This blog is a response to Colohue's, which can be found here. To find out more about this fiction series, which is a shared writing project between Tom and myself, click here first.
You want me to talk? Sure, I'll talk. You'll be the first person to listen to me in a fucking while.
I
started going out alone in London last autumn, after my two-year-long
relationship had broken down into tiny pieces and my cheating ex had
moved out of the flat we shared in Vauxhall. A lot of girls in my
position would have moped around for weeks, wasting their Friday nights
watching Friends reruns and eating tubs of ice cream. Not me. I'm
happiest in a crowd, even if I don't see anyone I know. And for me, the
noise and the activity of pubs and bars took the edge off of feeling
lonely. Plus people-watching was much more interesting if I'd had a few
drinks. It was easier to play the eye-contact game with strangers, and
make up stories about them in my head, and guess which women were worse
off than me by the way they dressed and how strong they liked their
measures and how they acted around men. A few weeks into my new
favourite pastime, I met Jack.
I
was sitting at the bar, sipping on my second Manhattan of the evening.
I was wearing red high heels but I don't remember which dress. My hair
was down like it always is when I'm making an effort. The place was
just starting to fill up with its usual clientele of City guys meeting
up for after-work drinks and I was sneaking sidelong glances at the
least unattractive ones among them, when a tall, dark-haired boy
elbowed his way to the front of the bar and hopped up onto a stool
right next to me. I'd have called him a man, but he wasn't wearing a
suit like the others his age. He stood out. His hair was longer, his
stubble wasn't exactly designer, he had a couple of piercings in one
ear, and I'd just heard him order up half a dozen whiskey shots and a
pint of Strongbow. Classy, right? He looked slightly dishevelled
(though I was later to find out that this was an intentional
affectation) and he'd pushed up the sleeves of the old blue shirt he
was wearing to reveal heavily inked forearms. I remember thinking he
looked like he might be in a band, which would make a nice change from
the dull stockbrokers and IT consultants I usually resorted to flirting
with.
Then
he caught me looking, and that was that. He was very talkative back
then, for a complete stranger at least, though I don't suppose he's
been half as forthcoming with you today. I listened to him rant on
about his job, and his politics, and his various passions in life, and
when I could fit a word in edgeways I told him about mine. It was nice
not having to carry the dialogue for a change, and I think the surprise
showed in my face.
I think we could both tell from the start
that there was something else below the surface that was deliberately
not being discussed by either of us, and sure enough after another
couple of rounds the conversation turned to our recently failed
relationships. It's meant to be poor dating etiquette to talk about
your exes, but you couldn't exactly have called this a date, and anyway
I think we were both too consumed by vitriol and frustration with our
erstwhile partners (and too excited at finding a means to vent about
them) to be bother being polite.
I guess I was pretty tipsy by the
time they rang the bell for last orders. While we had been determinedly
not chatting each other up all night, we'd still edged closer to one
another and I can remember him putting his arm casually around my waist
for the first time, and me allowing him to keep it there. I suppose
I've kept that same attitude throughout our relationship really - he's
made all the first moves, though he'd never admit that to you. I was
hardly ever the first one to text or call. He called me his girlfriend
a couple of months after we slept together the night we first met, and
I let it go unchallenged. He left a toothbrush in my bathroom a few
weeks after that and I didn't say a word. Though we didn't exactly
celebrate our anniversaries in the traditional way, it was him who
worked out how long we'd been official for, and mostly it was him who
reminded me about the dates.
It's not that I wasn't arsed about it, or that I had some outdated idea
that men should always be the ones to lead, or anything like that. I
guess I've just always needed him to prove his enthusiasm for being
around me. Is that because I've never had a real father figure in my
life, or because my ex ditched me for another girl, or just because I'm
comfortable when I've got the upper hand? You tell me, you're the
expert.
These blogs are part of the Relationship Thread. Every
so often, I'll post a new blog topic for the thread regulars to respond
to, and of course submit something myself. This topic is the second in the series, and explores our ideas about infidelity.
I'll start by saying that I've never knowingly been cheated on. Looking back, it probably did happen in one of my relationships, but I never found out at the time when it was actually relevant.
I have been unfaithful in some shape or form to everyone I've been 'exclusive' with (that's three relationships), except for the man I'm with now.
Because of my past failures, which obviously I feel crappy about, I'm much more harsh with myself than I am with the people I'm with. I can put my finger on the exact point where my mind goes astray, and because in the past it's led to infidelity, I find it easier to nip things in the bud a lot earlier than most people do - i.e. when I start thinking about someone else more than I should. It puts a bit of pressure on me, but I think it's better this way for now.
I know that a lot of people have a very black-and-white attitude about cheating - as long as no actual hooking up/sexual stuff goes on, it's fine. But for me, because I've had first-hand experience in this, I know that the same mindset that can lead to cheating starts a lot earlier than sexual contact with another person. Excluding the last year, in which I've been very well behaved, I've never had a temptation that I didn't follow through with. That doesn't mean that I've been putting it about left right and centre - it actually takes a hell of a lot to make me attracted to someone, so I'm talking about once every six months or something. Not that that's any excuse, or an attempt to lessen the seriousness of being unfaithful by saying it was only sporadic - just that it took an awfully long time for me to learn my lesson.
Here's the weird part, I guess. Unlike most people who've cheated, I'm not a hypocrite, I don't have ridiculously low benchmarks of what constitutes cheating, and I'm not extra jealous or suspicious of my partner. When it comes to him, I do have a pretty black-and-white approach. Pretty much, I'd consider it cheating if he kissed another girl, and anything upwards of that. I don't want to know, nor do I care, if my partner has flirted with some girl in a club on a night out. I would never, ever go through his phone or Facebook or whatever trying to search for clues to his infidelity. There are a few girls who I know have a 'thing' for him, but it doesn't drive me crazy. I just...don't remotely feel like he would do anything like that. Maybe it's because he knows everything about my past, and still trusts me in spite of all of it.
I think the decision whether to end a relationship because of infidelity is a tough one. For me, it would depend on a lot of factors, and on my gut feeling at the time. Firstly, it would depend on what exactly happened, why he was driven to do it, and with whom, and whether it was just once or if it was a proper love affair. I think there's a difference between a drunken hook-up and having another relationship on the side, but I don't know if it's a difference between forgiving and not doing so.
It's a matter of opinion, but I think for me there's a sliding scale of cheating. At one end is just a kiss, at the other is a full-blown affair. Whereabouts on the scale it was would influence whether or not I could think about forgiving it. At the heart of it, though, would be the questions of whether the other girl had more to offer him than I did, and whether I felt that he had anything more to offer me after being unfaithful.
In the past, when I was unfaithful it was when I already felt that my relationships were over. Obviously it was wrong to do that before I'd told the other person it was over, but there's not much I can do about that now except to try my utmost to uphold loyalty as a central tenet of the way I live my life. I didn't expect (or need, come to that) to be forgiven, because I didn't want to continue the relationship anyway. Screwed up? Maybe. But I feel like I'm passing that point now.
Anyway, I think that essentially if I still had faith in the relationship, I'd give someone another chance if what they did was only minor, and if they showed definite signs that they wanted to work through it. Especially if we'd been going out for a few years. But honestly, having never been in that situation, I think it would totally depend on my instincts at the time. Sometimes you just have to cut and run.
Mistrust and abuse of trust are both equally as destructive for relationships. I'd rather have the shock of dealing with an unfaithful partner who I previously felt nothing but love and trust for, than the constant and unnecessary heartache that comes with jealousy, insecurity and suspicion.
These blogs are part of the Relationship Thread. Every so often, I'll post a new blog topic for the thread regulars to respond to, and of course submit something myself. This first topic is a confessional. Sometimes we don't follow our own advice and it's important to identify things that we need to work on in a relationship. Enjoy!
As I've grown up, my personality has changed and consequently so has my approach to relationships. Typically, your first serious relationship will see many if not all of the big 'don'ts' - jealousy, insecurity, co-dependency, poor communication, immaturity, lack of self-control - and these all are caused by two factors: inexperience, and low self-confidence. The more experienced and confident we are, the more successful our interpersonal relationships will be.
My first real relationship lasted for just under three years, from when I was 18 until I was 21. For the first half of the relationship, I was doing the first three 'don'ts' on my list above. I was jealous of my boyfriend's female friends, thinking that they were all far more beautiful and interesting than I was; insecure about myself and about the future of the relationship, constantly needing reassurance from my boyfriend that he wasn't going anywhere; and co-dependent, not being able to imagine life without him. This obviously drove him up the wall, and probably further away from me.
I can't pinpoint exactly where things changed, but I think it must have been around the half-way point. My (now best) friend and I had gotten much closer, and we were going out partying together maybe three or four times a week. It sounds simplistic and shallow, but we both began to get more attention from guys, and as a result our confidence grew hugely - so much so that there came a point where we just didn't need reassurance that we were awesome. We led increasingly separate social lives from our boyfriends, and came to stop relying on them for any kind of support - we had each other, and we were independent.
So it was around this time that I swung over to the other side of the spectrum, and started experiencing the last three things on my list - I stopped communicating well with my boyfriend, and shut him out of much of my life; I would go out and do childish things and then act like he was a parent telling me off when he commented on them; and yes, I had a massive lack of self-control. Strangely, the more I pulled away from him, the more he chased after me telling me how much he loved me. The tables were turning, and soon I found myself thinking that I'd be happier without him. We were living together when I broke up with him. It was the hardest and most horrible thing I've ever had to do, and I didn't do it very well either.
After that, the common factor that I found was inhibiting my relationships was my crappy attention span - after a few months, I'd get bored and lose interest in the guy. My standards leapt up, and I started seeking out men who were more on my level in terms of intelligence, hoping that they'd know not to break the rules in relationships. It frustrated me when a guy would tell me his feelings for me, and as soon as he did my attraction toward him would fade.
This brings me up to the present day. I'm in a great relationship now, and have been since around February this year. He does know the rules, for the most part, and things would probably be pretty perfect if he hadn't been going through a massive emotional trauma for the last six months. Being orphaned at 24 will do that to you. So, yeah, we're coping with that, and we do try to be optimistic about our future together because we're ideally matched all things considered. Perhaps you'll get a whole blog about that out of me yet.
Anyway I'm finding it hard to lay a finger on where I sometimes go wrong, because it's much easier to do that when you're looking back at the past; but I do think that my aforementioned overconfidence has led to complacency and selfishness, which is difficult to rein in sometimes. I definitely don't get jealous anymore, or any of that, but I do sometimes find myself thinking of things in a parent-and-child way where he's stopping me from doing whatever I like. Overall though, my bad habits are not at all what they were a few years ago. My experience of relationships has helped me a great deal in identifying the signs and symptoms of a bad approach to things, but it's also made me examine myself more closely, and I don't always like what I find.
I think that ultimately it comes down to the fact that I don't have confidence in my ability to maintain a successful relationship. Since my previous ones have failed, and failed quite epicly, I've kind of created this cynical core in myself that says 'You'll never get anything right" and "Who cares anyway? You're fine on your own!" It's always been me doing the breaking up in the past, and I don't think I'd ever let it get to the stage where I literally could not live without the other person - however I still hold this distorted view that if you don't have that can't-live-without-you feeling, the relationship is eventually going to end.
If I work on reducing that core part of me, then I'll be able to properly commit to someone. I refuse to classify myself as someone who 'just doesn't do' serious relationships any longer. I also need to stop overanalysing my emotions, or lack thereof. I need to recognise that I'm not going to feel head-over-heels for someone 24/7, and that it doesn't mean I have some weird defect that renders me incapable of feeling long-term love. I'm not an overly emotional person, and prefer to approach things with logic and reason. Lucky for me, my partner provides the perfect foil - he's very cool-headed and rational, but he's also more romantic and feels things more deeply than I do. It's nice to finally have met someone that I actually aspire to be like.
Your comments are very welcome. From next week, you'll be able to find links to more of these blogs from more users, on the front page of the Relationship Thread in the Topic of the Month section.
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rigiddigits's blogs, last updated : November 19, 2009
