Dating/Sexual Biography

Well, I've realized that I have to come up with some pseudonyms for people. If I'm going to refer to days of dating past, I'll have to have names cause saying "him" over and over will obviously lead to confusion, for both me and everyone else. So, lets dig right in, shall we?

I've decided to go with rock and mineral inspired names as I'm a bit odd and I like to anthropomorphize things, and rocks always have seemed like they have personality to me.

Rose Quartz: My high school sweetheart. We dated for a number of years, ended very mutually and amicably. He has moved away and gotten married. Honestly, I only truly mention him to be complete, I'm extremely happy for him and don't think he has much bearing on my dating future, even if we still talk and he is aware of it.

Slate: He'll be mentioned a lot. Oh my, a lot. We dated for a significant portion of time, longer than many marriages I know of, we also split amicably and even lived together afterwards. He is one of my best friends and we hang out often. He has expressed interest in reconciling and, while I'm not opposed to the idea, we split, in part, because I wasn't feeling fulfilled in the relationship. We had different goals and different ideas of fun and while the schism was small, it was very much there. I am scared that, if we get back together, I would continue to have that same feeling and would start taking out my growing sense of ennui on him... which I would find personally unforgivable. He is one of the best people I know, for many reasons that I'm sure I'll eventually get more into, and I just feel like I'm a better friend than girlfriend right now. At least to him. I have so much more to say, but he really deserves an entire post, at least, to explain.

Labradorite: Probably a hard relationship to explain. We didn't date for long (one of those relationships that I would have a hard time counting as it was less than a year) but it was intense. He was just one of those people that I felt like I knew for ages, even though I'd only known him for a few months when he asked me out. The chemistry we had was and is unlike anything I've ever experienced and I've always felt I could be myself around him. Here's how he earned the name... if you've ever looked at a piece of labradorite, you'll see this blue shine at certain angles or in the right light amongst the grey striations of the normal rock. He is nicknamed as such because that's how I feel he is to me. Never outright cruel, but neglectful for sure, these flashes of brightness and these others of blah and confusion. We were great for months when he suddenly, and completely out of the blue, stopped talking to me. I spent a month in absolute torment... I mean, for all I knew, he had gotten hit by a car or something. I finally talked to him again, he didn't explain what had happened and I was too weirded out to ask and we hung out a couple of times rather successfully considering every day was like dating with an elephant in the room. One of these nights, we had gone to a barbecue and had a couple drinks when he, very casually, proposed. I laughed (which I later felt really guilty about) and said, "Sure, why not?" I, again, didn't talk to him for two weeks after that. In starting to truly realize this was what I could expect, I pretty much wrote him off at that point. When we hung out a few more times after that (again, not talking about yet another elephant in the room, which is probably why most of those were movie dates) he asked me to move in with him. At which point I told him that I felt that he was a coward and just plain delusional if he thought that I would ever consider that when I didn't even know what the hell I was supposed to be to him. We didn't talk for about a year. Recently, he called me up to talk to me, we went out and he told me to yell at him until I felt better, that he wanted to move forward and help dispel my (I hope, understandable) hostility towards him. I did, we had a really great talk, he told me that he had been in love with me, terrified of the commitment that it implied, and just ran. He told me he was still in love with me and that he was more prepared for having me in his life. I basically told him rather flatly that I didn't trust him as far as I could spit and if he was serious, then he had to start at square one and earn that back. If he didn't want to, I was fine either way. He is peripherally around still, but he does work out of town, so I do not see him often. Still not sure what to think about him.

Smoky Quartz: Where to start? We have known each other for many years, having met in elementary school. We went to junior high together, but I moved (same city, different area) and we didn't see each other for many years. We ran into each other one day. He saw me and approached me, kind of creeped me out because he knew my name and I didn't recognize him at all, and we started seeing each other. Yet another relationship that didn't last long but moved kind of fast because we had a lot of shared history. He gave me a key within a few months of dating and it was mostly good. We had a huge issue with the boundaries of platonic, opposite-sex relationships. I'm not a jealous person, and I know that I ask a lot considering I'm friends with pretty much all of my exes and that's a non-negotiable for anybody coming into my life. But he had a friend that very much crossed the line from "friend" to "emotional affair" and I often felt that I was the other woman, which is so wildly inappropriate in my books that I didn't even know how to broach the subject. When I did, it kind of blew up and it became something of a canker sore in our lives. It was always there, sometimes I touched on it without meaning to, and it just wouldn't heal. Quite frankly, added to it was that I am a "touchy" person with people I care about. Not an obnoxious "let's make out in this chair despite only having a small group together" but I definitely touch arms or even have been known to hold hands... gasp! He would jump back from me like I burned him whenever she was there, would sit with his arm around her and leave me on the opposite side of the table.... just an awful lot to contend with considering that I couldn't even talk about my lack of comfort in the situation without jabbing that same "canker sore". The situation, naturally, devolved and ended, though not by my hand. We spoke for a couple of months afterwards, but there were just too many hurt feelings. One of the strangest aspects was that I actually liked this other gal and we hung out both during all of the "drama" and after the relationship had ended. So, my issue was never with her as a person, just how he was around her. As has been slowly becoming my pattern, he contacted me almost a year down the road and we have been hanging out. He admitted acting inappropriately and apologized for not considering my feelings at all. He admitted that he had assumed that the issue was jealousy, not what I was actually saying... I guess assuming that I wouldn't bring up what was actually bothering me, which is funny because, with anything else, I was so blunt with him that he actually requested that I be more passive aggressive. Who does that???? Why he would think I wouldn't do the same in that situation is really his thing, but nonetheless, there is was. He tells me that he would like to start seeing me again, but I have told him that he broke my heart (which he absolutely did... I believe it was that I felt unfairly trapped and couldn't make him see why. It was probably the most one sided break-up I've ever gone through.) and that he would have to start rebuilding it if that's what he wanted. That was about a month ago, maybe month and a half. He has also gone back to school in the past couple years so he's just finishing his semester now and I'm not sure what the summer will bring.

Apatite: The most recent... err sort of. I'll get to that. Anyways, we dated for a couple months at the end of last year. It was going well, having fun and he kind of blew me off. I saw it coming, but it was still less than fun. We talk occasionally, but we started seeing each other after he had gone through a break up of a rather long relationship and he just wasn't ready to date. I'm fine with it, and things ended early enough that it wan't such a tragedy that it shut the door altogether. I don't know what might come of it and I don't even care to speculate right now.

Star Sapphire: Now, because I'm either an idiot or a sucker for drama or both, I started a very casual sexual relationship with someone that I had known for many years. We were never what I would refer to as good friends, more like acquaintances. We ran into each other, I was broken hearted still and he was suffering a loss of a different variety and it just happened. Now, it's been almost a year and I get the impression that he might be hinting at it turning into something more. He's good on paper, we get along and we do actually hang out as friends as well as engage in some extracurriculars here and there. So, why not? I just don't have that "butterflies" feeling that I would hope to have. I never really did. Where I felt/feel all excited and giddy about the actual boyfriends, I just don't here. I feel terrible, and I actually think that I'm probably keeping it from happening on some unconscious level. I feel that I'm mostly recovered from the heartbreak but there still is a reticence for starting a new relationship. I'm having an issue deciding if I want to even try. What if I do and nothing ever comes of it? It's completely unfair to him to say "yes" when I really mean "maybe?" so I tend to hold him at arms length. I've tried to explain that I just don't think I can emotionally commit, but it feels more like a delay than anything. I figure, until he actually brings it up and has that conversation with me, I don't have to make any decisions quite yet.

Fluorite: One last thing... cause I guess my life wasn't complicated enough for me yet. I have a friend that I have had some, err, interesting experiences with. She (wait, did I just say she?) and I have been friends for years, lost touch once, have come back into each others lives and very recently something happened. Now, I think most people are in university when they experiment with their sexuality, but I'm hoping to go back so no time like the present, no?;) I identify as being heterosexual but I, like many girls my age and younger, had a certain amount of curiosity. Having that experience, which I am grateful for, I can say that it's about the person, not their "bits". So, whatever that means I guess. I have always gotten along better with men than other women so perhaps my relative experiences are simply a reflection of that. But, we are still friends and it has happened more than once (which I would pass off as a aberration, but this has become something of a pattern) so I'm not too sure what to make of it. Funny enough, she too identifies as heterosexual. Slate and Star Sapphire, they both know about this but both Quartz's and Labradorite don't. I'm not a person that lies much in my day to day life (having long since established that I am truly awful at it) so it's just something that has come up with the people I talk to more. I assume that, if Smoky Quartz is true to his word and we see each other more when he's done school, he will know soon enough. Bear in mind, I have not said anything about it to titillate, though I'm sure it has that side effect, it was just more that I am friends with these people and I needed to sort it out in my own head and sometimes a sounding board is very helpful to that end. Star Sapphire and I have no expectation of monogamy as we are not in a relationship, so I felt comfortable talking to him about it.

Now, I have many other friends, but I'll have to come up with fanciful names for them as they come up. This is simply a "state of affairs" in my dating life, right now. It sounds all salacious when you put them all together, but this spans over a decade so I'm probably not as exciting as I seem! Of course, this is why I'm writing this... the past year has been oddly tumultuous. Well, we'll see what comes!

Introduction

Alright. Where do I start? Well, I'm a woman, past her mid-twenties, at a point in her life where everything suddenly seems questionable. I hesitate to call it a mid-life crisis (that would imply that I'm mid-life, after all!) but it must be something akin to it. I am single, I am looking at going back to school, and I'm currently unemployed. As I'm sure, from that snippet, you can gather... my life is in a state of uncertainty. I'm telling myself that it's simply full of potential, but I'm doing that as a way of whistling in the dark right now. Truth is, I feel like everything is being held together by thread and spit and it has been the cause of many sleepless nights. Not to say that it's all that bad... let's break it down at this point in time.

Job: To be honest, I'm trying to find something that I can do that I can leave at my place of work, without dragging it home everyday, that has the possibility of being temporary, based on the next item in this list. Don't seem to be getting a lot of call backs from all the resumes I've put out.... trying not to take it personally, but it certainly feels like passive rejection.

School: I have applied, I am waiting for word of acceptance (trying to remain optimistic, but that's something of an unnatural state for me to maintain) and so I might be restarting in the fall.

Dating: Oy vey, dating. Umm, complicated. I suppose I should be happy or flattered that I have people interested in me. In one way I am, to be sure. But in another huge way, I am exhausted by it and think that it's much ado about nothing. I don't think I'm all that much to write home about. I like me, I think I'm reasonably cute, I just don't feel most of the time that I'm that special. I mean, I try (don't we all, really?) but I just don't know if I would pursue me if I met myself at a bookstore or something. I do find that, depending on the day, I have a certain winsome quality about myself, but it's not consistent at all! And I have this horrible habit of getting weirdly defensive the first time people try to act familiar with me. So, if you ever find yourself on a third date with me, don't be surprised if I seem a bit terse. It's really not you, it's my crazy way to vet people, to figure out if they actually want to get to know me or just want in my pants. I prefer to move sloooowly, don't go acting like we're all hot and heavy when I'm barely comfortable having you in my bubble. I'm guessing this comes from my dating history since I'm something of a serial monogamist and I prefer long relationships. Anything that doesn't even make it past a year barely counts in my book. In fact, I've been single for the longest time since my teens recently, which is sort of nice to experience and also makes me feel like maybe it's just that I'm getting intolerable to be around, or something else that's paranoid sounding. ;) It's true though, I didn't realize how much I had built on that base until it wasn't there anymore. It's not there by choice, mind you. My exes have expressed the interest in rekindling what we had... and I do intend that plurally. I suppose it must be a testament of a sort that every one I've dated for at least a few months has come back at some point to tell me that they would like to start up again. It is somewhat mitigated, however, by the fact that everyone of them was the one to break it off. I must look better in the rearview mirror! Actually, I have some lovely friends, and even a couple of the aforementioned exes, that tell me that the reason is that I am "marriage material", and sometimes people don't know how to handle that, then panic and run. I don't know, but I like to hope that's what it is. I mean, aren't I well into that age when people are doing that "marriage/kids" stuff? So, do I just have a lightening rod quality for commitment-phobes? Opposites attracting? Ha! I don't know, but you should probably never come back to read this blog again if you don't want to hear musings on dating... especially since it's about the most exciting (read: more interesting than talking about the weather and daytime TV) I've got going on.

So, why am I doing this? Well, aside from having the time to do this right now, I realized that I wanted a place to go to force honest introspection. I'm choosing to do that by imagining a group of people looking at this, looking at me, looking through me... somehow, they know if I'm trying to dress this up to be something it's not. I mean, we, everyone, is their own protagonist. I won't deny that I tend to give myself the benefit of the doubt, but I try not to. I feel like everyone is becoming less personally accountable, me included, and I need to remind myself often that I am not a nice person all the time. You know the saying, "be the change you want to see in the world"? Well, this is an attempt to do that. I named this "One Open Book" because I am just one, and I want to be brutally honest, even if it paints me in a bad light. I'd rather be an ugly, real person than a beautiful facade any day.

Then again, maybe I just want something to do while I paint my nails. You decide.