that I could ever truly give up on the idea of love.

I guess when the right one comes along all my hesitations and fears will melt away. That hasn’t happened yet and I suppose there is a reason for that.

I guess we are all damaged from our previous relationships in some way. I try to tell myself that it’s worth it. I try to tell myself that the universe owes me.

Maybe it does.. maybe it doesn’t. I guess I will know when I become a cat lady.

But, in some way, as one of my favorite authors has famously said…

“We are all fools in love” - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Sorry this one wasn’t as quippy as my others.

More to come,

M.

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