It was around this time a year ago I learned something very important about myself.
I had been stuck in the weirdly undefined pseudo-relationship with Mr. NDNS (Neither Defined Nor Satisfying if you’re late to this party) for over a year and was pretty much at a loss as to what to do about it. Other than, you know, define it and lose the pseudo, but that would have made too much sense. Anyway, he had apparently had enough of it as well and I heard through the grapevine he had articulated to a mutual friend his realization we needed to talk about the state of our relationship.
So what did I do? I panicked and I slept with someone else.
I had recently reconnected with an old friend who was headed through the area on a road trip and wanted to know if I had any interest in getting together for the night (yes … as in the biblical sense). I had very little intention of saying yes, at least until I was faced with the alternative of actually figuring out my life, and so I found myself agreeing to a late-night Labor Day rendez-vous in a seedy airport hotel.
I had a bit of drive for the booty call, and I passed the time talking to an old friend, trying to explain the thought process behind making the decision to sleep with someone other than the man I had been saying could be The One for months. To be honest, I wish I had recorded it because I’d really like to recall how I made sense of that one.
My friend told me I was being a completely self-destructive idiot and to turn the car around. To go home, go to sleep and wake up the next day ready to face my future. I, however, opted to keep driving and have seedy hotel sex. And then ignore NDNF’s phone call and voicemail the following morning.
I would regret it later, but I deleted the message without even listening. It might have been something completely innocuous, but on the off chance he actually was ready to talk, I guess I just wasn’t ready to hear what he had to say.
As you know, neither one of us would bring it up again. And, after the high of my illicit night died down, I would spend many more months wondering what might have been.
So what is this important lesson?
It is something you have probably inferred by now, but it was the moment I realized I am completely jacked up emotionally. The friend on the phone, who will get his own entry one of these days, told me I have the most severe “daddy issues” of anyone with a completely normal father and family he has ever met.
It’s really easy to disguise commitment-phobia when you have a steady string of men in your life (not always in the biblical sense; I’m not a hussy). I wrote, at some length, about my proclivity for the unattainable back in the July 4 entry on a Declaration of Desired Dependence. It was in this moment a year ago I began exploring and trying to understand the phenomenon and my penchant for the geographically undesirable, selfishly unworthy, romantically unavailable, professionally unethical, aesthetically unachievable and/or unabashedly uninterested.
It's been a long road since.
The jury is still out on whether I found someone that breaks this cycle. Things are still very much undefined and I have to fight my inclination to keep them that way. For now though, I am enjoying the process and have no intention of self-destructing and ruining it with a spontaneous stupid decision.
Baby steps.
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