Faded love, love gone wrong, promises made and broken. It’s the common theme for so much music because it’s common theme in so many of our lives. You’ve been burned so many times, to a point where you’re bitter about it, and ready to give up on men, or women, or your gender, or the other gender, or whatever-you-are-don’t-start.
Don’t get me wrong, bitterness is often a totally appropriate way to feel about the men or women who’ve been in your life. It’s just that there’s that genie in the bottle story where the genie says “for the first thousand years I was trapped I swore if I was rescued I’d shower my savior with riches, for the second thousand I swore I’d grant my savior everything he could wish for, but for the third thousand years I swore I’d kill whoever saved me so prepare to die.â€? The point being that a) bitterness about previous experience isn’t fair to carry forward onto new ones and b) bitter genies always trick themselves back into their bottles, as of course happens in the story! (And, of course, the person who finds the genie is very happy to see it back in the bottle as well, and then no change of heart, no promise, will pursuade them to let it back out. That’s fine for fairy tales but a nightmare when it’s happening to us.)
The hard part? (It’s really hard, you know?) The hard part is you have to figure out how to pick different partners. (And oh I feel like an asshole for saying this.) I’m not singling any one person out, you know. I’m saying everybody does this if they’re not careful. And we’re usually not careful. Cautious? Yes. Fearful? Often. Careful? Not so much. Not enough to avoid making the same set of mistakes again and again.
We usually have two types we wind up falling for. The main type, and their woah-I’m-not-making-that-mistake-again opposite type. Problem is they’re almost always on the same pretty narrow path (maybe call it a railroad track) and as we go from relationship to relationship we just sort of… roll back and forth between the same two stations on the same line.
So the hard part is getting off that track and heading overland, which sucks a big dick at first, and often we wind up back at one of the two stations anyway. But the thing is that if you can really get off the track then you stop recognizing landmarks on the way and going all “uh oh, here it comesâ€? and bracing yourself defensively and, often preemptively, offensively.
Anyway, I’m not sure where this little outburst came from and I sort of apologize, but it’s the best articulation of the sort of cryptic thing I usually say which is that there are usually men or women all around us who would die for us if they could, but since they’re not on one of our “tracksâ€? they’re sort of invisible to us.
Anyway, that’s accidentally how I found my partner, when I was 35, after really, really realizing I was unlovable and unwantable and unsexy and unnecessary! My partner and I aren’t alike in so many ways. We’re more complementary (each filling in where the other lacks) than we’re really compatible. If I hadn’t just fuck-all given up I’d have never given her the time of day the day we met — she was pretty, yes, and friendly, sure, but she just wasn’t my type — she wasn’t heading towards either of my stations. As luck would have it if she hadn’t been in a similar state of mind she might not have bothered with me since I really wasn’t her type either.
Instead of being my type, because she wasn’t my type, she turned out to be someone utterly different than anyone I’d been attracted to before. Which was great because pretty much every time I saw one of those “uh ohâ€? landmarks and started bracing myself she’d take a different turn, one I’d never seen before. And, in this new terrain, of course I take different turns with her too.
Years and years later we’re still like that together. There are still bumps and stalls but they’re not predictable, they’re not routine, they’re not marked on the old railroad timetables. I love her till my hair hurts and my teeth itch, till my head aches and my heart breaks. If I were a folk singer (from Manitoba or Alberta or Saskatoon for some reason) I’d write a love song and the chorus would include “I’ve seen the mountains worn away, I’ve seen the great trees fall, my love outlasts them all.â€? I wouldn’t have gotten that if I hadn’t gone off the rails.
Anyway, if I can beat the railroad analogy to death, going overland has been a lot bumpier than rolling on nice, familiar tracks, but man, you get to go a lot more places.
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Thu, 2006-03-30 12:49.
as one in the tracks, i could use some overland travel. i could type out a tome in response here but the comments on not letting bitterness poison the future are so spot on. if there is any hope in a present situation too we must rid ourselves of it. it's just entirely incompatible with dwelling peacefully with anyone. it just poisons the contact we have with the people we have no bitterness toward. they can read it in us and they very rightfully move away if they have any smarts at all. if they are very wise and skilled they may challenge us in it but we don't always respond favorably. it's just an awful thing to carry around. it serves no useful purpose.
[Thanks, Lime. It's obviously not easy -- I was far more lucky than deliberate -- but it's good when we can at least look at diagonals to our tendencies. --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Thu, 2006-03-30 14:27.
I'll just continue to be bitter and cynical on my own time then. ha ha ha!
[Hey, as long as you're *choosing* to be bitter and cynical instead of just letting it happen, and as long as it's not on company time.... :-) But really, there's too much hidden optimism in your blog for me to believe you could do it full time anyway. Thanks, JeN. --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Thu, 2006-03-30 17:04.
Fig, that's beautiful. I think of it as 'stuck'... And I'm not, any more :)
[Cool, Darkneuro. Thanks! --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Thu, 2006-03-30 19:59.
So insightful it almost made me cry. And I'm not really sentimental.
Come to think of it maybe that's part of the problem. One tangent to your post - sometimes the trick isn't so much to change the person you go for (assuming no tendencies towards psychopaths or abusers) as to change the masks you're wearing, the habits you use to express yourself. I guess that's easier to do with entirely different people/types of people. Sometimes it's like we forget how to change until we're forced to, then we see how the change was waiting under our skin the whole time.
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Thu, 2006-03-30 23:58.
sigh. I think your post is exactly right. But it's hard to see the light when the tunnel has been dark all the way.. I really hope that my someone and I will find each other, just like you did - I love hearing stories like that. But I don't know if I ever will.. I might have to live vicariously through stories like yours! ;)
[I'm going to say unless you're actually *in* a relationship there's neither tunnels nor darkness. Just maybe shades we've drawn ourselves so we only see ahead and behind. And really it's even more like just habits, memories, and preferences. The good thing is it's *our* tracks, we've built them, we own them. And I guess the first part of getting off of them is realizing it's not our partners who put us there -- in fact we're the ones choosing our partners. Anyway, I'm just trying to say it's often the case that when we say there's no one there who works for us, we're only really considering people who fit our patterns. If that doesn't work we need to be willing to question our first choices. Make sense? (Maybe not.) Thanks, M. --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Fri, 2006-03-31 00:55.
Figleaf:
A very wise observation about how the bitterness and resentment we carry around can poison our future chances at happiness.
I remember a comment you made at ErosBlog last December during a discussion of Internet trolls and gave the following example:
I remember this guy in college, a musician friend, who was just so bitter about not being able to get a girlfriend. One day he's sitting in the rec center in a total blue funk about it and this really, really cute girl stops and says "Oh [X,] you look so sad" and he looks up at her and says "Yeah, well what the fuck are you going to do about it?"
Well, I'm glad you didn't have such a pathetic attitude. If you did, you wouldn't have found such a lovely partner.
[Yup, that was a pathetic example and so a wonderful illustration, but to a lesser extent I think a lot of us, especially the ones who feel their partnerships always turn to ashes, have had similar experiences. Thanks, Kochanie. --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Fri, 2006-03-31 01:00.
Well, I'm glad you didn't have such a pathetic attitude. If you did, you wouldn't have found such a lovely partner.
And your partner would not have a bathroom equipped with such a sturdy towel holder.
(Got flustered when I saw the photo and experienced uncontrollable clicking).
[Eek! Towel holder, eh? Not to change the subject but I've been re-reading Ladas, Whipple, and Perry's original "The G-Spot" and they recommend that men do their kegels by hanging a tea towel over their erections and bobbing them. Who knew, eh? Thanks, Kochanie. --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Fri, 2006-03-31 05:18.
Insightful post, even moreso because it has been a long time since you have felt the angst of repeat offenders, and yet, you get right to the heart of the matter.
But how? How does one jump the tracks, reprogram, learn to ride a bike instead? Some of it is hardwired from our childhoods, I'm convinced. The tracks are laid by our parents.
I LOVED the picture. It was a religious experience. Made me want to fall on my knees and do some worshipping. :-)
[I guess the most superficially unhelpful thing I can say, that was amazingly deep when it finally sank in for me, is "who says so?" Any time you find yourself saying "I'm just that way" you gotta ask yourself "who says so?" The thing is I just keep digging up all this stuff I decided was true back when I was four, and six, and sixteen and then I never thought about it again. It's been stunningly helpful watching my own children and saying "I was *her* age when I decided this" or "I was *his* age when I said it would always be like that?" If I can get out my stereotyping hammer again for a minute, I guess my problem isn't so much with stereotypes per se, it's that so many of them are formed by six year olds! And when I ask myself "who said so?" I realize it's often not so much what my parents told me as what I decided that meant. Finally, to kind of drive home the point, in an introduction to a book I otherwise don't remember, the author said in passing "I want to know who let an eighteen-year-old decide I was going to be a dentist for the rest of my life just because he didn't have the imagination to pick anything better?" So I guess the very short answer in the context of this particular topic would be, when you look at a guy and he seems just your type, ask yourself "who says so?" Or if you see someone else and say "he'd never do" ask yourself "who says so?" Make sure it wasn't a twelve-year-old processing her first crush, or an eighteen-year-old processing her first heartbreak, or an eight-year-old processing her parent's conflicts. It's not that you might not be making an informed, adult decision, it's that it really helps to know where your decisions are coming from. (I hope that makes sense.) Thanks, Elizabeth. --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Fri, 2006-03-31 10:40.
You and your partner are very lucky. And that photo belongs in the Louvre....
[Aww! Thank you very much, Mona. --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Fri, 2006-03-31 13:16.
Not to change the subject but I've been re-reading Ladas, Whipple, and Perry's original "The G-Spot" and they recommend that men do their kegels by hanging a tea towel over their erections and bobbing them.
That may prove a very useful skill. Should a man find himself in an edgy roleplay session, gagged, with hands bound, a bobbing tea towel could easily be used to signal a truce, [safewords being difficult to utter when gagged, I would imagine]. ;-)
[Heh. I can just see a dom now, saying "What is it Lassie? Is Timmy trying to use his safe word?" :-) Actually the point in the G-Spot (which also introduced the idea to popular culture that men's prostates are erogenous zones) was that men can benefit as much from doing kegels as women can. Both health wise and sexual-response wise. Thanks, Kochanie. --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Fri, 2006-03-31 13:24.
Hi there Figleaf
I’m a long time lurker, first time poster. I just wanted to tell you that this post really made me think about a lot of the relationship choices I have made in the past, and what I need to change to get off my own tracks. Thanks for sharing your insights :)
PS. That’s a really hot picture!
[Thanks, Azikale! It's not always easy but it's more of an adventure. Good luck. --fl]
Submitted by 690 (not verified) on Fri, 2006-03-31 15:53.
Par usual, an insightful and true post. If I had stuck to my "type", MC and I would never have gotten together.
As much I liked the post, I loved the picture even better! Makes me want to just hop right in the shower and get all clean ;)
[Thanks, Kitty! --fl]