Friends on a 100th-ish date
So, I don’t know if Topo Gigio knows it or not, but we’re right at the anniversary of our first date.
I saw him last night. It would have been nice to say we are a week away from, say, our first anniversary. But alas, here we are.
He was telling me about a friend who keeps making the same stupid mistakes in love, who doesn’t want to HEAR what she continues to do to sabotage herself. She seems to just want to wallow in self-pity that she will end up alone. I said we all feel like we’ll end up alone, and it’s not our faults that we haven’t found the right person yet. And that’s what she really wants to hear from you right now.
He reminded me that HE HAS FOUND THE ONE and I rolled my eyes and reminded him that he, like the friend he was telling me about, is just as opposed to getting a reality check from friends who actually give a damn. He can’t tell HER what he sees her doing wrong and he doesn’t want to hear from ME the very same thing.
But here’s an intriguing aside. I was telling him stories about my newest male friend. Just a friend, but I didn’t explain that. And besides, is anybody really JUST a friend? 😀
He seemed uncomfortable every time I said this guy’s name. And at the end of the night I referred to the guy having a girlfriend, and TG seemed like he mentally heaved a huge sigh of relief and was suddenly interested in what I was saying.
If I’m reading this right (and I’m always reading this right), he doesn’t want me but doesn’t want anyone else to have me either.
Life doesn’t work that way.
Allow me to regress a moment to the night of March 11, 2012, when a perfect stranger referred to us as a couple and he said, “We’re friends on a first date.”
We were holding hands at the time. And I saw a world of possibility in his eyes. Friends on a first date. Could anything hold as much hope for the future as that?
Last night, he gave me back all my things that were in his possession. I feel like I just got divorced.
Anyway, I guess I type all of this to say that it’s a real shame we didn’t work out. But I did everything I could to make it happen and he did everything he could to make sure it didn’t. He did me a favor by making sure that’s the way it went, I know that now.
I just wonder, though, if he realizes that my frustration was never (just) jealousy. But it’s morphed from 50% jealousy that he’d never love me with all his heart and 50% feeling that he’s settling for so much less than he deserves, to 95% concern that he’ll never know real love and he’ll have wasted his life when it was staring him in the face all along, and 5% wonderment that “how could my awesomeness not have swayed him my way?”
Again, anybody who doesn’t realize my awesomeness has no room in my romantic heart. But he’s still in the main chamber and I do wish him real love, with whomever that ends up being. And I hope that will hurt me a lot less than standing by and watching what I’m watching.
And I wish MYSELF real love, too. I just wonder how he’ll handle it when I find it.