Fall in love

..sometimes, when I look at his sleeping face in the morning, I feel like my heart is going to go pop.

I’ve just realised something. I wrote the first entry on this goal on September 24th 2005 – exactly one year to the very day before I ticked it off. How beautiful is that?

Like how this can be so painful and yet so amazing.

Like how this happened at all.

But there’s nothing I can do about it.

I love him with all my heart. Case closed.

Ugh.

Same as I wrote August 28th.

But worse. Much, much, much worse.

He’s even further away than normal. Thousands of miles away.

He feels like home. How can I feel at home when my home has flown so far away? I am displaced. I am distracted.

I feel pathetic for feeling like this. I’m a grown woman, not a stupid infatuated teenager.

I can’t even pick up the phone and call him. I don’t know when he’s gonna be able to check his email. And even if I did, an email isn’t a conversation, and even a conversation isn’t enough without the proximity. I want to see his eyes. I want his hand in mine.

Right now I feel like this is the stupidest goal I have ever worked on. It’s so worthwhile for the time we get to spend together, but my god, right now, it hurts. I wish someone had warned me. I was an idiot to think this would be all fun.

Afterthought: I don’t know. I’m probably also feeling a bit shit cos of other stuff that’s happening, or not happening, and I’m pinning it all on this. It’s an easy thing to pin my misery on and it’s probably unfair to give it all the credit. I need to be working on my other goals, and I can’t work out if I’m not because my mind is distracted, or if I’m distracting my mind on purpose.

I think I’m going a bit mental today.

..here, about enjoying missing someone… Today I’m not enjoying it one little bit. This morning, hungover, despondent and emotional, I got back into bed, curled into a ball with my cat and cried my eyes out.

I don’t think I actually knew what it was like to miss someone until now. It’s not romantic. It’s not fun. It hurts so much. It feels like a jagged stone twisting and scraping, carving a hollow in my stomach. The nearness of him both relieves and aggravates the pain.

There is nothing I can do about it. I need to calm down.

I had a thought this morning in the shower.

In many, if not all, of my previous relationships, I’ve had a sense of… not exactly being open to offers, but being aware that there might be someone better out there. A sense that I might be wasting my time.

But this time that feeling is completely absent.

I feel like nothing and no one could even come close.

..for your advice and support after my strange flip-out yesterday. I’ve had a good think about everything you all said, and talked it through with someone close to me, and I feel better today. I’m not such a freak for not wanting to go for the all-out “hearts and chocolates and flowers and poetry in front of 500 close friends” romance. Love and affection can be expressed privately and in different ways. I was thinking of myself as cold and unromantic, till my friend pointed out to me several ways in which I had recently demonstrated myself, in my own way, to be an indisputable ball of mush. So that’s alright then.

As for defining my relationships with sexuality, I’m in a similar situation to where I was with my “man without issues” goal. I can’t deny my sexuality or its importance to me, but writing about it and the way I use it has encouraged me to think hard about ways I can keep my tendency to exploit it in check so as to avoid falling into the same traps I have time and time again. The problem is partly that I have been filtering my thoughts, blinding myself to my affectionate actions, maybe because they aren’t as traditional as many people’s, and by comparison the filth loomed large. So I’m not doing that any more. I’m gaining clear sight, and I’m going to put into practice what I have learned and express my affection fearlessly and in my own way. That’ll sort the men from the boys, and anyone who can’t handle it shouldn’t be in my life anyway.

The couple read each other poetry and self-written vows, their voices cracked with emotion. They were both close to tears, gazing into each other’s eyes and, later, at the reception ceilidh, the bride sang to her new husband and he gazed on with undisguised adoration. I spent most of the day with my utterly loved up and newly engaged friends M and L, who were taking mental notes and excitedly planning their own wedding down to the tiniest detail.

The whole day was truly magical. I did cry – I always cry at weddings. But the whole experience has made me feel slightly disturbed and confused about my own capacity to love and be loved, and my mental block on the expression and the receiving of that love.

I want love. I do. But I walk around saying I want to be in love and I do eventually want to marry someone, and yet I have never thought about what it would be like. I’ve thought about the actual concept of being married, of spending my life with one person, legally committed to them, and this doesn’t phase me at all, quite the opposite. It’s what I want. I can’t think of anything better than finding someone I’d be happy to see every day forever.

But the wedding itself? I have barely ever given a moment’s thought to it. Where I would like it to be, what sort of dress I would have, the ceremony, how many bridesmaids, who… My friends M and L had been out the previous day sourcing tiny clothespegs for the seating plans. Yesterday’s cake was a layer of ginger parkin topped with cheesecake, combining the bride and groom’s favourite cakes. These tiny creative details are alien to me. And while pledging my troth sounds cool the idea of expressing my love for someone in front of over a hundred people with a self-written poem fills me with some kind of mixture of terror and nausea. When directed towards or coming from myself, the very idea of such public romanticism, traditional or personally directed, fills me with nausea and terror. I want it and yet it repels me. I can’t even find it within me. Why is that?

L’s had her wedding half-planned in her head since she was a young girl. Isn’t that the normal way for girls?

What happens? Do you reach a point when you’re in love with someone where a trigger switches in your head and turns it to mush? Where everything you see around you holds significance and potential for romantic expression? Where you cease feeling embarrassed by traditional or personal public displays of love, and start to actively plan them and seek them out? I discussed it with M, and he said that if and when I do get married I’ll understand. I don’t know if I will understand. I guess I really haven’t been in love.

My capacity for expressing and receiving affection is topsy-turvy. I do it, to some extent, through sex. I chase love, I want it so much, but I approach it from the direction of my pants. I have referred to myself on 43 as more of a “bend me over the sofa kind of girl”. I did it again yesterday, talking to M and L. Why do I do this? I am far more comfortable with sex than I am with love. I’m 31 and I’m driven by my knickers. Am I sabotaging myself to avoid what I see as the crippling embarrassment of exposing my weak, cold heart and opening myself to rejection? There may not always be someone around who loves you and wants to be with you, but there will always be someone who wants to do you. Am I so afraid of feeling something solid that sex is the closest I get to feeling true affection for someone? Am I limiting my options with my view of myself and by my actions? Have I been turning the relationships I’ve been having into a fuckfest at the expense of something deeper and longer-lasting, through fear? Sex is important to me – very important – but it’s not necessarily the path to true love.

I don’t know what to do about this. I need my needs to be met on all levels. I just don’t know how to get there.

She lies. She lies! May is past and done, and I haven’t met my husband as she promised on my birthday last year. Waaaah!

Holy fuck, I’ve written a lot. Go and get a cup of tea and empty your bladder before you start.

So last time I did an entry about this – actually, it was on the “meet a man without issues” goal – I’d just received a message from a local bloke on OKCupid who seemed right up my alley (snigger). Messages were exchanged on OKCupid, good ones, too, the kind that make you go “Oh, yay!” when they appear in your inbox, and leave you a bit smiley and silly. Eventually we said “This is daft”, and email addresses were exchanged. Textual contact continued, and it was all looking good, so we moved onto that next step in the peculiar ritual of internet dating rapprochement – MSN. Frantic messaging ensued, we both stopped hiding in “appear offline” and hung out in full view just in case the other came online, and this bloke had me chortling like a drain and champing at the bit for more contact. He was clever, witty, interesting, confident almost to the point of arrogance just the way I like them. He certainly appeared issue-free, and had a clear-cut, positive, and compassionate way of looking at the world that I really related to. He could even spell (and you know how important that is for me), we had tons in common, and despite his intense geekiness – LARP, Douglas Adams, you know the drill – when he asked me if I wanted to meet him on Friday afternoon it was all that I could do to restrain myself from saying (typing) “YES YES YES YES YES”. First phone call came and went, and it was fantastic. We spent 45 minutes laughing our heads off about medieval swearwords and the perils of being an adult playing on children’s playground equipment. Brilliant. It was a date. We’d meet at noon on Friday and see what happened.

So I got all dolled up like a 70s cop as I am wont to do on such occasions, and sat at the appointed meeting place, cacking myself with nerves and smoking furiously, convinced that every bloke I saw was my mystery man. I’d seen a picture, but you know how your mind plays tricks. Standing there watching the Salvation Army do their Good Friday parade… pause cos oh my God, he just signed into MSN… I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard my name spoken. I yelped, and turned around, looked at him and… felt nothing. No pulse of attraction, no nothing. He looked like his picture, a little wider perhaps, but he wouldn’t be the first or last person to upload an old picture. Chastising myself for my immediate non-reaction, and telling myself not to judge by first impressions, we went for a cup of tea. Weirdly, it wasn’t awkward at all. We nattered away amiably, telling stories and giggling, but always at the back of my mind… “The chemistry… It’s not there.” Damn, I felt shallow and awful.

I spent the whole afternoon with him. We wandered along the quayside and looked at art, pretending we knew something about it. We discussed everything under the sun from housing policy to etymology to fancy dress. Charming, funny, generous and intelligent, the man was a joy to be with. He was everything I’d hoped, the only thing that was missing was that final and most important link in the chain – attraction. Once or twice he tried tentatively to put his arm around me, and when my gut reaction was to flinch it solidified the idea in my mind that it just wasn’t happening. Finally, we went for a bite to eat, and the cut-off point – Lucyann’s late-afternoon gig – was approaching fast, so I bit the bullet and told him that although he was a lovely, lovely man, I didn’t think we were going to be more than friends. Oh, the wounded look in his eye! I felt awful. I saw all his insecurities flash through his dilated pupils in that one split second, then ease off as he recovered. He asked, and I agreed, if I would see him again on a friendly basis, and we had a friendly hug to seal the deal before we went our separate ways.

It is a testament to OKCupid’s matching software that we did get on like a house on fire. That impresses me no end, and I do fully intend to see him again as a friend. Who knows, maybe romance will blossom at a later date. But without that chemical floating around in the ether it was like spending the afternoon with an old mate or a brother. The one thing software can’t legislate for is pheromones.

I made the mistake of looking at his blog the day after. His mood was “disappointed”, and it transpires this is the fourth consecutive time this has happened to him. He does give me credit for being forthright rather than trying to wriggle out of it embarrassingly, and he calls me a charming young lady, which is rather gracious of him, and says that he’s glad that he now has another charming young lady with whom to discuss the world and all it contains. So hopefully, no lasting harm done. But even though I can’t really be blamed for it I can’t help but have a slight attack of the guilts for reinforcing this guy’s pattern of seemingly failed dates. And I’m disappointed, too, because I’d had such high hopes. But I suppose it can’t be helped.

As a postscript, later that night I went to what was meant to be a raucous guitars-and-wine-round-the-table gathering of friends. I hoped this would lift my somewhat disillusioned mood. When I got there, it turned out to be a coupley dinner party, as the host had forgotten to tell his fiancée his plans. All non-dinner invitees shunted off to the smoking room feeling, frankly, unwelcome. There was a beautiful newborn baby in the dining room with the other couple. I held it for ten minutes, gazing at it and filled with utter, utter longing for one of my own. When I handed it back, I rushed back to the smoking room and promptly burst into tears. So all in all, a pretty emotional day, and not at all for the reasons I’d hoped.