This is me using very much effort to not make a post I ought not make.
If you could hear me, this is what me not saying the things I want to say would sound like.
There are questions I want to ask, questions I want the answers to.
I suspect that the answers do not exist.
Which of them can I safely ask here?
This isn’t the first time I’ve had the confusion I’m experiencing here.
Maybe I just fall in love with a particular type of person who … thinks this way.
Here’s a question: Which part of passionately and repeatedly kissing me is supposed to communciate to me that you just want to be friends?
Here’s another: Am I really supposed to be able to tell that when you say you love me, what you actually meant was that you want me to be your friend and nothing more?
How about this one: What part of going to bed with me is intended to imply that you don’t ever want to be physically or romantically involved with me?
Any of you. I have a list of women who have, apparently, meant these thigns by these words and deeds, and if any of them would like to offer an explanation, you have my email address. I keep doing this to myself.
I keep expecting that when someone kisses me it is because they want to kiss me, that when someone tells me they love me and when they begin to make dates and plans for our future together that it means they love me and are dating me and want to spend their future with me, and that when someone then also becomes physically intimate with me, especially on more than one occassion and/or after long discussion of the meaningful nature of physical intimacy within the framework of an existing emotional and interpersonal intimacy, that they’re doing so because that is what they intend to do, want to be doing, and mean.
Apparently to expect such things often leads to failure, heartache, pain and confusion.
It isn’t just the most recent example, though that is what has led to this current incensed mood. It’s half a dozen women in the last several years. It’s even something I’ve been lying to myself about Sara about; she’s another version of the same story. I just hate to think about it that way, so most of the time I like to pretend she’s somehow different. She isn’t. Timing being perfect, she re-iterated that to me this morning, in her own way.
Fine. Fuck me for not listening to you all these years, and fuck you for only wanting to be my friend when you’re having relationship trouble – you and all the ones like you.
Yeah, yeah, you “love” me. But not in “that way”.
How’s the story go?
We meet, I’m interesting to you, I’m interested in you, you want to find out more about me.
One way or another I find myself in love with you. And you appear, in every way I can detect, and say, answering in every way I can imagine to ask, that you’re in love with me.
We keep getting to know each other, and as far as I can tell, things are moving forward normally and we’re growing together into a ‘couple’. There is definitely kissing, passionate, full-bodied kissing that seems to connect us unimaginably. There may be more, and usually we end up in bed at least once.
Immediately after we end up in bed… that’s not right… usually a few days or even weeks before we end up in bed together, you decide irrevocably that we should only be friends, but you can’t seem to just tell me, even when we end up in bed together, physically intimate. Except that then, afterwards, sometimes soon, sometimes after long periods of quiet that leaves me to wonder, you DO finally let me know.
And then … somehow … you … all of you, each one after the other … you actually believe and expect that we can go forward just being friends.
And don’t understand why I don’t want anything to do with you.
…
Now, some of the women who put me through this I don’t want anything to do with because it actually IS easier for me to just not see them anymore. To try to be their friend, the entire time loving them and wishing I could be so much more, is very painful and difficult and requires a lot of careful thought and cautious effort.
With others it’s for other reasons, such as the fact that they all, every one but the most recent (it hasn’t been long enough – give her a month or so), have found someone (or in at least two cases, gone back to someone) that reminds me (and anyone who knows me well) of me, and who doesn’t like their girlfriend/fiancee/wife spending time with her ex-lover… sometimes to the point of trying to hurt me… though I must admit I’ve only had people show up at my door intending to do me real physical harm once or twice so far… and I really don’t want to be “that guy” that boyfriends hate.
anyway… yeah.
The women that do this to me … I’d like to understand what they thought they were doing, what process they went through that led to this same final result, all of it… but generally, I don’t actually want anything to do with them anymore. They were lying then or they’re lying now or … well, they’re too fickle to be worth my time. Or some combination, but any of those is … too much.
I want friends who never made me fall in love with them only to turn the love they offered in return off like a switch, leaving me high and dry and in pain.
I want friends who don’t have to manipulate me (whether they’re manipulating consciously or not is not an important distinction here) to get me to have strong feelings for them. – Yes, I’m going to remember you, but not the way you want.
yes, I feel strongly about you, but it isn’t that I trust you and want to invest and confide myself in you. I feel strongly that i don’t want anything to do with you anymore, ever again, if I can avoid it. I feel strongly as though you intentionally played me…
…and with feelings especially, perception is reality. If everything I can see in the world tells me that everything you ever did was part of a lie or half-truth or miscommunication, if you tell me now that when you held my hand, touched my leg, kissed me, told me you love me, talked about forever and children and houses and hopes and dreams and that even when you had me inside you that you never meant for me to think you wanted to be any more than “just friends” – this I cannot believe, I cannot reconcile.
Yes, it’s too late now, for all of you. I already love you. There will always be a part of me that loves you, wants you in my life, more than friends, and forever. There will always be the desire to spend more time with you, get to know you, get close to you. I may forget how I’ve been feeling this week (and every one like it) AGAIN, and I may ask you out to dinner and a movie, or out for coffee or back to my place – and knowing you, you’ll probably say yes without knowing you’re just building my hopes up or creating a false impression in me. And I’ll go through this all over again.
And fuck.
I don’t want to.
How can I stop this?
How can I have faith and hope and love, how can I have trust, believe what people say and do, and not just keep running into this?
At this point I’m almost 100% sure there’s something I’m doing that’s causing this, bringing this on, generating this behaviour in the women I love… but I don’t know what it is, and apparently I can’t stop. Anyone care to try to help?
Fuck.
I’m going to bed.
And right now, I don’t care if this says too much. If you already know, you already know, and if you don’t, ask, and … I doubt there’s some magical piece of information hidden in here that will bring it all together, but … I’m not feeling well. So maybe there is.
I hate secrets, but…
I still care about these people, somewhere in there, and I always will.
So a certain amount of discretion is prudent.
I should go to sleep.
Why is my life so fucked up?