Hey dudes and dudettes and...I dunno, whatever I'm meant to say to be PC
.... CIS-and non-CIS...human or animal-identifying...um, he/she/.....?
....
Let's start over
Hey y'all!
Billy Rabb-ee in the place ta BE! Well, I dunno if FA is the place to be, but that's neither here nor there.
So, after 4 weird months, I actually was the dumper for the second time ever.
Usually, I'm the type of dodo bird who romantically clings to the notion that I can stick with anything, excuses a lot of stuff for my honey, puts up with shit, etc. until I've been miserable for years. I mean, I do believe there can be "love of my life" stuff, where someone is loyal and loving and supportive 100% of their beloved, and gets it in return. It takes a lot of patience and compromise to make a long-term thing.
But now? I'm finally assertive enough to be all "this ain't working."
I hate hurting people (gee), but...OK, lemme get into the specifics on this one.
About a year ago, I went to my young friends' Holiday party. Usually the type who just shuffles around by the refreshments table wondering exactly how long is socially acceptable to stay at a party before going home when in a room of strangers, I actually found a rather cute lady to chat with who had a brain and some shared nerdy interests. It was fun, though I had to go home to take care of my mother, who had mobility issues at the time and was recovering from an operation.
Then, in May, I suddenly get a friend suggestion on FB from the hostess of said party. I didn't even know this was a thing, but you can apparently tell someone "Hey, you should befriend this homeskillet!" on FB because FB is the land of vapid inanities that don't matter in real life but are there for people to live their weird, pretend, narcissistic lives and their farts will never smell again and la la la.
I was like "?--Oh, it's that girl I met months ago."
So anyway, like a month and a half later, I go to said hostess's engagement party because the host saddled me with the dubious onus of being best man, and there's said chiquita bonita. We ended up rapping quite a bit, so when I left, I was like "Well, maybe I'll add her, sure."
This is where warning signs started.
On the entire ride back to her house (which is like 45 minutes to an hour) she immediately was hitting me up on FB Messenger (an app that should just go because it tells people exactly how long their chat partner has sat on messages and when they're active and makes people all anxious and crazy).
We met again at the bachelor/bachelorette party (yes, they combined them...how fucking...spineless, right??), which was in Vegas (VEGAS, BAY-BEE!!!!111).
And then we ended up fucking like animals.
So, like, the day after the weekend of fun fun, she hinted she was in love with me and then posted that I was in a relationship with her on my favorite place (FB, of course!! Thanks, Fuckerberg!). I was hesitant but I accepted because I'm dumb.
We had a lot of plans. "Oh, you've never been to ___?" "Oh, you never went down Route 66?" All that stuff. So, I figured we'd be doing said things.
Nope. She never got up on weekends.
Turns out, she pretty much sleeps all day anyway. Over the next few weeks, it's clear she has no job...and then it turns out she hasn't had one in years and everything she's done for a job has been really short stints as cashiers and such at big chains--and sporadically, at that.
Dudebros, she couldn't see me sometimes because she had to do dishes. She had to clean. I recall two weeks in which every single day I wanted to hang out, she was like "*sigh*...I can't tonight. I have to do dishes, argh....still so many!" She lives with her parents, too, so...yeah, that's another gem. I mean, I live with my mom, but that's because mom is dying of cancer after having had super-bad mobility issues and all...so I'm basically her caretaker (and fuck no to putting her in a home).
She came down to see me once. She lives about 40 minutes away, but with the traffic in the area, like...going up to see her when I was off work at rush hour? Fuck that. Took like an hour and a half sometimes. Then, because she lived at home, she basically insisted on going back to my place, having sex (awkward when your dying mom is in the house), then driving her back up there, then coming back to my place. That's her idea of a date, I guess (just meet and fuck? Meh).
Now, the old me would have been like "This is great though, because she loves me and adores me and always tells me so!" She was pressuring me to get hitched like a half-month after the Vegas trip (around their wedding) and didn't want to use protection at all because she was like "My baby-producing years are running out!!" and stuff. Nobody's ever wanted to have a kid with me, so that sounded awesome, but....
Look, I'm giving way too much info and if she were a furry (maybe she is, considering she spends all night on social things on the net like Gaia), she would find out all these things I didn't exactly address but kinda hinted at over and over, but still.
Oh, here's another nugget: something like a month and a half after we "made it official!! (posting to FB is super serial)," she suddenly starts talking about this guy she had a thing for years ago but it never quite worked out, and how he contacted her out of the blue and wanted her to come work with him in a city like 3 hours to the south. It was supposed to be a real high-paying and valuable marketing gig (why is it the Millennial-type near-narcissists gravitate towards marketing at some point, I wonder). He needed her to come down for interviews and to show her the place, and she would be staying with him and his wife--oops! That's right. He suddenly blurted out that he's divorcing said wife and said they would stay in their own hotel room for the week.
This happened over and over. All the red flags were there. She made me cut off contact with the ex I almost married (but with whom I had been broken up for 6-7 years), and who's been a friend for like 12 years, because it made her uncomfortable. She insisted we shouldn't keep contact with people we slept with, but then it turns out she has a few herself because she always talks about their dick size or how the girl was the life-long crush (her own words).
So the upshot if it was, I let her down on Sunday. I'd been trying for months, but...it's an awkward place. Is it weird to have not let someone go before at this age? Maybe...I dunno! I'm not exactly the God of Dating. I ended up telling her that we were so not at the right place for a real relationship, which is true, and she was even like "Um...are you breaking up, or just telling me to cool my jets?" I'm like "I think breaking up would be good."
She said it was the nicest dump she's ever been through, lol!
Anyway, maybe it's Mom being terminally ill, maybe it's watching her suffer all the time and realizing that I need to get my shit more together (I mean, I have a job and a car and pay for shit and all, but I'd like to actually do adult shit like save money and take care of real issues), I dunno. But I'm more assertive and I think I'm at the point where it's like "Hey, I gotta do what works."
Now, I'm gonna say stuff that may rile a few feathers (fur?), but here we go:
If you find yourself mostly sitting around at home and sleeping and enjoying only your hobbies, a relationship will not save you, and nobody owes you shit. If you find yourself feeling "spoiled" because your lover does shit like always drives to see you and pays for everything and you don't even give him birthday presents and stuff, you feel like there's just something to the feelings of love you have for the person, you're not a good partner in a relationship.
I feel that a lot of people these days can bury themselves easily in the world of social media, the world of easily accessed videos, the worlds of...I dunno, everything that's readily at our fingertips. A loooot of people these days just bury themselves in fantasy land and don't really do anything in their lives, and that's just not good for anyone around them.
I know I'm guilty, as are so many these days, of overusing the "narcissist" word, and that most of the people like this aren't narcissists really, but they're at least narcissist-adjacent.
Wanna be taken seriously? Do real stuff! It doesn't have to be like my last weird fling with the asexual that drove me insane, where she touted her (supposed) 180 IQ, where she talked about how she graduated from a prestigious university in Japan (which was actually part of an exchange program--she actually graduated from some university in Wisconsin or some shit but studied a bit in Japan), you don't have to have some world-changing paper you'd use as a thesis to become a fellow in the field of economics with a PhD and all that...you just have to be able to give people what they need if you want a relationship. This goes for friendships, romances, and family--and yourself! I feel that just atrophying in your room without working and feeling justified in every belief you have and getting into huge arguments with people about it because you're like some Space Pope deigning to the world of mortals to bring the light of clarity--this is just wrong.
And these people are so hypocritical!
Seriously, this kind of thing...it's like the other people on the left who make me ashamed to tell people I'm on the left politically. They basically got Trump elected by caring SO MUCH for relatively trivial issues like "cultural appropriation" and by doing obviously moronic things to protest such as trying to set up "safe spaces" and all that. Meanwhile, nobody cared about the way Glass-Steagall was neutered, the fact that our economy keeps getting in ridiculous bubbles, the fact that college costs in the U.S. are what are preposterous and not necessarily the loans, the fact that, yes, we have lost manufacturing in this country, and I mean...just the fact that everything is so goddamn fake and it's exhausting. And so, people turned to someone outside the system to try and break stuff up--I get it.
Seriously, the best you can do if you're worried about things in the world or life or whatever is to go out and find something to do so you can provide for yourself and those around you and to nurture and care for them. That's it!
And so few people do that these days, it seems....
Anyway, I feel pretty good about it all, though I did hurt her and she's still recovering and all upset and such. But dammit, I mean...c'mon. We gotta take care of ourselves.
