From: llama@pooh.cc.utexas.edu (sine nomine)
Newsgroups: alt.angst
Subject: Re: When Does It End?
Date: 19 Nov 92 07:28:25 GMT
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5

IDJMW@ASUACAD.BITNET wrote:

: When does a relationship end? Does it ever end? Does it ever stop
: hurting? Or is the Ex-S.O. doomed to return again and again and again

as recently as four months ago i'd've said it never ends. even though
it had been six months since my ex and i officially broke up (the
process was agonizingly slow and took about six months to happen), i
was still a puppet, still trying to figure out how i'd failed and what
i could do to show him i'd changed. i was dating other guys, yeah, but
i was comparing them all to him and they weren't winning. i also had
the clever habit of dating incredibly unsuitable men (way too young,
or planning to move out of the state in a few months, or not really my
type.

but i don't think it was this guy so much as it was the passion we'd
had. it was the first time in my life i'd given myself over completely
to giddy, love-sick euphoria, and i didn't think i'd ever find that
again (okay, so i was wrong). letting him go was like watching a dream
die and was probably the single most painful experience of my life,
which is really saying a lot. shortly after it became obvious that it
was going to end, i was hospitalized and taking sedatives every night
because i couldn't bear to go to bed uOBnless i knew i was going to pass
out immediately. it was the first time i understood heartbreak as a
physical pain.

so last june when he started telling mutual friends that he still
loved me (at a time when i was about to get involved with a new man,
btw) i freaked. i forgot about the times he got kinda physical with
me. i forgot about how he fucked someone else in a closet at a party.
i passed over his general noncommunicativeness and lack of a life
outside his computer and his pot. i jumped. 

to make a long story short, it didn't work out. never really got
started, actually. he was the same person he'd been, and i wanted
more. but still, i kept thinking that maybe he'd change, that i must
have affected him somehow, since it took him nearly a year to date
anyone but me. i was pretty much over it, but still had occasional
twinges.

so now i'm in love and it's even more intense and more real than it
was with this ex. and when i heard he'd found a girlfriend, my
reaction was pique at being gotten over (how dare he!) but i wasn't
incapacitated like i would have been a year ago. still, i don't know
if i'd've considered myself *over* him.

so today, i took the bus back to campus to meet the marmoset online.
wow. there was my ex, big as life. so i sat next to him, and we
talked, and i was kinda watching myself, trying to figure out what i
felt.

not much of anything. i wondered what i'd ever seen in him, why i'd
nearly wrecked my life over him. i saw an aging hippie with some
adolescent mannerisms, someone you have to pry comments out of. an
attractive man, but not gorgeous. no sexual desire was there, no
tension, no chemistry. just a guy with no life who used to be part of
mine.

it was weird. too cool. i wanted to laugh and dance and skip all the
way to the lab. i'm free. he doesn't matter anymore. he can't hurt me
again. i feel like i did after a 104-degree fever i'd had for days
broke: happy, tired, kind of drained. now i'm free to give myself
entirely to the man i love. 

: And isn't he ever going to just go away and leave me alone?

probably not, but you'll get to where you don't care anymore. 
he'll wear off eventually. 

: Is everything always going to be my fault?

depends on who you ask.
as long as you let him make it so, yes.

--
sine | deb
"nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands" -- ee cumming