When do memories start to lose their potency? When you cram in enough new memories? I don’t know . . . I think even if they get crowded, they never get crowded out.
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I got to thinking today about my odyssey through the treacherous world of dating. When I think of all the men now, they’re like ghosts – half-formed spirits, indistinct around the edges with only a pale glow to let you know they were there once. Against their vast, hazy backdrop, B____ stands solid, warm, whole, strong. Nothing indistinct about him. But they were there once, filling my vision one at a time like a horrible receiving line at a Tim Burton party. And I’m staggered again that I endured it for as long as I did. How can you go day after day into an unrelenting misery? Oh – that’s like my job, isn’t it? I endured dating for years and I endured teaching for years. Honestly can’t say which is worse. It’s like having my arm sawed off versus being splashed with acid: hmm, which will hurt less? How did I do it?
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I didn’t see that I had a choice.
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That’s how I did it. For years, hating every minute of it.
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But seriously, I can’t see how I did it with dating when I take into account the sheer number of minutes and hours spent in unmitigated dread. But I did. And shy, innocent, inexperienced little me went out with three times as many men as any one of my friends. Insufferably arrogant John who claimed indulgently that he had the “playbook” on women because he had so many women around him. Tom, the handsome, wired little Italian whom I met at a bar who chafed my tender skin as he ground a drunken kiss into me. Ridiculous Gustav who finally spurred me to call It’s Just Lunch to say that if they set me up with one more guy like that I was going to terminate my membership and expect a refund of my $700. Awkward, earnest Scott at the beginning of my online dating trek who was in such a different league than me but I had no way of knowing that until I stumbled on his creepy MySpace page. Slacker Will who had no real ambition beyond doing construction work but who seemed, oh, I don’t know, good enough, I guess, in all other respects because he’s at least better than the others. Just to name a few.
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I just shake my head in wonder at how honestly diligent I was in trying to lower my expectations. Everybody so glibly admonishes you “not to settle!” But boy, I sure did try hard to do just that. My crushing inexperience couldn’t support my bone-deep yet persistently repressed sense that this couldn’t be it! I went out with so many men and felt with all of them that I was behind colored glass and they didn’t even realize they weren’t seeing me clearly, let alone desired to do so. No wonder I got so smashingly depressed so many times. No wonder I saw a psychiatrist for months (not a psychologist, mind you, because this guy needed to prescribe drugs). No wonder I went on anti-anxiety medication to deal with my dread of dating and my swelling conviction that it was hopeless: both my ability to lower my expectations and my chances of finding anyone who could make me feel anything. No wonder I hit rock bottom as everything else in my life crumbled to the ground.
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And then came B____.
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And I knew. I knew suddenly that I could never make myself settle and that I never needed to. I knew that my mother was right when she said, “There’s a reason they call it ‘falling in love,’ because it literally feels like you’re falling and you can’t stop it.” I knew that everyone who said when it happens, you’ll know and it’ll be so easy, was right. I knew that all my sky-high expectations had for all my life been right on the money. I knew that it really did come down to one man and only one to awaken me with a kiss, to send blood rushing through my icy body. I knew that all the stories and songs and poems were right. I knew I was home.
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As far as the east is from the west is how different B____ is from all the dozens of men I had tried to date, had tried to match myself with.
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And at any point in this whole journey since B____ left, had you asked, I would have said without hesitation that the worst B____ had put me through, the worst that marriage would cough up, would still and always be better than what I had been through. And I can say that with even more conviction now.
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There is only one man for me.
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And his name ain’t Gustav.
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