After reading Holly’s post from yesterday, I find myself reflecting on my life and, more specifically, my relationships. In the post, she talks about Doug Hutchinson marrying a 16-year-old, but when I first read the title, “When love is more destructive than sex” I really thought it was about something else. The title by itself evoked a feeling from me that I don’t have nearly enough, a feeling that I deserve more than I think I do. And I thought that the post was going to discuss how hurtful it can be when there’s sex without love, but one of the partners is experiencing it as sex WITH love. I was surprised to find I was wrong, but at the same time realized it’d be a good topic for a blog post of my own, especially since I haven’t been serious in awhile.
I’ve had quite the menagerie of relationships in the past decade or so. Many of those relationships were like this:
… idealized, over-dramatic, volatile, impractical, and often destructive. When two teenagers fall in love, they may do stupid things, but they really didn’t know any better.
And then when I hit 16, they changed to more like this:
When I was a teenager, I thought True Love conquered all. I thought if it was really True maybe it would last forever and we’d get married and have babies and a house of our own. I wanted to be by my True Love’s side all the time, damn the damage to the rest of my life–in fact, I even thought the damage was sort of romantic, because it meant I was sacrificing for Love. I thought that True Love means thinking that your Lover is perfect and worshipping them. And if he asked me to do things I didn’t want to (rarely sexual, more often in terms of disrupting my studies and friendships), saying “no” wouldn’t be very Loving, would it?
But around 19 or so, I started dating older men and it was like this:
… being idealized by someone, having them treat you like you’re Edward Cullen and you’re made of unicorn kisses and it’s so cool that you have a car…
Currently, my ideas on love are a mash-up of all three. I like men my age, because we can be irresponsible and have fun together and just go nuts, and we can blame it on alcohol and/or being young. I like throwing myself 100 percent into relationships because I know that if I hold something back, and it fails, I’ll think it was my fault for not opening and giving myself to him completely (emotionally, people, jeez). I like older men because they’re more mature, accomplished, stable, and (sometimes) romantic. They usually have steady jobs that will be lifetime careers, a house or apartment of their own, and their ducks are in a row.
The problem with dating guys my age is that they are immature and financially unstable and totally volatile emotionally. But the problem I’ve discovered with dating older men is that they are usually broken. The reason they’re still single is because something fucked up their heart at some point and they just never recovered. Something huge had to have happened to cause it, yet the man usually won’t tell what it was, so it leaves me in constant fear that I’ll do the same thing to him again and that’d be just terrible.
However, no matter what the age difference between me and a partner, I’ve always had a hard time separating sex, love, and infatuation from each other.
Many times, I’ve mistaken infatuation for love and it usually ends a little painfully, but overall it’s okay. We really liked each other and we burnt it out too quickly. Or I really liked him and he tried but just couldn’t so we got really close but then ended it. Or the reverse, he got really close and I couldn’t so I ended it.
The problem scenario for me is, and has been for years, mistaking sex for love. I tend to jump into relationships entirely too quickly, put my whole heart into it, get completely absorbed by him, and just let him completely permeate my existence. Then I allow it to go too far, too fast, and it results in sex before it really should. The problem here is that I then get so emotionally attached because of the sex, I can no longer figure out if the guy likes ME or only certain parts of me. Nor can I establish if I actually like him and am falling in love with him, or if that’s happening just because we had sex. And the worst part: it can’t be undone. Once you tip the scales to involve sex before there’s love, it’s nigh impossible to make love the influential weight, or even to level them out again.
The hurt I’ve felt because someone didn’t love me the way I loved them, or even LIKED them, has been nothing compared to the pain I’ve felt when I realize there’s no love behind the sex. There may be some sort of affection and caring, but it’s not actually love. Though he may say that he loves me, that doesn’t make it true. (Of course, the reverse is also true: If he doesn’t say he loves me, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel that way, though why a guy wouldn’t just say it… boggles the mind.) And though I’ve continually told myself that if I just hang in there, eventually he’ll really love me, I know that it’s a fallacy and that I’m putting myself through more pain than necessary. Yet, I also know from my past experiences that I will do just that. I will always keep going. I will not give up until it’s simply too much to bear.
I will continue to put myself out there 100 percent. I will continue getting pushed around, and hurt, and taken advantage of, and disrespected. I will continue to not get what I want or deserve. But I also will continue having the good times while they last, and enjoying the feeling of being around someone I care about.
If I don’t try, I’ll never know. So yes I’ve “slept on the floor” just to be near someone, and taken off of work to help them with something trivial, and driven an hour to spend 30 minutes with them, just because he wanted me to. I know it’s destructive. I know it’s ridiculous. And I know it’s a volatile way of life, but I also know this:
If I don’t put my whole self into it, and risk putting my heart in his hands, why should I expect him to do the same?
Tags: pervocracy, PostAWeek2011, relationships, the past
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Hey again, Data. Spitfire here.
Another good read you’ve got here. There was definitely something that stuck out to me that I agree with. Regarding what you said about older men (and I assume you mean for this age group to be 25+) and why they stay single in your view, I’d have to say that this is for the most part correct. It happens to ALL men. And for a lot of us, the older we get, the worse it becomes…especially if it’s never addressed or expressed properly. (How we go about doing that and NOT be called a pansy/wuss/punk/whiner, etc is beyond me, to be completely honest.) Those who have had really horrible luck with women suffer especially; you already know that I’m pretty deep in that category. Well, anyway, here’s the scenario:
We get out of a bad relationship, or we have little to no experience in that realm of our lives…in many rare instances, sometimes both. We meet this one [supposedly] INCREDIBLE girl/woman, we idolize her, we idealize her, and we commit the sin of pedestalizing her without even KNOWING that’s NOT what you’re supposed to do…and then for one reason or another, she lets us down completely. She leads us on, she lies to us, she flakes, etc, etc, and to add insult to injury, tries to force us into the friend zone. Not many of us are equipped to handle any of this, so we find ourselves going through the motions of it all. I’m probably not doing the best job of describing the whole hellish process, but know that it’s still pretty painful all the same. At the end of the day, our ideal, or dream is essentially crushed under the weight of reality and disillusionment. We in turn are also crushed. The one that we thought was going to somehow be different turns out like all the others, and so the deep cut is left to turn into a scar. We’re traumatized, and unable to jump back out into the game knowing that:
1) We’ll never find another girl like that; despite what she did or didn’t do, she’s still that unforgettable.
2) We’ll ultimately be crushed again if we were to so stupidly put ourselves out there like that again.
Even men who are MARRIED, and who love their wives more than anything in the world still wrestle with something like this. I’ve talked to a few. It’s not a very easy thing to get over. Then, as another scenario, you’ve got the ones who are in seriously committed and good relationships that suddenly–and for whatever reason–go south. That’s pretty damaging, too. And in many cases, that’s damage that can never be fully repaired. I won’t even go into what you and I discussed a few days ago, about my theory about men who grew up with strong, positive fathers and equally positive older brothers who actually cared about their personal development as opposed to men who grew up with overbearing, domineering mothers, weak, kee-towing fathers and uncaring siblings.
(More to come later.)
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Spitfire again, continuing on where I left off…
Things are only made worse the better looking the woman happens to be, along with how nice or pleasant they appear to be. It’s just a cluster(REDACTED) of epic proportions.
Returning to what I’d mentioned before about men not being adequately equipped to handle what this jacked-to-all-hell culture and society has thrown at us since birth, there needs to be some kind of safe forum for men like us which allows us to express how we feel about things like this…being so deeply scared, being played, etc…and NOT be judged for it. Because for those people who tell us to “man up” and deal with it…how much do they actually know about manning up? And are they qualified to teach us? I’ll bet about a month’s worth of my pay that the answer is “no.”
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Thanks for the comments. It’s always great to get feedback on my blog. And you take the time to be insightful and share how you really feel about the topic. And it is for that reason that I even have a blog, because I love to, and need to, share my thoughts with people. If no one reads it, then there’s little point to the blog. Thank you for caring enough to post your thoughts publicly. It’s much appreciated.
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