Many people hesitate with this awful feeling of resentment, uncertainty, deprecation, and any other word synonymous with failure and judgment…when approached with a new relationship opportunity…after failing at a marriage. All of these blogs and self-help stories that continue to perpetuate this idealization of romance as if to say because you messed up the first time and failed at something, this time your expectations will be different. You will be more experienced in the department of acting as someone’s soul mate. That the second time around you will know exactly what you want and won’t settle for less. As if that isn’t an enormous amount of pressure to place on one person who is already feeling pretty shitty about themselves to begin with.
Perhaps this is just my view point….perhaps it is not the norm….but in my world, where I have been deemed a failure in my father’s eyes, my dance instructor’s eyes, my art teacher’s eyes, my piano teacher’s eyes, my band teacher’s eyes, my high school boyfriend’s eyes…my friends’ eyes, and then later as fate would have you, my husband’s eyes….this propaganda-induced message that the second time I will be better in a relationship is horrifically daunting. It is as if to confirm all my fears and insecurities and rain them to be true from my first married relationship….as it…failed.
Some say that the relationship didn’t fail, it just didn’t work out. Well, that is great…thank you for equating my LIFE to something so simple as the glass half full/empty scenario. Well played. However, in my life, I am a realist and understand that the marriage failed. Failure is defined by giving up. And that is what we did. Neither of us fought for anything. We certainly didn’t fight for each other. More than likely we were probably too defeated going in to it to even understand what we were fighting for. Granted, we both failed at it….it was not just me and not just him who individually walked away…more like we sprinted towards opposite ends of the room as fast as possible to showcase our detest for one another.
Without digressing too far in to the distant past….my marriage failed. There is no other way around it. No sugar coated way to disguise the element of failure that lurks behind the candy covered truth. My marriage failed. I became a statistic on that day in February 2014. A harsh cold statistic. I became one of the young people in my generation who gave up on something so sacred that we forbid people of the same gender to participate in it because it goes against the word of God. But yet myself and my ex-husband participated in a lifelong vow, only to mock it less than two years later.
Based on society, my marriage was doomed from the start as I got knocked up first. Strike 1. Strike 2 would be that I moved in with his mother who inevitably turned on me and negatively influenced my husband to see me in a light that was unfair, untrue, and if nothing else, disrespectful. Strike 3….our foundation was shit to begin with. Game.
Based on society…the second go-around should be filled with bliss and unicorns! Love will just swoop back down in to my life like on those made-for-Hollywood romantic comedies that we hold our relationship standards to. Last I checked, love is messy, it’s unkind at times, it’s vulnerable, it’s dirty, it’s repulsive, it can be difficult and hard and all these negative things too. Love is not synonymous with romance. Love is not synonymous with this warm fuzzy feeling. Love can make you feel warm and fuzzy but it is not the end all to what it can do for someone. Love is support. Love is equal. Love is strength. Love is beauty. Love is seeing perfection in imperfection. Love is holding the weight of the world on your shoulders in such a way that others see them as wings. Love is unconditional…which strictly means, taking the good with the bad. Love is balance. Love is desire. Love is raw. Love is the most difficult and yet, innate human emotion we can feel. And yet it is jaded by so much drama, fantastical Hollywood lighting, and this idea of hopeless romance. Why would anyone want to be a hopeless romantic? My knight in shining armor is not coming to save me….for I don’t need to be saved. I need someone to meet me at my demise and help me fight for what I am running from…not pick me up and save me from it. I don’t need to be saved. I don’t need someone to come in, sweep me off my feet, and make my world a better place…I need someone to help me improve upon my better place by meeting me at where I am in my world.
Love is pushing someone outside their comfort zone with enough trust that they will be there to catch them when they fall. Love is an understanding that some people can only do so much at once without retreating back in to their self-designed protective bubble. Love is an idea based from a deeply rooted emotion that no matter what happens, the person who you are sharing said love with will go nowhere. That they will never leave your side…which does not necessarily mean that they will agree with you or encourage you if its not in your best interest…but they will not sway from the position directly to one side of you. Love is not always this grand gesture of glimmering hope. Love may simply mean that after fighting with your shower head and groaning while cleaning up the mess of water they made all over your bathroom and seeing how their negative attitude dampened your day ever so slightly….they come back and lay next to you in bed molded beside you, even if they are obsessed with time and running late.
All of this pressure that society puts on us…or on me in particular…about what I should look for in a significant other…what I should or should not settle for….this idea of self-respect that I should be honoring.
My situation is non-traditional….look at my life. It is the least traditional someone could make it. I am a rebel in the sense that I do not conform. Sure, I may have on my pressed light tan slacks, loafers, a fitted white v-neck t-shirt and a pale red cardigan on, sitting at my 9-5 job…wasting the day away while sipping on my Dunkin Donuts ice coffee and wondering when it will be late enough to eat lunch so I can have a better understanding that my day is half over. Which I am sure most of America is doing simultaneously…depending on time zone, etc. But my inner self…my actual life…my emotions…my heart song does not sing to middle-America’s antiquated values. I had my child before marriage. I cause a ruckus typically wherever I go and rarely apologize for it. In the time that I have been in the field, I caused three people to quit their job…two at the same time at one agency….had a well respected Executive Director fired…and recently had the FBI at my house subpoenaing me to appear before a Grand Jury to testify against a federal indictment…against my now/then boss. I bark if I don’t like what I see more times than not. I never stay in a place too long…specifically because there is only so much you can learn standing still. I am a wanderer…in both my personal and professional life. I get bored easily.
So…in my current situation…why not find a wanderer to spend time with? Why not find someone who is just as difficult as I am. Who is just as scared? Why not find someone who is on my level for a change. Who has the ability to help me when I need help and allow me the ability to help him when he needs help. Someone who is equal. Someone who has a similar heart as me. Someone who knows that deep down inside, if they could muster up the strength to break down their walls that we would be insanely perfect for each other…but that right now. In this moment. They are not able to do so….and neither am I.
Maybe part of the problem is me…and the way that I communicate and convey things to people. Maybe because I am insecure and part of me is this girlish imp-like creature who secretly wants the happy ending…but at the same time has no business waiting for it…and realizes that once it comes it will disappear. Maybe that is why I am stuck in this non-committed committal relationship that oozes perfection but both of us are so scared to let anything go. We are afraid to let things go because if we let them go then this relationship becomes real and then we both have the power and potential to sabotage it…something we both excel with.
Maybe the other part of the problem is society…and what society’s view of relationships is. Dear society…fuck off!!!! You are wrong. I am happy being who I am with who I am with. Do I have insecurities? Fuck yes…but why do I have them? Not because you are helping me shed them…oh no, quite the opposite. Primarily because you are helping me perpetuate the endless cycle of self deprecation. With every new romantic comedy that is released a part of me blows up in side. Primarily because once the credits role it’s back to real life. And not that some of you don’t live these romantically blissful movies in real time…but because you don’t. There is no way. At a certain point…everyone needs an edit, end scene, curtains close moment. Everyone. All those weirdos doing things for two on social media…the farmers market crew, the hiking crew, the restaurant connoisseurs crew… everyone is over compensating for something. We all are. Maybe I am overcompensating for the fact that I am petrified of love. That this wonderful emotion everyone is so over the moon about makes me want to retreat in to my closet like a young child hiding from the boogie monster.
Love, in my mind, is just that…a monster. Love can mend your soul, but love can break your heart. $15.00 to whomever guess where that quote is from first…google freaks need not accept the challenge. Love is the scariest thing ever…look at what it did to me. Why would I want to find it ever again? Why? It destroyed me, it broke up my family…it forces my child to have to spend time away from mommy to see daddy and vice versa. My daughter will forever spend holidays shared. That is the result of love.
So strategically, why wouldn’t I find someone who feels this same way? Why wouldn’t I protect myself? Sure, do I feel I have it in me to love again? Yes. Will my standards be different? No. I mean I am who I am. No divorce or anything is going to change that. Will it make me less tolerable to the way a person treats me? Of course…but respect starts at home. And it’s difficult to respect myself when everything in my life confirms the reasons why I was disrespected to begin with.
Having the ability to right a manifesto about my love/hate relationship with…well, love…I am going to probably save the rest for another rainy day. In short though…of course I will love again…perhaps I am in love now…who knows…who will ever know. What I did learn is to keep things to myself…that is what love has taught me…to hide that compassionate person from others for it alludes to this idea of weakness. To hide that inner free spirit because she’s still sort of nursing her wounds. To hide the warm, cuddly, affectionate person I used to be because it did nothing but hurt me. Is she crying to come out? Of course…but not yet. And not because of who I am with or what I am doing or who I am…but because she’s scared. She’s scared shitless. Notice that there aren’t self-help posts or blogs or books or a magazine article capitalizing on what happens with regards to love after it majorly fails twice. There may be a reason for that.