Sunday, December 16, 2012

Faith

Each relationship, and each subsequent break-up, each near-miss of a promising future, it makes it that much harder to stay hopeful that I'm going to meet that amazing guy who will make all of this fucking bullshit be worth it. I'm sick of dating, of boyfriends and first dates and wondering if this time, maybe this time, the guy in front of me will be The One. I'm sick of all this fucking nonsense. I'm ready for my next boyfriend to be my last.

And then I go through another fucking break-up.




How do I stay hopeful when time after time, a different wonderful boyfriend has fallen out of love with me? They still fancy me of course, and say and do most of the right things, but I feel it. Something changed in them. In us. It's damn near soul-shattering. Again, and again. Fuck staying hopeful, how do you stay whole?

Right now, it looks so much easier to give up. Give in. Date the next generic nice guy who asks me out and is stable and looks good naked and can overlook my many flaws if I blow him often enough. Because I'm not sure how many more tries I have left in me.

I've never been a god or religion kind of person, but love? Love I could have faith in. I've seen how wonderful just the inklings of love can be. Sure it wavers and sometimes on really dark days, I wonder if that cold-hearted bitch of an exterior I used to put on as a protective shell has finally seeped inside and become real. There have been times over the last couple years when I wished it would happen, or have willed it to happen. Fuck 'em and dump 'em. It came easily enough to me, as long as I didn't let myself think about it too hard. Or at all.

And then, inevitably [queue the music], someone or something always reminds me about the power of love. Not the Hollywood bullshit that makes audiences of two hundred cry at once, but the quiet and far less glamorous kind of love that has roots so deep it can penetrate years and miles apart, and yet have two people always so in sync that it makes me believe soul mates are real.

I want to be with someone who makes me glow with love, and I want to do the same for him. Keep in mind I'm not saying this with the never- or little-broken hearted of a know-nothing twenty year old. I'm thirty-two. I've been there, done him, lived with him, been engaged to him, and left him. And I've been left to go try yet again.

It's just... I have so much love in my heart, and I want to give it to someone. All of it. I want to knock him over sideways with the sheer force of how much warmth I have stored up inside me. Sometimes I expect it to burst out of my body because there's so damn much inside me, I can't contain it anymore. Then other times, like these last few days or weeks, I'm shaken by the fear that I will never find someone to give all this love I have in my heart, and it will slowly extinguish itself.

Last night, crying myself to sleep in the most utterly cliche of cliche ways, I listened to the sappy and sweet song "All Your Life" by The Band Perry, and I sent all the warm-fuzzies I have in my heart out into the world with the silly little hope that some amazing guy senses it feels me is warmed by the glow of our future love, and he smiles.

I just hope we find each other before I lose faith that it will happen one day.

15 comments:

  1. <3 we love you Vix and always will. I can only hope that you can learn to love yourself as much as we love you.

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  2. As always, your writing rocks me to my very core and makes my chest tighten up like I'll never breathe easily again. Thank you for sharing your talent with the world.

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  3. This is absolutely a mirror image of how I feel. For both our sakes, I hope we do indeed find it. Love your writing.

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  4. I loved this. It was perfect. You're great.

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  5. Sorry you seem so depressed.
    I think you have to consider the possibility that having a healthy and rewarding relationship is more than having great sex and multiple orgasms. I don't think anyone would disagree that a trove of sexual experience can be valuable to the health of a relationship, but maybe you have gained mastery of that tool at the cost of neglecting other important relationship skills. The way you've gone about it hasn't worked, maybe it's time to come up with some real changes.

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  6. I've been following you for a few years now and have got to witness some of your ups and downs. I'm 39 and let me tell you I absolutely know where you are coming from. It is very hard to know you want to love somebody but have spent so long keeping everyone at arm's length you aren't sure how to let them in. I'm figuring it out and I know you will too. You're smart, funny, and pretty damn sexy. It will come to us both soon I hope.

    And if I ever get out to TX (got family there) I need to give you a big ol' hug. :-)

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  7. Keep holding out, Vix. You're an amazing person.

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  8. Listen, I've read your blog for a while and I like it, because, as you know, you're smart, funny, and attractive. That's why guys are into you. (I'm a guy.)

    But I have to tell you, you don't have a relationship problem. You have a drinking problem, an employment problem, a flakiness problem and a self-esteem problem. All of this comes through loud and clear, in spite of your artful presentation. No guy is going to stick with that, no matter how smart and sexy you are.

    You need to work on yourself, and get to the point where you can be at peace with yourself without the buzz of alcohol, bacon, validation from strangers on the internet, etc. As soon as you feel better about yourself, you will then become the person that someone wants to stay with after the initial thrill quiets down a bit.

    I also recommend therapy. Going to therapy is just about the best thing I've ever done, myself, and hey, by the way, are you actually in Dallas? I can recommend a great one in Dallas; her name is Berit Johnson.

    I also recommend the book: The Mindful Way Through Depression, or as I would call it, How to Cope with Life. (You don't have to be depressed to benefit from it.) You're smart, you can read it in a day, and I'll be surprised if you don't get a lot out of it.

    Executive Summary: fix yourself first, the guy will follow.

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  9. I think you should cut Vix a bit of a break. She's a blogger and no doubt exaggerates some of the things she blogs/writes/tweets about. You can't claim to know someone and diagnose their problems just because you have read their blog for years. I'm not saying your heart wasn't in the right place, but it's hard to make those kind of judgements without actually knowing someone in person.

    Therapy might be a great idea (it is for a lot of people), but telling someone they have a problem with alcohol or employment is a little harsh. She might drink more when she writes, or she might write better about drinking - doesn't mean she drinks too much because it's not in the context of her whole life. Her employment troubles might not be anything to do with her or her actions.

    Keep at it Vix, we love you :)

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  10. Perhaps at the start they are happy with you.

    But after a long time seeing how much you drink, and how you haven't got a steady job, your appeal disappears quicker than an unfulfilled Mayan prophecy.

    Get a job. Stop drinking. Make a guy wait for sex once in a while and you might find what you're looking for.

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  11. I've been reading your blog and twitter for quite sometime.. I really agree with Tim.. he made it blunt but he has a point. I mean you can't have your cake and eat it too. Believe me Ive been there. If you want to screw everyone and have fun so be it, but you can't really complain when a guy only wants to hook up with you and use you for sex. I honestly do not know why you let all these exes and losers (ie Chef, seriously this guy pisses me off) back into your life and use you. The second you can walk away from all these idiots (for good0 the second that great person comes (its cliche and true, happened to me when least expecting it). You need a fresh start, work on yourself (you know what you need to do) and stop hiding behind the snarky sarcasm. Guys that are "the one" material will NOT be staying with you for the long haul if you have sex on the first date, period. I figured you and Olympian weren't going to last ( sad but true). The only reason it probably lasted as long as it did was probably due to what seemed to be an awesome sex life. You and him clearly didn't have the basics down. Goals, life style, etc. Anyone could have seen that. I'm not saying change you, but any guy who is the one material and has his shit together isn't going to want to be with the Vix who drinks too much, screws too much, and doesn't take care of themselves. Just focus on yourself for right now and the rest will follow. <3

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  12. Vix: I tweet as @RandomlyBob. You asked me via Twitter to post here the TwitLonger post I wrote during a bout of insomnia late last night. The URL is

    http://www.twitlonger.com/show/keh7u7

    But to save readers from clicking over, I'll paste the text of it here. It will exceed the allowable maximum length, so I think it will take two or three comments to get it in. (Verbosity is one of my key talents.)



    @vixoen I hope you're in the mood for some older-guy, been-there advice. Breakups suck, but there is much to be learned from them that can give the next serious relationship a far better chance of succeeding.

    I was struck by your saying that you have a lot to learn before you meet a "quality" guy. Maybe you just said that too glibly, without really meaning it, but I'm taking it at face value and challenging its accuracy. Olympian must be a "quality" guy, or you wouldn't have been so deeply involved with him. (It's not like you don't know how to have a casual relationship when you want one.) The fact that it didn't work out in the end does not disprove that. He's probably exactly right for somebody--just not you--in the same way that you're probably exactly right for somebody--just not him. *Most* relationships fail at some point. We're lucky if we get one good one that lasts until the proverbial "death do us part."

    I think it might be more constructive if you looked at the Olympian experience as kind of a "near miss." There was a lot there to like, but also some incompatibilities that the relationship could not endure. That's sad, but it's not intrinsically a negative reflection on either one of you. You were like a lock and key that at first seemed a match, but wouldn't quite open. That doesn't mean that either one of you is not a "quality" person. It just means that there was a mismatch.

    So what caused the mismatch? I don't know. I don't know either of you. But it might be worthwhile to write (actual writing, as in pen and paper) a list of things about him that you liked and were indispensible, i.e., the qualities that you would have to find in any future partner for the relationship to have a prayer of working. I imagine those would be things like honesty, kindness, physical attraction, etc.

    Next is a list of things you liked about him that were nice but not requisites for a future partner--good cook, tidy, punctual, whatever. (I'm totally making these up, since I have no clue whether those describe him, nor how much or little you might value them.)

    Then the same thing for the negatives--the things that you could tolerate for a lifetime if you had to, and finally the dealbreakers.

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  13. (continued)

    But wait, there's more!

    Even more important than the above is the self-inventory. This involves questions like, "What could I have done better?" It's crucial to understand that this doesn't mean that you're blaming yourself for the breakup. This isn't about recrimination. In fact, I think that trying to assign blame for a relationship ending is usually a pointless and even destructive pursuit. (To be clear, it's crucially important to understand why it didn't last, in the same objective way that a pathologist does an autopsty to discover the cause of death, but your objectivity gets clouded when it veers into the blaming game.) But we all screw up, and if we don't identify the patterns of our screw-ups, we'll probably keep doing them. You know the old saw about failing to learn from the past. Life is too short to spend it making the same mistakes over and over again. (Find some new ones to make!)

    The reason the self-analysis is even more important than the inventory of the ex is that you can't change him, and you can't change the next guy who's a serious prospect, either. You can only change yourself. What needs changing about you? Hell if I know. Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot. I hope, though, that you can distinguish between the things that you might need to change to make some particular guy happier in a relationsihp with you, and the things that you might need to change to be happier with yourself. My nugget of wisdom for the day is that if you do the latter, most of the former items will take care of themselves, or at least be readily negotiable.

    I've been through two divorces, and though they were excruciatingly painful, I learned a ton about myself as a result that I never would have opened my eyes to if I hadn't been slapped in the face with the hard truth that I wasn't a very good husband in a lot of ways. (I'd like to think that I've got it figured out well enough to be an excellent one for the third time around some day, but we'll have to wait and see.)

    It would be a shame if you brushed off this whole Olympian experience as some sort of life misstep without learning what you can from it. It would be just as much or more a shame, though, if it caused you to wallow in self-pity and despair that you're not good enough for a "quality" guy. After several years of reading your thoughts, I would have a very hard time believing that.

    I hope that you find the middle ground, with self-reflection that does not devolve into self-recrimination, and that as a result you move to an emotional space where you can be happy and fulfilled all by yourself. If you can, then you'll be much better prepared to be half of a really awesome relationship when life hands you one--and I believe that it will.

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  14. Yeah, what Rakewell said.

    A couple of comments seemed to attack Vix's employment situation, but it should be pointed out that she did in fact start her own card business. Maybe it wasn't enough to support her or quite turn out the way she hoped, but it takes some stones to start a business.

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