A Yellow Post-It Note

That’s all I have left of my relationship. All that I have that symbolizes the love I shared with the man I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with. It says, “S, I love you. Welcome home,” with a heart scribbled on the bottom. He left it for me on the kitchen cabinet to find when I got to his apartment when he was at work three weeks ago. You see, my boyfriend and I, well, technically he’s my ex-boyfriend now, had a relationship where I would come and spend about four days with him at his apartment and then let him have a week or so alone. He needed time alone. He wanted to be alone to work on his creative projects and I understood and respected that. We worked it out. Everything was going great until he decided to be dishonest about his need to protect his time alone.

Our relationship wasn’t perfect but it was certainly ideal for me. We were, no we ARE, politically, socially, intellectually, culturally, aesthetically, and sexually identical. We vibrate on the same plane in every way except for emotionally. Our relationship was affectionate, romantic, and the very definition of intimate. We communicated well. We rarely argued. We enjoyed each other’s company. We complemented each other in ways that I’m not 100% sure I’ll ever be able to replicate with another human being. The disparity in our emotional maturity is the one aspect of the relationship that was unequal. Emotionally, he seems to have been stunted somewhere around the age 13 or 14. His interactions with women are all VERY dysfunctional. He’s never had a healthy relationship in his life other than with me. He values and craves cheating, adulterous, casual, unsafe, misogynist, sadistic sex with women he doesn’t love and with whom he does his level best to convince he cares for more than he does. He is the quintessential Casanova, telling women what they want to hear to convince them that are special and unique, anything to keep them fixated and focused and horny for him. He pours on the romance with emails and poetry and stories and late night phone calls with skills like no other man can master. He makes the women feel like they are his entire reason for living. But what they don’t know is, he’s doing it simultaneously with multiple women. What they don’t know is, it’s a game for him. He can’t help it. It’s an addiction for him.

He did it with me, too, as hard as it is for me to admit. He didn’t romance multiple women while we were together, of this I’m sure. I had full access to phone and email and I had a key to his apartment. He did however tell me what I wanted to hear rather than the complete truth. In my heart, I felt that. I knew he wasn’t being completely emotionally honest but I saw growth and evolution and I FELT his love so I made the conscious choice to love him. I wanted to deny that he was capable of emotionally lying to me because I kept believing that our connection was greater than all his others. And truth be told, it was greater. I’m sure of that as well. I know that the love he felt for me was genuine and that our connection FAR exceeded all the dysfunctional relationships he had, but I’m also sure that he just wasn’t emotionally ready to face his demons and being in a relationship with me forced him to an emotional space he’d never occupied before. He is not ready to be introspective. And rather than face up to his shortcomings, he would rather run. I made him a better man. I made him hold up a mirror to his actions and look at them. I saw all his unhealthy behaviors and I loved him despite them and I think that made him uncomfortable. There is a part of him that feels undeserving of being loved, of this I’m sure. I made him realize that his behaviors were not only hurting the women he romanced and fucked but hurting himself as well but that they didn’t mean he wasn’t deserving of amazing love and acceptance. If I didn’t recognize his desire to leave those types of behaviors behind, if I wasn’t completely assured that his willingness to shun those types of deeds was rooted in some truth, I would have walked away. He was worth my effort, however, very much so in fact.

I’ve always said that I wasn’t looking for someone perfect, just perfect for me. As the old saying goes, be careful what you ask for because you just may get it. Well, truer words were never said. I’m far from perfect. I have my flaws and issues. I freely admit that when I’m angry, I yell and scream and say things that are unnecessarily hurtful. (I’m working on my issues more and more. I have made it my goal to control my rage in every disagreement I have going forward) Granted, rarely do I get that angry; I only get that out of control like that when I’m lied to. I confess have an irrational response to dishonesty. Conversely, I’m able to handle the truth better than almost anyone I know. I can handle the ugly, dirty truth with a grain of salt. I don’t get angry, I don’t lose my temper. I might be hurt by the truth but I consider the truth essential in a relationship. I am also pathologically honest. I made a promise to myself more than 15 years ago to be honest and I work at telling the truth every day.

How, then, does a person like me fall for a pathological liar? How can a person who emotionally lies and manipulates women be my perfect match? GREAT question. Well, I can tell you that my now ex has the ability and desire to communicate harmoniously that goes beyond anyone I’ve ever dated. That had value and worth to me. No, he wasn’t perfect but he apologized when he did something wrong, he was anxious to resolve conflicts, and we did so in a mature, healthy fashion. That’s worth fighting for. I’ve met far too many men that need to be right at all costs, who can’t apologize, who are passive aggressive and argue just for the sake of arguing. We as a culture are sooooooo quick sometimes to kick people to the curb if they don’t meet our vision of the perfect person. Someone who was supportive of me, who showed his care and concern, and who was willing to end conflicts in a healthy way was certainly not someone I wanted to throw away, especially not with all the other things we shared in common, even if the entire package wasn’t so pretty.

So, what happened? Why did the relationship fall apart? He emotionally cheated. Did he have an emotional/physical affair with another woman? Nope, not at all. He wrote an email to another woman. It was just one email, maybe two, and it wasn’t even anything emotional in the correspondence. It was, however, symbolic of him deceiving me to get his ego stroked by another woman. It was his effort to hide his communication with someone else, to breech our intimacy and forsake it to resort back to his Casanova ways. It was nothing but dumb/bad luck and my gut intuition that allowed me to find out about the email exchange with someone he knew three decades ago. When confronted, he responded in the way he always does. You see, rather than him trying to examine his own dysfunctional behaviors, he prefers to wallow in them and simply claim that he’s not ready to be in a relationship. That’s the easy way out for him. He can say, “I’m not ready to be in a relationship,” and that makes him feel less angst and guilt than saying, “I’m not satisfied by the love and intimacy you offer me, I need drama and dysfunction, in fact, I prefer it.” The man who professed his love for me on our Valentine’s Day dinner, who gave a monologue about how happy he was in the relationship and how I had made him a better human being and a better man, the man who literally reveled in the tenderness and intimacy we shared, was and is willing to throw away the greatest relationship he has ever experienced to go back to his dysfunctional ways.

The fact that he’s not in the least bit introspective, he would say that’s not why he wants to end the relationship. Knowing him however, knowing him better than anyone else in the world, I can tell you with unwavering certainty, he needs his old behaviors back because he’s never fully owned them or taken responsibility for them. His denial, to himself more so than to me, of the impact and complexity of his cheating, slutty ways will always draw him back to them. Until he’s willing to admit that his views about sex, women, and his self esteem are damaged, he can and will tell himself, “No, I don’t NEED to dominate women. No, no, no, I don’t NEED slutty, casual encounters. Nooooooooooo, I don’t NEED to cheat,” but that sort of denial will only fuel his needs for those exact situations. He desperately wants to believe that he’s better than those sorts of dysfunctional behaviors, he wants very much to negate the impact those sorts of behaviors have over him. But he will be a slave to them until he can acknowledge that he is turned on by that level of dysfunction and make the conscious choice to move away from them.

The reason I write so extensively about my personal experiences are for two very good reasons. The first and most important reason is that writing allows me to heal. All of these words have been floating around in my head for the past two days and they won’t go away until I get them out. I only stopped crying a few hours ago. I need to process my feelings and analyze them and I need to make sense of the mistakes I made so I don’t make them again and that I grow as a person. The second reason I write, and I share my reflections with the world, is because I know that there are other people out there who are struggling within themselves, having challenges with their relationships, or questioning their ability to form healthy relationships and I know my words, my introspection helps them heal. I’m not afraid to put my frailty and insecurity on the line because I am assured that someone, somewhere is dealing with similar questions and if me exposing my pain and fears unapologetically can help them in any way, I have to do this.

The hardest part of this process is realizing/stating that it’s really over. We’ve had arguments where I’ve screamed that I wanted to break up before and I was just reacting out of anger. I can honestly admit that every time I said I wanted to break up, I was hoping he would profess how much he loved and needed me. We did break up once before, for exactly one year, because he said he didn’t want to be in a relationship. We obviously got back together but this time, I can’t take him back. This time, I have to see that he is not willing to examine his own motivations and that is ultimately not going to work for any relationship that I want to share with him. His unwillingness to look at his own motivations, his inability to claim responsibility for his own unhealthy behaviors is detrimental to the relationship we could have shared. He has a need to deny the dark parts of his personality, he is obsessive in his need to diminish the impact his unhealthy preferences have over him. Anyone who can’t take full ownership of the ugly parts of themselves, who needs to deny and hide that from themselves even, is not ever going to be ready for a healthy relationship. I couldn’t see that until the tears stopped. It is that realization that makes me see that we can’t get back together. That is perhaps the most scary thing I’ve ever typed in my life.

To say I loved this man more than I loved anyone else is an understatement. I was more vulnerable with him, more emotionally invested, I was happier with him than I’ve been with anyone else in my life. Over 95% of the time we spent together was spent in bliss, kissing, holding hands, sharing ideas, and having phenomenal sex, just being in love. So for me to say that I know that we can never get back together, for me to write it for not only the world to see but also him means that I’m shutting the door on a relationship I really don’t want to end. I have to say it for myself. I need to love myself enough to let him go and accept that I can’t love him enough to heal him from his narcissistic/borderline personality disorder. It’s going to be many, many months before I stop holding my breath when the phone rings and hoping it’s him saying he misses me and wants me back, before I stop waiting for the email that will never come. I know that I need to work on myself now. I have to find a way to heal the hurt and eventually, one day, decide that I’m okay to try to find love again. That day isn’t going to come any time soon, I realize that. It’s going to take me a long time to get there.

I do know for certain that I can’t give up on love. I felt true love in his arms. I felt it when he would take care of me and hold me and let me ramble about my dreams for AfroerotiK. I know transcendent love exists and I know how wonderful it made me feel, how nurturing and supportive he was of me. I do not want to diminish for one second the great times we shared. Museums, concerts, dinners, making music, making love, watching TV on the sofa, it was all good. Even though I can’t get to that place anytime in the near future with anyone else, I know even now that every day, I have to take one step closer to healing so I can get to a place where, at least theoretically, I can love and be loved in a greater way. The reason I’m here on this planet, the reason I have breath in my lungs is to LOVE. Money, success, fame, it’s all great but without love, it’s empty and meaningless. I need to hold a vision of Scottie in the future being loved in a way that completes me in every way.

I’m kicking 50 in the ass. My heart doesn’t bounce back the same way it did when I was in my 20’s. When I was in my early 20s, I could fall in and out of love in a week. I was convinced I was in love with any man who showed me attention. In my 30s, I was single. I didn’t have a relationship. I loved a man who didn’t love me back for seven years, we never had a relationship, we had a fuckship that lasted two weeks a year and I dated other men to fill the time in between. But now, in my mid 40s, every relationship I enter into, I want it to be my last. I invest more of my heart. With every broken heart, it gets more and more difficult to bounce back. With every broken heart, it becomes more and more difficult to visualize finding someone else who can meet my needs. How do I prevent something like this happening again? How do I make myself feel less like a victim who has been rejected because of some perceived flaw I have and recognize that it was his inability to face his issues that caused our relationship to be destroyed? Lord only knows but I know that I have to invest in loving myself enough to say that I do deserve better than what he offered me and not see myself as the one who is the loser, literally and figuratively, in romance.

He says that he will be ready to be in a relationship in two or three years and that he hopes I’ll still be available for him. He’s not going to ever be ready to be in a relationship with me until he faces his demons. He needs counseling, he needs to learn to be more introspective, he needs to learn to be truthful with himself. He’s not going to do that. He needs me in his life to make those sorts of changes and without me, he’s going to stagnate in dysfunction. He will never see, acknowledge, or recognize how unhealthy his behaviors are and for the most part, he will be very happy with all his choices. I can’t save a space in my heart for that man. It’s very conceivable that I might not find anyone to even form a relationship with in that time, when he feels he’s ready to be in a relationship. I know me and I know how my body and heart function. It is very possible that I may not find a lover to replace him, one I can trust, one that I will love and give my heart to. He, on the other hand, has about three weeks tops before he fills OUR bed with someone he can slap and call a slut. I realize that if there ever comes a day when he shows up in my life wanting to resume the relationship, I owe it to myself to demand better than he can offer me.

So, now, I’ve got to redefine myself. I need to embrace my worth as a partner, embrace my flaws and continue to work on them, I have to let go of the dreams I had of traveling the world with my best friend and lover. I have to let him go. As much as I love him, I have to emotionally divorce myself from the man that hurt me in order to prepare me for an even greater love.