I’ve been having trouble writing this piece. Over the last
few days, I slowly began to realize that it was because I felt like I was over-sharing.
It’s one thing to provide intimate details about one’s friendships. It’s
another thing entirely to dish about one’s romantic life. It made me
uncomfortable. Therefore, I decided to tone down the details. We’ll have to
see, dear readers, if you still find it interesting and/or relatable.
When I speak of my romantic life, I should be clear that
there hasn’t been much of one. I spent most of my life without a partner. I
didn’t have my first boyfriend until the summer after I graduated high school. The
relationship was short lived. Throughout all of college, and well into my 20s,
I never had a serious love interest.
It took me a long time to realize that the problem lay
inside of me. To be sure, I was a bit of an ugly duckling. I don’t say that in
an attempt to gain sympathy or to hunt for compliments. It honestly took me a
while to grow into my looks, or at least to accept them. I was in my late 20s
before I began to feel like a beautiful swan. I’ve also always been a bit of a
tomboy, just “one of the guys.” For a long time, I thought these things were my
problem. Not pretty enough, too much of a boy. Not desirable.
Throughout my early 20s, until I met the man who would later
become my fiancé, I often felt used. Inevitably, it seemed, the people I became
involved with would get what they wanted from me and leave. Or they wouldn’t
get what they wanted and leave. Or, even worse, they would leave at the first
sign of trouble. I felt like I could never be perfect enough. As soon as I had
a bad day, they’d be out the door, running as fast as they could.
It was humiliating and depressing. I was lonely. And I felt
abandoned every single time. It got to the point where I didn’t think anyone
would stay. I was surprised when someone did. I felt lucky. “Finally, someone
is putting up with my crap,” I thought. My fiancé and I put up with each other’s
crap for about five years. Things didn’t work out. In the end, I think we’d
both agree that this was for the best. To this day, we’re still good friends. When
we broke up, I moved out on my own for the first time in my life: no family, no
significant other, and no roommate. Just me. I loved it.
But then something bad happened. I’m not going to tell you
what, but in order to put the kibosh on wild speculation, I will tell you that
it did not involve any form of assault, sexual or otherwise. But it was a big
deal at the time. I felt like my life would never be the same. It forced me to
take a step back from everything, to evaluate not only my relationships but
also myself.
At the time, I was in the middle of grad school, about to
start the eight-month process to write my Master’s thesis in order to complete
the program. I decided to focus on that. No more chasing after relationships,
or even friendships. I threw myself into writing my thesis and put myself back
in therapy.
It was the best decision of my life. I’d been through
therapy before on more than one occasion. I don’t regret any of the therapy
I’ve been through. Each of my counselors was important in his or her way. I
felt like the times I’d gone before had been for fixing specific problems,
though, like my anorexia. This one was for fixing the rest of me.
I’m not going to tell you that I had some immediate insight
because that’s not what happened. There was no lightning bolt. I completed my
Master’s degree and got back out into the world, rebuilding the social life
that had been neglected while I wrote my thesis. Some time after I finished my
degree, my therapist and I agreed that I’d gotten as much as I could in our
sessions. What I discovered in the months after that was that now that I was
happy with myself, people were drawn to me.
It wasn’t something I did out of any conscious effort. I was
happy because I’d finished my degree, something that had been high on the list
of things I’d wanted to do with my life. I was also happy because I finally liked
myself. I’d gone through an ordeal and come out the other side with the
realization that I could rely on myself, that I was strong and clever and
accomplished. I realized that I would never need someone else to make me feel
better because I knew how to do that for myself.
Not only did I attract more people – in a nine-month period
I was asked out on more dates than during the rest of my life combined – but I
also attracted a higher quality of person. While none of those relationships,
save for the obvious one, worked out, most of them ended with a minimum of
drama. I think this was when I finally started relating to my potential love
interests like an adult, rather than like a teenager.
When I met the man who would become my husband, I was
immediately drawn to him because he challenged me. I wasn’t used to that. He
didn’t just accept my opinions; he wanted to know how I had formed them. It
could be frustrating at times – it still is – but I liked it. I liked that he
made me think. The first time we met, he had a girlfriend. It was disappointing
but I moved on. When we met again a couple of months later, he was single. That
night, one of the last things he said to me before we parted ways was that
happiness is a choice. I didn’t believe him then.
It took me years to accept that he was right. Now it’s
the coda that I live by. No matter what we’ve been through – and we’ve been
through a lot – I have chosen to be happy. I feel the strongest, mentally and
emotionally, that I’ve ever felt. Of course, I obviously still feel lonely
sometimes or I wouldn’t be writing this series. But I never feel lonely in my
romantic life.
I don’t worry that my husband is going to leave me. I never
feel like he’s putting up with my crap. Neither do I feel like I’m putting up
with his. That’s not to say it’s all sunshine and rainbows. It’s not. We rarely
fight, but we bicker frequently, and sometimes we don’t like each other very
much. But it’s okay. That’s life. That’s living with, and relating to, another
human being. I married my husband with every intention of staying together
forever. That is still my intention. If, for some reason, things
don’t work out, however, I know I’ll be okay because I already am. My husband
isn’t a void-filler. He’s the man I love.
Love isn’t like how they portray it in chick flicks.
No one is going to complete you. If you have a hole inside of you, you need to
fill it yourself. It’s no one’s job to fix you. In hindsight, I can see that
this was my problem for all those years. I may not have realized it at the time,
but I was looking for someone to build up my self-esteem. No one wants that
job. Once I learned how to build it up myself, I became more attractive to
other people as a by-product.
Sometimes I wish I'd learned this lesson earlier in life. If I had, though, then I probably would never have found myself here. I like here. So instead of wishing to change the past, I'll just be happy to have learned the lesson at all, while enjoying the present and looking forward to the future.
