“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
I have been living my emotional/romantic life for the past 3-4~ years terrified of a woman who would come by and break my heart. There. I said it.
Has this happened once before? Yes. Well, sort of. My first girlfriend was a girl I met at a youth group meeting at church, and we dated for the majority of my senior year. When she broke up with me, she said that it was because she "didn't want a long-distance relationship" when I went off to college out-of-state and she finished her senior year. (She was about a year younger than me.)
I accepted this, and we had the "let's be friends" talk. Two weeks later, she has a new boyfriend and is telling me all about the dirty things they do in bed. Suffice to say, the girl who first laid claim to my heart was not a real girl, but rather a projection by my then-girlfirend of the kind of girl I was looking for.
She became, afterwards, the polar opposite of the girl I had been in a "committed" relationship with for 9 months; abusing alcohol, illegal drugs, and generally living the high school party life.
Fast forward to freshman year of college, and the "OMG GURLZ" reaction of leaving the small pond and going to a huge lake. I was extremely flirtatious in college, I'm not ashamed to admit that. I had my eye on a number of girls, but there was one in particular that I really wanted to pursue a relationship with. She was cute, funny, extremely musical and a committed Christian, the "Proverbs 31" woman every young man in Bible college dreams of. I asked her on a couple "dates" (as much dating as one can do on a $20/week budget) before asking her about pursuing a relationship that could end in marriage. I think "courting" is the word I used. I was so noble in college, it's disgusting.
She said yes, and was very enthusiastic. A week later she came to me and told me that the nervousness she was feeling, she decided, did not stem from her first "real" relationship, but from the anxiety that our relationship wasn't something we could or should focus on. According to her, my direction in life was unclear and she couldn't commit to someone that lacked direction in life. I don't deny I lacked direction at the time, but what I needed then was less someone who wanted me to "get my poop in a group" and more someone who would help me along my way.
Since then, this young woman has gone on a choir tour that I could not attend due to my piss poor grades, and built a relationship with one of my friends that has led to their engagement. Am I still upset about "what could have been"? Absolutely. Was it almost entirely my fault? Probably. You can also see where this is going: Ron in a relationship is batting .00000000 and it's the bottom of the 7th with 2 outs.
Three or four emotional flings later, and here I am, 23 years old, without a meaningful relationship to my name these past 3 years. Am I being fearful about my next relationship? Yes. Part of it is being in the Army and adjusting to that kind of life, along with being overseas for the past 2 1/2 years and not taking too kindly to any of the locals, in a romantic sense. Yet here I sit. And I don't know where to go from here.
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