I"ll try to keep this short, no one wants to read a novel. I initially said "I don"t think she broke my heart", but after writing this out that"s a ridiculous thing to say looking back. But I also think she flipped a switch in my head permanently. It"s hard to explain, but I"ll try.
Some backstory about my personality first would help: I"m terrible with women. Always have been. A good example, and a sign of things to come, is when I was at a camp one summer when I was like 7 or 8. They had a dance one night, and I didn"t want to dance with girls. My sister was a counsellor or volunteer there, and I clearly remember her and a couple friends literally dragging me on the dancefloor. I guess you could chalk a lot of that up to immaturity, kooties and all that, but I think that story is pretty telling. I"m not gay, don"t even try saying that, posing naked for my gay photographer friend notwithstanding. With the occasional rare exception, I"m just poor at approaching women I"m interested in. It"s weird, I"m a fairly extroverted guy, I can hold a good conversation, I have no qualms striking up a conversation with a stranger male or female. But as soon as the stranger is an attractive member of the opposite sex that I would like to pursue, my mind goes fucking blank. I can"t think of what to say, do, anything. Once the ice is broken, I do fine, and luckily I"ve got lots of friends who recognize my issues and often do it for me god save them.
So yeah, due to the above, I"ve tended to be single pretty much my entire life. That"s also partially due to just flat out liking the freedom of being single and not having obligations.
So backstory done with, I had first seen this amazing looking girl when I was in grade 9. She had just transferred from another school from what I gathered, and was a year younger. Gorgeous, very unique and cool fashion sense, and had that intelligent look to her (as it turns out she was at best average intelligence, but hey). Being the coward that I was, I never approached her. Crushes came and went over the years, but she was always at the back of my mind. Fast forward to the end of grade 12 (I had zero girlfriends through grade school), Aprilish, and I"m thinking "shit I need a date for grad." 3 years after first laying eyes on her, I screw up the courage to approach her. Knowing I had no charm to woo her with, I just went with the direct approach. I walked up to her in the hallway where she was talking with some friends and asked her if she could talk for a second. We knew each other, but not well or anything (I was in the popular crowd for my grade, her grade was actually pretty lame and there wasn"t really a group like that in it). I asked her if she wanted to go see a movie (which was the Matrix, that was a great first date). She immediately says yes without hesitation, much to my surprise. The date went well, and when I dropped her off she asked if I"d like to come in. She was living with her 2 sisters and mom, and to my horror I ended up at the kitchen table chatting with all of them for like 2 hours. I say horror because initially I was like oh god this will be torture, but as it turned out it went really well, her mom was awesome and both sisters smoking hot (aside, her older sister was the body double for Rebecca Romaijn in X-Men) and it was quite fun. I got huge brownie points both from her and the family for it.
So everything went great, she came to grad with me, I got to take my dad"s Porsche, I was going in to engineering in the fall and pretty much on top of the world. Life was awesome the summer after I graduated highschool, I have so many great memories of those times. My relationship with her was great, she was a really awesome person and we thought we were madly in love with each other. In the fall I started engineering while she was still in grade 12. Notwithstanding the sausage party that my faculty was, I soon began questioning whether I should stay with her or not in large part cause of the hot ass running around everywhere. I felt like I was losing interest in her, it was a bit of a pain dating someone still in highschool and not 18 (drinking age here), all of my friends" highschool relationships were starting to break up, and like I said I really do enjoy being single. On top of that we still had not had sex, no blowjob, nothing other than making out and dry humping. She wasn"t religious or anything, she just wanted to wait awhile longer. Looking back I was a pretty big asshole about it, I tried to pressure her about it so much, I feel badly about that. So that aspect I think also played in to my decision to break up with her, all I heard from my friends was all the awesome sex they were having, and I wanted my piece of the action. And with 15,000 girls to choose from at university, how could I go wrong right?
So I broke up with her. It actually went quite well, I mean she balled her eyes out when I told her, but we agreed we"d remain on good terms and during our relationship (4-5 months) she"d become good friends with my group of people. I said I"d call her in a couple weeks once things had settled down and we"d go from there. Looking back, god I wish I"d not broken up with her but instead taken a break for a week or two, because after the couple weeks we started hanging out a bit as friends, and we"d see each other at parties etc, and I started to realize I had made a terrible mistake. As I said we were getting along great, there was no relapses of any kind, it was totally platonic. A month after we broke up I took her aside at a party and told her that I wanted to get back together with her. She said she"d have to think on it and would call me. Sure enough she called me and said that she didn"t want to, that for the first week after we broke up she was really heartbroken about it, but after that she had gotten over me really quickly and she wanted to remain friends.
And that just made me want her back even more. Looking back I did go a little strange, but she also misintrepeted some things as well. On top of that while I was dating her I"d observed she was really strange with her other exboyfriends. It"s hard to explain, so I won"t try. She just really got strange with exes. Initially that hadn"t happened with me, but after I made it known I still wanted her the flip switched and she started getting weird. She"d avoid me at parties, screen calls, that kind of thing. Again, I admit I was a little fucked up about it, but she was strange about it too. I can somewhat understand it, but not totally. Eventually she stopped hanging out with my group of friends, although she remained good friends with a couple (especially the above mentioned gay photographer, natch).
It took me a long, long, long time to get over it. Years. I descended into a pretty bad EQ addiction (if not EQ it would have been something else), did brutal my second term in engineering, stopped going out with friends much, and just kind went into the shitter. The following fall I dropped out of school cause I"d been doing so poorly, and was forced to work for my dad because I was basically playing EQ 18 hours a day and nothing else. It really fucked with my head.
So I got over it eventually (I"d still probably marry her in a heartbeat, I think I"ll always have feelings for her, but I no longer yearn for her. I think a lot of it is the old you want to have what you can"t thing). I still see her around every now and then, and she"s still really weird about it. She and a dozen other friends were over at my place before going to see Sam Roberts, and I"d bought all the tickets. She gave her money to the gay dude to give to me. I mean, this was 5 years after we"d broken up, I"d ceased being a weirdo and made every effort to just be cordial, not make passes at her, that sort of thing, yet she couldn"t even hand me 30 dollars and say "hey thanks for getting me tickets to a concert that sold out really fast despite me giving you the cold shoulder for the past 5 years." She cannot, I mean absolutely cannot, maintain eye contact if we"re talking. She constantly looks down or around. Conversations are really stunted and just incredibly awkward when I run in to her at bars etc (typically she"s there with other people I know, I don"t go out of my way to track her down or only talk with her, and again I"m just trying to be personable).
It"s just really fucking weird, and I don"t know what to make of it. I mean in the grand scheme of things it was a highschool relationship, big deal. I got pretty fucked up about it, but she claimed she was over me right away, so I"m not sure why she acts like she does. One of these days I should talk with the gay dude about her, come to think of it, I never have.
So, that"s the girl that broke my heart. It was kind of cathartic writing that out, actually. But I want as much to talk about the aftermath of that than the relationship or heartbreak itself. I mentioned a switch that got flipped by that whole mess. What I mean by that is that I don"t seem able to develop strong feelings for a girl for a long period of time anymore, and it"s starting to get concerning. Don"t get me wrong, I get crushes on girls all the time and I"ve dated dozens of girls since (okay a dozen, fuck you, I told you I"m terrible). But every relationship fizzles out after 3-4 months. I just hit a wall. With the first girl after the big heartbreak one, I started to get the same feeling I had before. "Oh fuck, here we go again" I think to myself. I dragged the relationship on longer than I should have in hindsight, cause I was terrified the same fucking thing would happen all over again, and ended up cheating on her and breaking up with her the next day. I still feel shitty about that, cause she was the nicest, sweetest girl ever, and her previous 5 year relationship had been very mentally abusive, and I went right ahead and did the same shit to her all over again. Thankfully, she"s so damn sweet and nice that she never held it against me and we remain good friends.
So I broke up with her, and my gut instinct was right, I had lost interest. It was the right decision. I was relieved by that. I ended up going out with the girl I messed around with a year later, and the same thing happened. Hit 3 months and lost interest. And it happened again. And again. And again. Every relationship I have had since has hit a wall at about 3 or 4 months where I lose interest and walk away with no regrets. While I said I like being single, I also like having a girlfriend and don"t much enjoy the initial dance and games inherent in dating. At this point of my life, I do want a relationship. None of my really close friends are married (the wider orbit of people are predominantly getting married though), but almost all are in very long term relationships. As Chamo said, I"m the perpetual 5th wheel. If there"s a concert in town that none of my friends want to go to, I either have to go by myself or just up and pay for someone"s ticket (cheap fucks, seriously). I want a girlfriend to hang out with, travel with, that kind of shit. Hell, I have more money than I know what to do with, and my "provider instinct" makes me want to buy shit for a girl, too. Send the gold diggers my way.
But I can"t seem to maintain interest in any girl I date past a few months. Maybe it"s just the simple fact that I haven"t met the right one, but I"m starting to question that, because I"ve dated some pretty awesome girls. It might partially be that I"m incredibly picky and OCD, and can find something wrong with fucking everyone with no exception. But I"m starting to wonder if maybe I got so screwed up over that first girl that I"ve created some kind of subconcious mental block or self defense mechanism to precludes me from falling in love again.
And that is the end of my Livejournal entry for the day. Thanks for reading, if you did.
