Selling Out

I was out with some girlfriends the other night (thanks to kickball – I have actual friends!) and my friend Ghost was giving me crap for the complete 180 that I’ve done since we met. She and I had a mildly-intoxicated late night confessional in my car way back at the beginning of the summer and we discussed our mutual issues with men. I was in serious PC/relationship backlash at that moment and I went off (as I was wont to do around that time) about the possibility that I’m not the marrying type and that I don’t think you need a relationship to complete you, and blah blah blah. Ghost brought that up as we were out on the town last weekend and said, “Now look at you!”

So, yes, I’ve sold out. The odd thing about it is that it doesn’t feel like selling out. Once I regained my independence in March and remembered how much happier I was alone, it seemed perfectly reasonable for me to assume all relationships would make me feel smothered, drained and miserable. But Joe Montana doesn’t make me feel that way. Yes, we talk every day (because how else can you sustain a long-distance relationship?), but neither of us is ever upset or resentful if the other is too busy to talk at certain times or can’t talk for very long or puts their own social obligations ahead of spending hours on the phone. I had a little too much to drink when I went out with Ghost and the girls and passed out on a friend’s couch instead of calling Joe Montana. Rather than being upset with me, he was happy for me that I had so much fun.

I keep thinking that I should be more worried about selling my Single Self out – but it doesn’t feel like I’ve had to give anything up to be with Joe Montana. I haven’t had to change my life or how I do things for him, I’ve just been able to add him to everything that was already here that has been working so well for me for the past 6 months. So is it nuts for me to think that maybe I am the marrying kind – as long as it’s Joe Montana that I’m thinking of marrying?

Ghost told me that she’s totally jealous of what I’ve got going on, and if she felt the way I feel she’d be married in about two weeks. I told her people would think I’m insane if I were to rush into marriage that fast (or even this fast). She said, “I wouldn’t think you’re insane. Well, maybe insanely awesome.”

Lyrics of the Day

“…These wrinkles masterfully disguise the youthful boy below, who turned your way and saw something he was not looking for: both a beginning and an end.” Death Cab for Cutie Brothers on a Hotel Bed

PC: Epilogue

I really try not to get defensive when people give their views and opinions on what I write about, because it would be pointless to write in a public forum and expect all comments to be flattering. But I'm going to address this subject one last time, because I just feel like I should say a thing or two.

I realize that my accounts of my relationship with PC are one-sided. The catch is that I was never 100% honest with how things were between us. Never. From the moment that PC knew about this blog, he constantly brought it up - when things were good or bad. He'd say, "So are you going to write about this in your blog? Are you going to make me look like a jerk? Are you going to tell your friends and your mom and your sister about this?" Because of this constant reminder that he felt what I was writing and saying affected him, I glossed over much of the bad stuff and all of the worst stuff really. Even after he left, I pulled punches.

I never felt that I was a woman who could be abused, in any way, but I've come to believe differently.

No, he did not ever actually hit me.

Would he have? If things had continued on the course that they were on (and they would have had I not ended it once and for all), I think he would have. In the last week that we were together, he scared the hell out of me more than once and one time he grabbed me forcefully enough for it to hurt and enough to send a million red flags and warning signals through my head.

With what I know now, and what I have found out since PC and I broke up, there was a lot more wrong and a lot more going on than I ever knew or probably ever will know. I realize that I sound cold when I talk about my frustrations concerning what I hope will be my final communication with him, but 6 months of half-knowledge and endless speculation have put me in a place where it makes me physically ill to speak to him and sometimes even to think of him. I felt a lot of guilt for a long time (guilt is a lot of what kept me with him for as long as I stayed), but I can't feel guilty any more. He made the choices he made - over and over and over again. He manipulated me every chance that he had, doing his best to ensure that I wouldn't leave him - that I would feel like I couldn't leave him.

He's not the worst guy in the world, there are plenty that are far worse, but he's an extremely troubled and messed up guy and he did everything he could to hide the worst and keep me tied to him. I was miserable with him and I thank my lucky stars every day that I finally had the wherewithal to end it.

By the time that I had been with PC for 3 months (as I've been with Joe Montana now), I had spent probably a week's worth of nights up and crying because of things that PC did or did not do. And those were the good times.

Keeping it To Myself

So I’ve been busy. Frighteningly busy really. I bought my townhouse and have spent much of the past couple of weeks working on furnishing it and getting my things moved out of the old apartment. I’ve also spent much of the last couple of weeks dealing with the train-wreck of BS that is still my every interaction with PC – but I’m mostly going to leave that alone in this space. Suffice it to say that six months after we broke up, he has still not come back to Florida to pick up his stuff (which truly is almost every one of his earthly possessions) and he is now scrambling to try to get his act together before the end of the lease on the apartment. It’s not been a stress that I’ve needed, but I don’t seem to have any say in that.

I’ve also been trying to analyze why I haven’t been more eager to tell you all what’s been going on with Joe Montana. I think that I’ve come up with a couple of viable reasons:

1. I chronicled a lot of my elation at the beginning of my relationship with PC and I just can’t bear for anyone (including myself) to make comparisons between that and how things are with Joe Montana at this point.

2. Part of me wants to keep this happiness all to myself and not share the intimate details with anyone.

What’s going on here is too good and too special and too realistic to really be described. It’s also hard for me to talk about it publicly because I know that there are people who will think that it’s just me rushing into something again and that I’m destined to get myself into more trouble (people like The Sister, especially). But it’s just not like that, although I don’t know if I’m able to truly articulate why. It just is, and that’s what’s amazing about it.

A brief break-down is that Joe Montana’s Labor Day visit was amazing. There wasn’t a single thing about the weekend that wasn’t fantastic and not a single thing about it that I wish had gone differently - except maybe the part about him getting on a plane and flying 3000 miles away from me afterward. We’ve talked every day since. We’ve been doing this phone thing for three months now and last night we still managed to accidentally stay on the phone for over an hour because we just didn’t get to the end of our conversation.

I’m going to man up and be honest here, because it’s what I usually do, even though it’s something that has always been hard for me – to be honest about my feelings. I’ve fallen completely in love with Joe Montana. It’s serious stuff here kids. Like, someone-may-have-to-move-across-the-country kind of serious. No real decisions have been made at this point, but we both know that eventually we will actually be able to be together. Because we know this, it’s somewhat easier to be patient with the distance now – though it’ll never be a cakewalk. I’m going to Montana for a weekend to see him in October and he’s coming back to Florida to visit for New Years. It’s not often enough, but we’re doing what we can. And as for that whole “we can date other people” stipulation, well that’s just a moot point. I can’t imagine wanting to, and it’s quite possible I’ll never date again.

Lyrics of the Day

“You know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you. You know I dreamed about you. I missed you for 29 years.” The National Slow Show

I Should Be Committed

Speaking of commitment, Joe Montana and I (rather inadvertently) had The Talk. We were on the phone one night and he just threw out the “boyfriend/girlfriend” words. So I said, “Oh is that what’s going here?” Then we proceeded to have a stammered, halting discussion about the idea of being monogamous from three thousand miles away. I shared my opinion that in a situation like this, if one of us were to meet someone that we truly wanted to go out with, we should be able to do that as long as we’re honest about it. Joe replied with the conviction that he had no intention of meeting anyone else, that he couldn’t think of anyone but me. I had already thought this over from my perspective and had realized that Joe had set the bar pretty high. I couldn’t imagine myself engaging in a random, flip cup-fueled make-out session and it would take quite a lot for a guy to impress me enough to want to give him a chance.

So whether or not Joe Montana and I agreed on my stipulation (and I’m still not sure whether or not we really did), we did agree on the boyfriend/girlfriend words. So, here I am with another long-distance boyfriend: a long distance boyfriend who is on a plane on his way to see me at this very moment.

Although this long-distance business is familiar ground for me, everything about this relationship feels like uncharted territory. I don’t think that anything has gone so easily before (although I’m sure that I have said similar things in the past about relationships that were not going nearly as easily as I was imagining they were) and I’m both excited and nervous about where to go from here. If things go as well this weekend as I am hoping they will (and there is every indication that my hopes are based on reality), I think that this relationship is going to get pretty serious. From my perspective, Joe Montana’s perspective and the perspectives of River (who knows us both very well) and the therapist that I’ve been talking to (that’s a long story, but she’s been listening to the events since the beginning of things with Joe and she’s been behind it the whole time) Joe and I are just about perfect for each other.

The therapist said that a person’s life is like a movie script and when you’re dating someone, you’re letting them audition to fill a role in your movie. So far, Joe Montana seems perfect for the role and I’m thinking he could actually make the final cast. (Though we do disagree on which way to put the toilet paper on the roll; it was almost a deal-breaker for me, but I decided to try to be open-minded.)

When I was younger, I thought that it was perfectly reasonable for people in their 30’s, or thereabouts, to move more quickly in relationships. Obviously with more years of life and dating experience under your belt, you can figure out much more quickly what you like and what you want in a partner. Hopefully you can also figure it out more quickly when it isn’t working at all. Now that I have reached this venerable age group myself, I am feeling like it would be irrational for me to move too quickly with Joe. Or rather, a large part of me thinks that he really could be someone that I could be with long-term; the rest of me feels like I need to justify having this belief a mere couple months into the relationship. But I do believe it.

Lyrics of the Day

"I’m getting lost in your curls, I’m getting rushed back on a whim. Our breaths get wind back to the time when we were green. I know we have changed, but I still grin cause I can’t wait to see you." Animal Collective Bluish

"He's Scared, She's Scared"

When I decided that I would be doing a little bit of research for posting material, I went to my local Barnes & Noble to browse the love and relationship section. At the time, I was curious about my self-diagnosed commitmentphobia and found the perfect book with which to educate myself. Who better to reference than the very authors who originally coined the term “commitmentphobia”?

Having been published in 1993, the book He's Scared, She's Scared, written by Steven Carter and Julia Sokol, is slightly dated in its references to the changing landscape of modern dating. It refers multiple times to the new, independent, modern woman – the type of woman that I’ve always considered myself to be and a gender role that has become common and familiar to my generation. The book addresses this subject to emphasize the evolution of gender relations and the shift from the perception that men have the monopoly on fear of commitment. Aside from these slightly dated details, I think this book is as useful as any I have ever read in addressing a subject so comprehensively.

Unlike The Man Plan, He’s Scared, She’s Scared uses scores of anecdotes and partial case studies very effectively to illustrate its points. The authors use these stories to put the behaviors they outline into real-life context. I don’t think that anyone could read this book without recognizing a relationship that they’ve been in or witnessed in one or more of the cautionary tales. The Sister’s relationship with her first boyfriend was so classically commitmentphobic that I almost believed she must have been interviewed for the book. (I actually Priority Mailed her the book almost as soon as I was finished reading it. It should be quite useful to her.)

The ideas in He’s Scared, She’s Scared are complex and involved. I won’t outline even the basics here, but if you have any reason to believe that you have issues with commitment or that your partner does, I highly recommend reading this book. It doesn’t treat people with commitment problems like they’re crazy or like there’s no hope for progress – it’s actually quite the opposite. There is even an appendix at the end with tips on how to deal with a commitmentphobic relationship, whichever stage it’s in and whichever role you’re playing in it.

Surprisingly for all of my asserting that I need space and my independence, I don’t seem to be an actual commitmentphobe. I have made mistakes in selecting partners and I have repeated a couple of odd patterns, but I don’t perpetuate the same destructive patterns that are detailed in He’s Scared, She’s Scared. The reason that I didn’t want to stay with PC and didn’t want to marry him wasn’t that I’m afraid to commit: it was that he was just the wrong guy for me. So there is hope for me (and maybe for Joe Montana) after all. If you think you might have issues with commitment, I think this book can show you that there’s hope for you as well.

Lyrics of the Day

"If you'd only seen yourself hating me, when I'd been so much more than fair. But then you'd have to lay those feelings bare. One thing I know has still got you scared." The Shins Turn On Me

Life Goes On

As happily wrapped up as I have been in all the newness and the fun of my romance with Joe Montana, I’m not allowing it to take over my life. I think that I did that with PC, I dropped my focus off of myself and what I should have been doing at that point and put all my energy into seeing him and talking to him as much as was humanly possible. Obviously, that didn’t turn into a good situation; I’ve been determined not to repeat those mistakes (even if I am crazy enough to repeat the long-distance experiment).

Kickball has started back up for the fall season, so I’m forced to thrust myself back out into the social world. I took a week to cocoon when I got back from Montana and then I had a week with The Mother in town. Now I’m back to my sleepless Thursday night routine and back in weekly contact with the friends that I’ve made down here. I’m also… drum roll please… buying a house, a townhouse to be more specific, and it’s actually a done deal. I’m just waiting for the 15^th of September for my closing date and I will be an honest-to-goodness grown-up homeowner. It has been my life goal to be a property owner of some sort before my 30^th birthday and I’m actually going to achieve that goal. I’m pretty damn excited. The Mother also bought a house in the area to have as an income property, so I’ll be seeing a lot more of her over the fall and winter. I’m back to normal at work and received a favorable six month review. Life is chugging along.

Of course I am still talking to Joe Montana through all of this. The more that I get to know him and know about him, the more I like him. We talk so easily that an hour can pass before I even know it. I find myself wanting to tell him about anything interesting or funny that happens during my days, and share with him first when something good happens. I had a nightmare one night (not a usual occurrence for me) and he was the first person that I wanted to call to make me feel better. Of course, it was four a.m. and the feeling passed before I actually did wake him up in the middle of the night. But it was a comfort to know that he was out there somewhere. Nothing has yet happened (sense my cautious optimism) that raises any red flags. He’s also coming down to Florida to visit me for Labor Day weekend. I’ve been counting down the weeks and days and I’m thrilled at the idea of getting to see him again.

As well as things are going, I can’t bank on it working out. I can’t get so fixated on the idea of being with Joe that I think I need to move back to Montana immediately and start planning a wedding and naming my unborn children. I’ve got a lot going on here in Florida and I’m going to keep working on it all and enjoying myself. If things happen to work out with Joe Montana too, it’ll just be icing on the cake.

Lyrics of the Day

"All I know is I gotta be where my heart says I outta be. It often makes no sense, in fact, I never understand these things I feel. Don't change your plans for me." Ben Folds Five Don't Change Your Plans

Across the Universe

I’m going to skip ahead a bit here. Long-story-short, Joe Montana and I maximized the rest of the time that I was in Bozeman. I felt so completely comfortable, at ease and able to be myself around him that it just felt natural to see as much of him as I could. When I last saw him on the Saturday that I was leaving town, we hugged goodbye and agreed to keep talking. We didn’t discuss anything further than that, which was perfect. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I did know that there was one road that I definitely did not want to be traveling again so soon and so irrationally.

Since I’ve been back in Florida – over three weeks now – Joe and I have talked every day. We talk at night and exchange text messages semi-regularly throughout each day. Again, I’m feeling like a teenager here. This infatuation, these long phone conversations, the Romeo & Juliet feeling of a romance complicated by outside influences. I really don’t think that I have any clue what I’m getting myself into here, but I can’t help but fall head-long into whatever it will or won’t be.

Joe Montana is extremely open with how he feels about me. And he’s crazy about me. Every so often, his adoration has given me a pang of worry – my brain remembers the disaster that was PC and how frighteningly clingy and suffocating he got. It only takes me a few moments though, to remind myself of the many significant differences between Joe Montana and PC (shared first name aside…).

• Joe Montana has an established job in a career that he loves
• He has his own friends and maintains the relationships
• He is completely presentable in public and is in no way embarrassing
• He is older than me (which I still consider to be a minor miracle, with my track record)
• He’s never had a significant brain injury (I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this other bizarre pattern of mine, but it’s been one)
• He hasn’t done any of the creepy, manipulative, passive-aggressive crap that PC pulled when we were first long-distance dating

The part of all of this that is truly scary and very frustrating is that Joe Montana could just be perfect for me. By perfect for me, I don’t mean perfect in every way, but we just seem to match up really well. The catch is, there is no way that I can leave Florida in the next year and a half, and I have no desire to drag Joe Montana down here (away from all his friends and family and his job) to live with me. So if something is to continue between us, it’s going to be a long, slow road.

I talked to River about what has been going on, because I felt like I needed to really get her blessing. I asked her how she felt about Joe and I talking and she said she’s so excited that she’s really trying not to get her hopes up too high. She told me that she loves us both and couldn’t think of two people she’d rather see together.

I’m prepared for you all to admonish me and tell me that I shouldn’t jump into something crazy when I’m still so newly single; that I’m nuts for trying to have something with a guy that is three thousand miles away and is going to stay that way for a while. But the part of me that harbors general optimism thinks that there is something here and that something would be a shame to rule out before I even get to see what it is. Besides, it could just make a great story someday.

Lyrics of the Day

"Well, hot and heavy, pumpkin pie, chocolate cake and Jesus Christ. Ain't nothing please me more than you. Oh, home, let me come home. Home is wherever I'm with you." Home Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros