Without making the
conscious decision, I found myself on facebook stalking an 'ex'. I was staring at a
photo of them on holiday, wondering if they’d had sex with the person they had
their arm around. Wondering, staring, resentful, teeth grinding…
CONSCIOUS: Pull up Red 2! PULL UP!!
My
conscious mind manages to grab the controls of the plane and pull back hard,
pulling myself just clear of the mountains of jealousy.
CONSCIOUS: Phew. That was
too close!
This was no great love of
my life, of course. It’s merely someone who asked me out, who went out with me
for 5 weeks and then, with no prior warning, decided they didn’t want to see me
anymore. This is someone who’d told me they were “in love with my brain” and kept telling me how attractive I was. Positive indicators like that. Then, one morning, she
took the sum of my being, weighed it up and then, on a total whim, thought “Hmm….mmnaaaaah.”
Good old-fashioned no nonsense rejection.
It still singes a bit now. I said to
my friend: “She kicked me right in the ego.” My friend said “Are you sure that’s
not just you covering the fact you had feelings for her?” That’s backwards
thinking right there. When I was a teenager, I conflated everything with love.
If my mum didn’t get me the kind of sweets I wanted, I realised I was suddenly in love with liquorice comfits. Deeply in love.
No. I knew that the only
reason I was thinking about her is that I’d been canned. If I’d decided to stop
seeing her, she could be having a fivesome with The Wiggles and I'd be blithely indifferent. When you’re not in control of
things, anything that happens to you is the world’s greatest injustice. Also,
there’s the dread knowledge of knowing how cavalier you feel when you do the
rejecting yourself. “Why is she still messaging me? What does she think this
will achieve? Why doesn’t she have some self-respect?” And so I sit there and
think. “But she REALLY seemed to like me. And then she dropped me for nothing.
She can surely undrop me on a similar whim, right?” It’s pathetic. But these
are the classic symptoms of bruised pride. She caught me right in the soft dangly
bits of my ego. I still sit down gingerly.
Incidentally, it’s the
idea of being so disposable that bugs me. Even with a reasonable amount of
analysis, and MUCH has been expended, I can surmise that one of the man things I did wrong was that, on two occasions, I poured wine for myself first instead of her. Sounds laughably
superficial. Yet finding myself dumped hours after everything was fine through a vague
facebook message, I think it’s fair to put our ‘relationship’ in a laughably superficial
folder. See? I’m referring to the relationship as laughably superficial rather
than her. That’s good of me. A real gentleman. Well done, me. Classy...Actually. She was,
too. Flighty, whimsical, cat sucking bitch.
“I don’t know if you
should write ‘bitch’ Ed. People may think you’re a misogynist.”
“I’m referring to one woman.”
“Err…okay. Just don’t tell them you also like Bill Burr.”
The facebook message she
sent me referred to upside down cats. A sort of code of ours, from a happier
time (a day before) when all messages to me had x’s at the end. That’s when
I knew her profound love for me had dried up. She went from three x’s to none. The kisses were totally withdrawn from circulation. Messages post cat metaphor were "Hi!!! How are?!!! Bye!!!"
It wasn’t immediately apparent to me that I had been dumped but then it
occurred to me the next day, almost like it suddenly occurring to you that
there’s a draught in the house. I suddenly felt a shiver down my spine and thought "Where's that coming from? Wait...I think I'm dumped."
I have waded in the paddling pool of paranoia more than once so I showed the message to my sister at a family barbecue. I required the services of a female codebreaker that I knew loved me:
“That does seem final.” Fucking hell! Women, eh? Sorry. Woman, eh?
I had to call her to
clear things up. By which I mean, I had to call her to get her to dump me
properly. I didn’t even manage that. I hate awkward calls so I pretty much just
agreed with everything she said.
“Well, it’s not even like I’m dumping you because it’s not like we were going
out.”
“Exactly.”
No! Not exactly! Why am I saying that? Why are you agreeing with her? She's not going to sleep with you!
She can’t
just change her mind overnight. She should be a man about it: Change your mind overnight
and then wrestle with the decision for weeks and months! I then did something
worse. I gave her the easy way out. She still hadn’t dumped me to my
satisfaction, so I went with.
“Anyway, I’ve got to go to Edinburgh and you’re off on holiday, so we wouldn’t
see each other for a month anyway…so, we can just leave it for now and see where we are
after that’s all over.”
“…sure.”
I was trying to wrestle back some control, or at least make her tell me that “There’s
no way I’m seeing you again” instead she just thought ‘I’ll just stop replying
to any messages he sends. He’ll get the idea.’ I think I've used that one myself. Damn me for doing things to other people
that I wouldn’t want done to myself. Someone should have made a suggestion
about that. In a book or something.
In fairness I’ve never been really
affectionate to someone and taken them to my bed a lot just to hoof them after five weeks on a whim.
Weekend tops. After a week, you have a duty of care. You can look after a child for a weekend but any longer and you need to know about their medical history. Fact.
I say five weeks. We met
about 6 times in 5 weeks. That’s still a thing. We were sending each other messages every day. The weather was boiling hot the
whole time. I wore shorts every time. Even to a restaurant. She wore dresses. I
bet it would have lasted longer if I'd worn trousers...I don't mean worn, threadbare trousers. If anything, that would make it worse.
The worst thing about
this kind of thing is that there’s nowhere to get a refund or compensation for time lost. I
obviously can’t ask her for a full explanation. We were introduced by a mutual friend. I thought about
appealing to her. I have this strange idea that if some female friend of mine
vouches for the character of another female friend they’re less likely to dick
me about. And yet on three occasions the female friends of my female friends
have always turned out to be flirts, or flakes, or fluff. There’s a reason why your ‘lovely’
friend is single:
"But she's soo pretty and fun. I just don't understand why she's single."
(Me waving my hand in the air at the back of the class.)
"Ooh...ooh...I do."
In fairness, I’m single too. But mostly that’s because I’m
not really looking, rarely meet anyone I would consider being with and I don’t really earn any money to speak of. That wouldn't matter with all women, just absolutely almost every woman.
On our first date she
asked me how many women I’d slept with and I actually told her. I thought I was
being refreshingly open and honest, but think I made myself sound like a
snowplough. “You really shouldn’t sleep with these people so casually. It's not very nice..."
No, it’s much nicer to feign having deep affection for them, build
their expectations up over weeks and then dump them on a whim through the
metaphor of cats.
Yep. Right in the
Selfworthticles.
