This fucking sucks. I’ll just say it. I fucking hate how relationships tend to take me over. I am 36 and can’t seem to break away from the tendency to just want to jump in too soon without giving people time to fully reveal themselves. How do I slow this process down? How do I remove the anxiety around the beginning of relationships, the part where you’re trying to figure out if this is going to be something or not? Why is dating such an unclear thing for me, it’s either all or nothing when I feel like it’s something good. And this dude did too. He told me two weeks after meeting me that he thought he was falling in love with me. We had only been getting to know each other for 6 weeks. We were scheduling future plans, small and big. Even had talked about the holidays. How in the hell was I this stupid so quickly?
I feel like I have such a good handle on people, that I can read them so well, and can see things that other people can’t see. I’m an empath, so I tend to really feel who people are after spending time with them. But this whole thing has made me doubt my abilities with this part of myself. Maybe I’m not as capable as Ive been thinking. Or maybe I am, but just not when it has to do with me as much, when my heart is involved, because my romantic whimsy seems to carry me away. And I don’t know if this makes me unhealthy, like I don’t know if this is something that I need to work on, or if this is just who I am and I need to just be cautious about finding someone who actually understands me. I’m sure it’s somewhere in between. I know I need to work on my listening and observing, rather than seeing what I want to see and taking people at face value. Because I did take him at his work, at face value. He was saying all kinds of things that included forever, pointed towards love and compatibility and promise and running off into the sunset together. I mean there was so much of that. So much, all the time, and he guided the majority of it. I know I ran with it in some ways, but I never would have done that without taking my cues from him. And he was apparently unable to give any type of boundary related cues, until he was just breaking under the pressure and done. Until he knew I was “collateral” as he called me. Just hours after he told me he was committed to me and loved me and grateful for our magical weekend we’d just had together. And it fucking was magical. It was comfortable and exciting and domesticated-feeling since we barely left my home but a couple times. We danced in my living room, sang for each other and with each other, held each other, he cried in my arms as he realized and allowed himself to understand how much he was going to miss his little girl when he finally moved out next week. Fuck. Even as I’m typing this I’m realizing how incredibly stupid I was to believe this could have lasted. He’s going through complete turmoil. And I was foolish enough to think that we were already solid enough to make our way through it. My staying with him through the process of physically separating from his family would have never been healthy for him. He’s gonna have to feel all of this on his own so that he doesn’t associate me with his strength and growth. Just as I am now associating him with my new apartment. This feels like shit to be here knowing that he won’t ever be here again. I’m hopeful because today is the full moon and I can attempt to truly cleanse this space and start over.
Fucking hell. This hurts so much. Hurts to look at myself yet again and realize that I still have work to do. I feel like sometimes that I have so much about myself figured out, and then something like this just derails me. Fills me with doubt. Doubt in my growth, doubt in my strength, doubt in my worth, doubt in my ability to find real genuine happiness with someone else.
I guess no real growth is ever just comfortable. This hurts like fuck because I’m needing to learn something. I just can’t believe how deep this actually hurts so quickly into something new. And this scares me a lot to go forward. I don’t want to keep going through this.
Tender Embers Burning 