Re: Relationships and Pain (a rant)

Thank you for the support, Catcher.

I guess I will never know how much of an impact I had on these women's lives. I like to think I added something very positive to their lives while I was still part of it, but it will likely never be known how much they appreciated what I brought into their lives during the brief time that they loved me.

The thing is, this last woman I was with, the one who just recently broke my heart, insisted that we form a committed relationship with each other, even though I was ambivalent about it due to both the physical distance between us and how much I have always been hurt whenever I fully give my heart to just one woman. She said I sounded like a "typical guy" who couldn't commit to just one woman, and she said she refused to share her man with any other woman (and, as a result, agreed to refrain from seeing other men; she said she ONLY wanted one). I believe that if she and I agreed to be just "friends with benefits" and allowed each other to be "free" to see other people, we may still be talking now. She was the one who insisted that we be exclusive with each other, and while I am capable of monogamy, I ALWAYS get hurt whenever I allow myself to develop such a close relationship with a woman. So though I have no choice but to accept the fact that she moved on to someone else, and I will not be consumed by hatred or bitterness, I am currently angry at her for not knowing herself better than that and for refusing to recognize her possible inability to commit to just one man, at least if a distance separates them, and for not being honest with me about it. She made me feel VERY bad about myself when I suggested to her that being exclusive may not be a good idea and that it could cost us all future contact between each other (she denounced such men as "man whores"), and she insisted that due to the number of female friends that I have (ALL platonic) that I would be the one to end up hurting her. And conventional wisdom constantly tells us that the older man is ALWAYS the one to hurt a younger woman in a relationship. That is total bullshit, and our society needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

This is what angers me; her inability to be honest about her own ability to commit to just one man. I would have had no problem with just a "friends with benefits" thing, and if she was more honest and agreed to that, she might not have felt the need to walk out of my life entirely and we might still be talking now and planning to visit each other in the future. And I also think that just vacating my life suddenly and abruptly like that, right after telling me that she was in love with me, was a very mean thing to do. I understand she could have been embarrassed to admit that she couldn't live up to the standards that she told me that I would be incapable of living up to, but it's also possible that she simply didn't give a damn anymore.

Also, Catcher, I think it's interesting to note that this particular woman also told me that if I really and truly cared about her, I wouldn't let her go (she said this to me when she once got mad at me and told me she was done with me, and I responded by simply deleting her name from my friend's list and moving on without begging her to come back to me). I told her that I have no control over what she does and would never expect her to give me control over her life, and that if she wanted to leave me, I'm not going to beg her to stay and I will have no choice but to move on. Hence, I haven't called her again once I realized that she wanted nothing to do with me anymore. Even though she may take this as a sign that I didn't truly care about her, the truth is I don't want to come off as a harrassing stalker. I have to face facts and I think she is well aware that I didn't want her to go. Perhaps later this week I will send her a brief offline message to let her know that I did really care but I don't want to come off as harrassing since she has moved on. Now it's time for me to do the same, yet again.