I met someone unexpectedly and started to care from him. Misunderstandings arose, the time came for us to part ways, he never fit the bill of what I was looking for anyway, and my expectations for what a friendship/courtship deepened by distance might be were never realized. I saw him a few months ago, which was for the first time in months, and it wasn’t the tear stained, steamy passionate reunion I had hoped for, and which I gauged in my mind as his feelings for me and our ‘potential’ as a couple, much as during the time we were more or less together I didn’t really think of us as a couple sice it didn’t happen, or at least, I wasn’t aware of it happening until the time came to leave.
I leave off writing him emails for a while, and think he’s just forgotten about me and will just go away, since I feel like I’m the one initiating everything, and then he gets in touch when I least expect it. I know that might seem like a red flag of a sort of abusive, well not abusive, but unhealthy relationship, and it’s not ideal, but maybe it is also proof that sometimes love doesn’t always speak; sometimes it just listens. And just because someone doesn’t hold on to you, doesn’t premature cleave to you, doesn’t mean that you are nothing to them. Just because there’s not a clear label on it, and nothing seems to go as you expect, doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.
And, as I have learned time and again, that there is even anything worth stressing about. it’s not always the stupid dude, the truth is it’s your own expectations and clinging and attachment to a certain ideal of what love should look like that is making you suffer. Love actually is all around, and not having a dude to cling to makes you realize how much stable and deep the relationship S in your life already are. When he does show some sign of affection, it IS just gravy.
Sometimes this guy makes me feel crazy because I am crazy. I am crazy like every unenlightened being, although we’ve all got Buddha nature or amazing grace or something like that. I am crazy because I know what love should look like. I am crazy because I’ve got it all planned out. I am crazy because I have deadlines and milestones and an idea of what I should be doing five or ten years from now. I am crazy because I am tempted to close my heart to someone wonderful just because they come from a differet religious and cultural background from mine. I am crazy because I don’t neven want to be tied down to him from the second I return to France but I want him to pursue me and try to lock me down. I am crazy because my friends don’t really like the idea of him that much and maybe they are right but the truth is that I know that I am a crazy one in this relationship and the tales I tell them and myself are SO distorted by all the expectations I have laid on them. I am crazy because I expect to get what I want even though I’m afraid to even tell this poor guy what that is, and then get mad at him because I don’t trust him because I don’t trust he really likes me because sometimes I don’t really like myself or ever feel I’m good enough even though I’m working on that.
I have tried to push him away so many times, to box him into a corner of disappointing me. I have fantasized about him acting so inappropriately I had to end things and just revise my vision of him as a total cad from day one, a very simple BLACK in a world of black and white where I am always the helpless wronged, self righteous victim. I have feared and hoped and tried somehow to label the boxes in my mind in some way that I can just kick him to the curb like so much trash because he TERRIFIES me.
not him, actually. I knew from the moment I met him that he’s a gentle soul, and in over a year of knowing him I can’t think of one unkind thing he’s sad to me. I can think of countless times I wished he would say more and there have been so many times I wished he would just call or write or tell me in some unmistakable unshakably certain way that he loves me and wants me and needs me and all of my care is not for naught, but I honestly can’t think of any times he has deliberately hurt me. He has been thoughtless and careless bordering on rude, and he can be, like the rest of us, a bit selfish at times, but never ill-intentioned. Not so far as I can tell, much as I’m always slightly afraid he just wants a little American princess arm candy golden ticket to the US but I know him well enough to think his pride and principles make that an unlikely scenario, and last time I checked he didn’t treat me like a princess. He treats me like a person, which I have always demanded but sometimes love and sometimes hate.
The truth is that all I want to do, really, is crawl into his lap, for him to take my hand, to embrace him and cry like I did when he left and see he’s crying too because he’s so moved at seeing me again and the fact that we have another shot. That as much as I have long drawn out sex fantasies with him, it’s really just the time that he reached over and pulled my legs into his lap and put his arm around me while we watched tv, or when he called me my heart just after we made love or had sex or something like that and we were both clothed and he was attending to dinner.
And how all this could be reconciled with the fact that j’aime Paris I ❤ Paris, and supposedly to be a Parisian is not to be born there but to be reborn there, that that place makes me happiest and most content in all the world, even though I feel like I should put mind over matter and be happy anyplace but that's where my heart is. ANd that's where he is, where I met him, and I have learned through the cold spells and frustrations of our long distance communication that it is definitely not him that I am coming back for. And he loves New York, thinks Friends is a good tv show over How I met Your Mother (facepalm!), would rather be in America, would probably trade and suffer a lot to get here when it's my birthright to be here, and all that jazz. The fact that I don't want to get too caught up in SUVs and big houses full of stuff and a consumerist workaholic lifestyle, and in some way that's something he wouldn't mid having. The fact that I read, and he watches TV. I do yoga and lift weights and go to the gym for fitness, and he plays soccer and swims and even watches sports on TV. The way he gels his hair and I hate it and just ignore it in favor of his other charms. The fact that I am a crazy free spirit cum careerist with an MBA who loves living abroad, and he just wants his family to be happy and feels stuck working very hard and is in Paris for a bette job, a better life that stresses even him out.
I thought he was just a naturally happy go lucky easy going person. Now he seems worn out and busy. Maybe he was just happy to see me.
They say not everything has to be serious, and it was a good lesson to learn. I never thought this would have even a hope of being serious in my rational mind, or maybe that was just a defense mechanism that actually enabled me to let go and enjoy the moment for change and actually enabled this to manifest.
I don't know if it will last forever, if he's the one, if we are perfect for each other. He's not my best friend, and he hasn't been my lover for a long while. I don't really know if we want the same things, and I often suspect that we don't. I say I want a chance at a serious long term relationship, a real boyfriend, that I can see a future with, and that said guy has to have XYZ qualities and has to do what I want as I want it and no friction and no deal breakers. That guy hasn't shown up yet, there's a chance he might but I suspect that's not the answer.
The answer is to stay open, realizing that this guy, the one that is actually a presence in my life, the real person who responds to my emails and who I will have a very good shot at seeing in less than a month, and with whom a relationship might be logistically possible, is going to shatter my expectations. If a real love relationship blossoms, I will not get what I thought I wanted, and I will not likely get everything I want based on what I already know about him and is quite unlikely to change. If I walk away from him and somehow cut him off in order to make room for some new relationship to manifest that meets those expectations, I wont have him, and my heart still aches for him at times, quite frankly, even though I know I don't need him and nostalgia might make things seem better than they were though hindsight is twenty twenty. I wonder what it would be like to be intimate again though I wonder if things should be slower this time, and at the same time it seems like it would be a silly denial to artificially pace according to some ideal of courtship.
It's true, I don't always have the talk all night conversations with him I dreamed about, but the truth is, I'm still dreaming about him.
So something is going to give. I'm not sure how things will work out, but whatever circumstance emerges, it will be ME that gives way to a more genuine, peaceful person, unattached in the positive sense of Buddhism, who is more able to accept and receive and attract love into her life.
I lose, whatever I choose. I choose to lose my expectations. And to give up planning my future to be fully present in the now. One of these days, Mr Right Now will turn out to be Mr Right, but I can't get to Mr Right any time other than in the Now.
My expectations aren't real. But he, and the way I feel about him (however that is), is.
And more importantly, I'd rather be the loving compassionate person who doesn't discard or attach to people according to her own whims of how things "should" be. I'd rather be a true lover true to my true nature of goodness that is everyone's birthright.
A happy ending, worth the sacrifice.
Namaste,
MJ