I woke up from a dream this morning that left me feeling unsettled. It revolved around my first serious boyfriend and a serious quasi-fling. The dream was confusing, it felt as if I'm meant to choose between them but whether I chose or didn't, I couldn't actually have either of them. Throughout the dream it seemed as if they weren't allowed to talk to me but they were constantly within view. A "see, no touch" kinda thing, lol.
I don't want to be cliched and do a post about love so soon after Valentines Day, which is an occasion I don't celebrate nor believe in anyways, but perhaps due to the proximity of the day recognized as a celebration of love whereby your senses are inundated with romance, love and the like, this dream happened. And it got me wondering if this dream of mine was a subconscious way to tell me.....something. Ok, I guess I should explain a little bit on my romantic background. I have been single for the past 4 years. Completely by choice. My last serious relationship ended after 4 difficult years of being with, let's call him H, someone I should never have gotten with in the first place. After that relationship, I dated about 4-5 men, some overlapping but was never interested enough to keep any of them going beyond a couple of months. I have only ever had one other serious relationship prior to H, we'll call him G, and that was a year and a half long. I am not a fling kind of girl, hence I don't date around. I am more of a long term relationships person.
Back to the unsettling feelings the dream evoked. I guess why it leaves me feeling conflicted is because part of me believes the two men in my dream were the two men I actually were in love with. I have never put these emotions down in writing but I secretly fear that I'm not completely over them. Especially my first boyfriend, G. I know this was wrong when I made the decision at the time but the reason I got together with H was to see if I was over G. At that time, G and I had been broken up for a year and I was feeling it was time to move on. H was someone that, although I didn't emotionally get, I was physically attracted to him. It turned out I wasn't ready to be with someone else. I was very much still not over G. And I'm starting to believe I'm still not. I spent 4 guilt-ridden years with someone I should NEVER had gotten with. We were just such opposites and I was never really all there in the first place. It was both unfair to him and myself. I guess as my breakup with G, due in part to long-distance, was so, for lack of a better word, unfinished, that in some ways we played a game of emotional tag with each other over the span of 3 years after our breakup. Two of those years was when I was with H. G would tell me that if in the future there's a chance for us to be together again we should keep that option open but then will turn around and say that maybe he and I were meant to be just good friends, only to backtrack the other direction again. It confused me and although what I wanted from him was to just be decisive and tell me if he wanted to give us a second chance or not, he never did man up and say anything concrete. G kept being cryptic about what he wanted. I know that people say I could just as well have told him I wanted to be with him but for my part, that ship had come and sailed. Although I initiated the breakup, days later, I asked G if we had done the right thing. Whatever his thinking was back then, he said that it was and I should move on. I was humiliated and I did try to move on. Two months after that incident, G calls me and asks me why we broke up. I know he sounds like a douche and I guess his actions at that point were inexcusable but prior to that he had set the bar so high for being the most amazing first boyfriend a girl could ask for, I still unfairly use him as a yardstick. However, I doubt even the person G is now would match up to who he was back then. I'm a cynic that way.
At this point I know I should have just broken up with H but I am ashamed and embarassed to admit that I didn't want to go through Uni alone. An attempt at breaking up was made but I called H up and told him I had changed my mind and we continued seeing each other for another year and a half. I just want to say that I never cheated on H (he had no qualms about doing it to me though, on multiple occasions I might add) with G physically but I guess emotionally I knew that I was still very much hung up on my ex. Feeling guilty, I tried to make it work with H and we even talked about marriage but part of me knew at some point H and I would go our seperate ways. And we did. Only it happened because I was having an emotional affair with someone else. It wasn't because of all the times H cheated on me, lied to me, constantly borrowed money from me as well as those around us and was an all-around ass. Again, I know that I wasn't perfect or the saint in this relationship. I was half in love with someone else most of the time during that relationship. Yet, I was all ready to commit the rest of my life to this man I wasn't too sure I loved much less liked and I guess, it was a blessing that I met the next guy, my fling, who we'll call Fling.
The time Fling and I met, we were both with other people. We connected with each other on almost everything. It was like he and I were mirrors of each other. I was at a point in my life where I was feeling extremely jaded about love but Fling made me feel as if concepts like soulmates existed. It was the same emotional connection I had with G. We made many plans to go out but always, at the last minute I would cancel. I just couldn't go through with it. I had been cheated on before by H but wasn't about to do the same. After 2 months of indecision, I ended my four year relationship with H and even though I didn't verbalize it, I was hoping Fling would do the same. Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you wanna view it, he didn't. I told him I didn't want to be a third party in his relationship and after a brief freeze out, we got talking to one another again. For a while we deluded each other into thinkng that we'd be just friends. We'd hang out, bringing along reinforcements so that it wouldn't look like we were on dates. We'd call each other and talk all night. Fling was pretty much acting as my boyfriend but he was officially someone else's guy. I think this went on for about 5 months and one day, I just came to realize that Fling was no better than G. He was indecisive and couldn't make his mind up if he wanted to be with me or not. I was disappointed but didn't want to be kept in that limbo any longer. I finally made a clean break from Fling but for months on end, I moaned and whinged to my friends about why he couldn't choose me over his girlfriend. Perhaps, in hindsight, I wasn't so much into Fling because I wanted him. Maybe he nurtured the part of me that was, as corny as it sounds, dying for staying too long in a non-functional relationship. Perhaps also, Fling evoked much of the same feelings I had with G. I guess I won't really know if I was so into Fling for him or the feelings he brought up in me. Another thing that just occurred to me is maybe I am only in love with the memory of my first relationship and not the person itself. Perhaps, I want to replicate those feelings but can you ever have the same feelings more than once?
Anyways, I dated a few guys after that. One, K, was even serious about marrying me but I didn't like him in a romantic way. It would have been so easy just to say, ok, let's get married but I doubt it would have lasted. We didn't have anything in common and I know this may sound conceited and ungrateful, but he was too into me and that put me off. K told me he loved me after our first date. He announces his intentions to marry me on our third date. He tried to rally my friends into talking him up in front of me. He ambushed me with a meet with his parents. He was just relentless and not in a good way. He did do some sweet things, like on my birthday, he came and brought me a Baskin Robbin's ice cream cake and serenaded me with his guitar. It was a sweet move, but back then I just felt uncomfortable and semi-creeped out. I never led him on, from the get-go I had told him that I was not looking for anything serious and the reason I agreed to go out with him was because his persistance wore me down. The lesser of two evils was to agree. I openly declared that I wanted to be friends and if things changed later on then it would happen but he always tried to force things to be more than what it was. I don't know why he was in such a hurry. My opinion of him didn't improve much after he messaged me about 3 months after I had turned him down for the last time to tell me he was engaged to someone else AND in the same breath, so to speak, told me he missed me. I still have a copy of that conversation, as a reminder of how even the most naive and innocent seeming men can be jackasses.
The other guy I went out with was F. F was a catch, completely fantastic on paper. Good-looking, successful and with personality to boot. He was older by 6 years and it was a change from all the same-age or one year older guys I kept getting with. The thing is it never seemed quite right with F. To put it simply, I didn't feel that chemistry with him like I did with G and Fling so rather than waste both of our times, I let our quasi-relationship flounder. I got posted to my first overseas position so it was quite easy to just let things die. F recently got married and invited me to his wedding. I didn't go because I was here but if I had been in the country, yea, I would have gone to his reception. He's a nice person and some part of me does feel like I let a good one go. But I just think that fate has other plans for both of us and it wasn't one where we are in it together. If I'm being completely honest, back then I thought F was a bit out of my league and I always wondered what it was he saw in me. I also felt I wasn't in the same place he was in and I didn't want to string along something that I wasn't sure I was going to put myself in wholeheartedly. Shows I do learn my lesson :D
After F, I decided to give myself a break to do things on my own. In the four years since then, I have not dated anyone nor do I feel the need to be seeing anyone. I love the way my life is now, on all fronts, it feels fulfilling to me. But with this dream, I'm afraid that a part of me, my subconscious, is trying to tell me that I don't actually like my life this way (does that sound crazy?). I feel I do but now I'm not sure if I am happy about the direction my personal life has taken. See how confused I am.....I don't even know if my doubts are real or not. I'm afraid that the reason I've not felt the need to connect with another man is because I don't want to get hurt and in that way I have managed to protect myself from having relationships for this long by developing this emotional block that has stopped me from feeling remotely interested in relationships. I mean I can appreciate a good-looking man and I do have moments of undiluted fan-girly obsessions over Rob Bourdon, Matt Czuchry and the like (if I wanted to overanalyze myself, I could say that I form crushes on unattainable individuals so that I don't set myself up for disappointment, but I wont't go down that analytical road :P) but when it comes to feelings of companionship, being with someone, I'm quite dead on that front. My mind rationally says that I would like one but I can't evoke any emotional connection to that thought with my heart. I dunno if that made any sense. I'm just afraid that the two people that I gave myself to emotionally have made me scared to allow myself another shot. I think the experience I went through with them damaged me, left scars, and I am not too sure how to fix myself. At this point, I don't know how to open up myself to let another person in. I don't know if I ever can again. It was difficult to do it again after G and when, after completely and totally giving myself up emotionally for the second time and it didn't work out, it could be I just don't want to put myself though all that again. Heck, at this point, I'd be hard pressed to remember how to behave on a date.
Right now, I don't know whether finding someone is something I want. I do find it funny (in a what's wrong with me kind of way) that I can survive with my own company most days and that I don't seek out companionship. I don't know if writing any of this is shedding any light on my emotional psyche. I just felt the need to express my feelings. The dream seriously disturbed me. I wish I hadn't dreamt it at all.
One funny little thing I noticed about myself is that I like to date guys whose names start from the first half of the alphabets, A-M...... perhaps if I were to start dating again, I should broaden my horizons to include men with names beginning with the latter half of the alphabets, someone from the N-Z range :D
I don't want to be cliched and do a post about love so soon after Valentines Day, which is an occasion I don't celebrate nor believe in anyways, but perhaps due to the proximity of the day recognized as a celebration of love whereby your senses are inundated with romance, love and the like, this dream happened. And it got me wondering if this dream of mine was a subconscious way to tell me.....something. Ok, I guess I should explain a little bit on my romantic background. I have been single for the past 4 years. Completely by choice. My last serious relationship ended after 4 difficult years of being with, let's call him H, someone I should never have gotten with in the first place. After that relationship, I dated about 4-5 men, some overlapping but was never interested enough to keep any of them going beyond a couple of months. I have only ever had one other serious relationship prior to H, we'll call him G, and that was a year and a half long. I am not a fling kind of girl, hence I don't date around. I am more of a long term relationships person.
Back to the unsettling feelings the dream evoked. I guess why it leaves me feeling conflicted is because part of me believes the two men in my dream were the two men I actually were in love with. I have never put these emotions down in writing but I secretly fear that I'm not completely over them. Especially my first boyfriend, G. I know this was wrong when I made the decision at the time but the reason I got together with H was to see if I was over G. At that time, G and I had been broken up for a year and I was feeling it was time to move on. H was someone that, although I didn't emotionally get, I was physically attracted to him. It turned out I wasn't ready to be with someone else. I was very much still not over G. And I'm starting to believe I'm still not. I spent 4 guilt-ridden years with someone I should NEVER had gotten with. We were just such opposites and I was never really all there in the first place. It was both unfair to him and myself. I guess as my breakup with G, due in part to long-distance, was so, for lack of a better word, unfinished, that in some ways we played a game of emotional tag with each other over the span of 3 years after our breakup. Two of those years was when I was with H. G would tell me that if in the future there's a chance for us to be together again we should keep that option open but then will turn around and say that maybe he and I were meant to be just good friends, only to backtrack the other direction again. It confused me and although what I wanted from him was to just be decisive and tell me if he wanted to give us a second chance or not, he never did man up and say anything concrete. G kept being cryptic about what he wanted. I know that people say I could just as well have told him I wanted to be with him but for my part, that ship had come and sailed. Although I initiated the breakup, days later, I asked G if we had done the right thing. Whatever his thinking was back then, he said that it was and I should move on. I was humiliated and I did try to move on. Two months after that incident, G calls me and asks me why we broke up. I know he sounds like a douche and I guess his actions at that point were inexcusable but prior to that he had set the bar so high for being the most amazing first boyfriend a girl could ask for, I still unfairly use him as a yardstick. However, I doubt even the person G is now would match up to who he was back then. I'm a cynic that way.
At this point I know I should have just broken up with H but I am ashamed and embarassed to admit that I didn't want to go through Uni alone. An attempt at breaking up was made but I called H up and told him I had changed my mind and we continued seeing each other for another year and a half. I just want to say that I never cheated on H (he had no qualms about doing it to me though, on multiple occasions I might add) with G physically but I guess emotionally I knew that I was still very much hung up on my ex. Feeling guilty, I tried to make it work with H and we even talked about marriage but part of me knew at some point H and I would go our seperate ways. And we did. Only it happened because I was having an emotional affair with someone else. It wasn't because of all the times H cheated on me, lied to me, constantly borrowed money from me as well as those around us and was an all-around ass. Again, I know that I wasn't perfect or the saint in this relationship. I was half in love with someone else most of the time during that relationship. Yet, I was all ready to commit the rest of my life to this man I wasn't too sure I loved much less liked and I guess, it was a blessing that I met the next guy, my fling, who we'll call Fling.
The time Fling and I met, we were both with other people. We connected with each other on almost everything. It was like he and I were mirrors of each other. I was at a point in my life where I was feeling extremely jaded about love but Fling made me feel as if concepts like soulmates existed. It was the same emotional connection I had with G. We made many plans to go out but always, at the last minute I would cancel. I just couldn't go through with it. I had been cheated on before by H but wasn't about to do the same. After 2 months of indecision, I ended my four year relationship with H and even though I didn't verbalize it, I was hoping Fling would do the same. Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you wanna view it, he didn't. I told him I didn't want to be a third party in his relationship and after a brief freeze out, we got talking to one another again. For a while we deluded each other into thinkng that we'd be just friends. We'd hang out, bringing along reinforcements so that it wouldn't look like we were on dates. We'd call each other and talk all night. Fling was pretty much acting as my boyfriend but he was officially someone else's guy. I think this went on for about 5 months and one day, I just came to realize that Fling was no better than G. He was indecisive and couldn't make his mind up if he wanted to be with me or not. I was disappointed but didn't want to be kept in that limbo any longer. I finally made a clean break from Fling but for months on end, I moaned and whinged to my friends about why he couldn't choose me over his girlfriend. Perhaps, in hindsight, I wasn't so much into Fling because I wanted him. Maybe he nurtured the part of me that was, as corny as it sounds, dying for staying too long in a non-functional relationship. Perhaps also, Fling evoked much of the same feelings I had with G. I guess I won't really know if I was so into Fling for him or the feelings he brought up in me. Another thing that just occurred to me is maybe I am only in love with the memory of my first relationship and not the person itself. Perhaps, I want to replicate those feelings but can you ever have the same feelings more than once?
Anyways, I dated a few guys after that. One, K, was even serious about marrying me but I didn't like him in a romantic way. It would have been so easy just to say, ok, let's get married but I doubt it would have lasted. We didn't have anything in common and I know this may sound conceited and ungrateful, but he was too into me and that put me off. K told me he loved me after our first date. He announces his intentions to marry me on our third date. He tried to rally my friends into talking him up in front of me. He ambushed me with a meet with his parents. He was just relentless and not in a good way. He did do some sweet things, like on my birthday, he came and brought me a Baskin Robbin's ice cream cake and serenaded me with his guitar. It was a sweet move, but back then I just felt uncomfortable and semi-creeped out. I never led him on, from the get-go I had told him that I was not looking for anything serious and the reason I agreed to go out with him was because his persistance wore me down. The lesser of two evils was to agree. I openly declared that I wanted to be friends and if things changed later on then it would happen but he always tried to force things to be more than what it was. I don't know why he was in such a hurry. My opinion of him didn't improve much after he messaged me about 3 months after I had turned him down for the last time to tell me he was engaged to someone else AND in the same breath, so to speak, told me he missed me. I still have a copy of that conversation, as a reminder of how even the most naive and innocent seeming men can be jackasses.
The other guy I went out with was F. F was a catch, completely fantastic on paper. Good-looking, successful and with personality to boot. He was older by 6 years and it was a change from all the same-age or one year older guys I kept getting with. The thing is it never seemed quite right with F. To put it simply, I didn't feel that chemistry with him like I did with G and Fling so rather than waste both of our times, I let our quasi-relationship flounder. I got posted to my first overseas position so it was quite easy to just let things die. F recently got married and invited me to his wedding. I didn't go because I was here but if I had been in the country, yea, I would have gone to his reception. He's a nice person and some part of me does feel like I let a good one go. But I just think that fate has other plans for both of us and it wasn't one where we are in it together. If I'm being completely honest, back then I thought F was a bit out of my league and I always wondered what it was he saw in me. I also felt I wasn't in the same place he was in and I didn't want to string along something that I wasn't sure I was going to put myself in wholeheartedly. Shows I do learn my lesson :D
After F, I decided to give myself a break to do things on my own. In the four years since then, I have not dated anyone nor do I feel the need to be seeing anyone. I love the way my life is now, on all fronts, it feels fulfilling to me. But with this dream, I'm afraid that a part of me, my subconscious, is trying to tell me that I don't actually like my life this way (does that sound crazy?). I feel I do but now I'm not sure if I am happy about the direction my personal life has taken. See how confused I am.....I don't even know if my doubts are real or not. I'm afraid that the reason I've not felt the need to connect with another man is because I don't want to get hurt and in that way I have managed to protect myself from having relationships for this long by developing this emotional block that has stopped me from feeling remotely interested in relationships. I mean I can appreciate a good-looking man and I do have moments of undiluted fan-girly obsessions over Rob Bourdon, Matt Czuchry and the like (if I wanted to overanalyze myself, I could say that I form crushes on unattainable individuals so that I don't set myself up for disappointment, but I wont't go down that analytical road :P) but when it comes to feelings of companionship, being with someone, I'm quite dead on that front. My mind rationally says that I would like one but I can't evoke any emotional connection to that thought with my heart. I dunno if that made any sense. I'm just afraid that the two people that I gave myself to emotionally have made me scared to allow myself another shot. I think the experience I went through with them damaged me, left scars, and I am not too sure how to fix myself. At this point, I don't know how to open up myself to let another person in. I don't know if I ever can again. It was difficult to do it again after G and when, after completely and totally giving myself up emotionally for the second time and it didn't work out, it could be I just don't want to put myself though all that again. Heck, at this point, I'd be hard pressed to remember how to behave on a date.
Right now, I don't know whether finding someone is something I want. I do find it funny (in a what's wrong with me kind of way) that I can survive with my own company most days and that I don't seek out companionship. I don't know if writing any of this is shedding any light on my emotional psyche. I just felt the need to express my feelings. The dream seriously disturbed me. I wish I hadn't dreamt it at all.
One funny little thing I noticed about myself is that I like to date guys whose names start from the first half of the alphabets, A-M...... perhaps if I were to start dating again, I should broaden my horizons to include men with names beginning with the latter half of the alphabets, someone from the N-Z range :D
