Save me from myself

Hearts break and then presumably, they heal. Time goes by and the memories fade, the pain subsides. But do the little cracks ever fully mend? All I know is that every time, there is a little bit of innocence lost in a way, a new experience ingrained, maybe a little less trust left for the next time. None of this stuff is easy. We are all so very different and often so closed off from each other that it sometimes seems impossible to ever have it all figured out. All I know, is that I am very bad at all of this.

I've had boyfriends across the ocean or just the continent, I've dated coaches, guys who were depressed or worse, one who was twice my age, I have fallen for a family man, once I even had the pleasure of bringing someone out of a self-imposed, 3-year long celibacy, which then led him to realize how much fun it was to screw around and thought that he should tell me about all of this too, but only when I was visiting him, only a few thousand miles from NY. To put it in short, complete disaster.

Among the chaos, I have learned many things. Most importantly, about myself and also about others. I am not sure if it's my nature or if I have arrived at where I am now emotionally through all the experiences I have had, but I have just figured out something rather important about myself. Somewhere along the line, I stopped trusting my intuitions, stopped having much trust in people, and started making broad generalizations based on the few bad experiences I had. However, in reality, I am a hopeless closeted optimist, who has always believed that everyone was meant to experience that great love that we hear about and sometimes see around us. This wasn’t easy to admit even to myself.

There is this boy I have liked for some time now. Sort of like a high school crush, a decade too late. I imagined us in the most romantic ways, my heart fluttered every time I saw him, there were butterflies in my stomach every time we talked. In my imagination, he was perfect. He would be the perfect boyfriend, perfect lover, attentive and considerate. I was also quite certain – except for the optimist hiding at the back of my mind – that we would never be more than two people working on the same floor, friendly the way people are who pass each other in the hallway daily.

Now, it’s time to get out of the world I have created in my head and start living in reality again. Good things we have imagined do happen sometimes! The boy I had a crush on eventually asked me out and that’s when things got a little complicated. There was this picture of him in my head – the perfect everything – and obviously, he is nothing like that. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. It’s just that nobody is like that. Well, that’s not entirely true. There is one person who’s like that. Me. What I imagine the perfect man to be is really just me in a man’s body. A man who knows exactly what I want, when to call, when not to talk to me, when to kiss me, what to say and so on. Clearly, I don’t actually want to date myself, so this creates a certain amount of anxiety. Maybe I am an anxious person to begin with but this sort of paradox can make things much much worse.

Here is what I figured out so far (with the help of my future therapist, who just really gets me, thanks Becky!): I like living in my head – it’s a perfect life, who wouldn’t? – I am a little scared of reality – often it does not work out the way we imagined – it’s scary to actually get to know someone, with all their flaws, even if they are great; people are different and we have to accommodate for those differences and respect them for what they really are, that is, get to know them in reality, by spending time together, by talking, not by sleeping together. Everything has its time. Life happens out there, with other people and it would be a shame to miss it all by living in the comfortable, perfect world that is inside my head.