it's scary when you realize that you're a commitment phobe. it dawned on me that i'm totally afraid of marriage and that i purposely fall for emotionally unavailable men because i find it easier to love then accept love. i love loving. i hate the vulnerability of being on the receiving end. i always feel so tense that i'm going to somehow do something to cause the person to stop loving me. i guess i'm not confident in other people's ability to love unconditionally. i think the same can be said about friendships, but to a lesser extent. i love people in general really easily, and mostly without expecting anything in return. because expectations lead to disappointments.
i've heard it said many times that marriage is about compromise, but as an observer, it seems to me that there's always one partner that has to compromise more than the other. and that scares me. i've spent the last 4 years building who i am. learning about myself. and developing boldness and confidence in what i discovered about myself. i don't want to lose that. i don't even want to trade it, unless it's for keeps. i'm also disturbed by the notion of causing anyone else to change as well.
i'm 28 years old. it's been 4 years since my last serious-relationship. i'm an ex-relationship junkie, who until january 2004 had dated non-stop for 8 years. boyfriends were my hobby and the longest gap between them was 2 months, the others were more like 2 weeks. it goes without saying that a lot of damage was done during that period in my life. i regret putting so much time and effort into relationships with men who are no longer in my life, and letting my other friendships go. i'm the opposite now. with 4 years of relationship-sobriety under my belt, all of you (with the exception of melinda, melody, and buddy) know me as a single woman who never dates. that seems ironic. i'm very different than i once was, the years of healing have been good to me.
i've become less daring. slow to gamble. i have more at stake. i hope my guardedness won't instead trip me up.
you'll be loved like you never have known.
5 comments:
I hear ya sista!
Michelle
i think those setiments are quite common for adult-women. and probably adult-men too. i'm specifying adult because i don't think people in their early twenties are fully developed adults, they're still pretty pliable. which is good.
this being said, it was pointed out to me by beckie that i don't have to be afraid of losing myself because i AM a fully developed adult. which is comforting. i'm sure things will work out when the right person comes along, but i fear the unknown.
p.s. if you use the 'NAME' option you don't have to post anonymously. you just put in 'michelle' as your name and ignore the website portion :)
I was talking to someone a month or so ago (at the beginning of meeting someone that, it turned out, wasn't a good match for me). This person told me a story about how it was painful to watch a friend of his build up and build up and build up this relationship that to any objective outsider just wasn't going to work. That he winced watching his friend being so unaware and how sad it felt watching the enivitable crashing letdown for her. My response was something like it might be braver being aware...having lived in relationships and exerpiencing that it doesn't always (or usually) work and sometimes quite spectactularly so but, sometimes!, trying again anyway.
it's so hard discerning between a good person and a good match. not that good matches aren't good people, but sometimes we can like someone so much (because they're really awesome) and end up ignoring that we're not compatible. i think it's all just trial by error.
You articulated the good person vs good match very well. It's hardest, sometimes, explaining it to the person that IS a good person but not a good match. :-(
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