I think I’ve discovered through this blog that people will forgive you for being raw and intensely personal, as long as it’s a half-decent read.

I’ve discovered that writing and relationships can be like the water torture: the constant drip drip drip of “what-if” and “could-be” that eases up when you finally realize the legacy of all that pain.

Yesterday’s poem was about a relationship from several years ago, written about a year ago. I stumbled across it and though “Hey – that’s not bad is it?”

I go with my gut a lot. However sometimes (like my last relationship, the wounds from which are still raw) I can talk myself out of going with my gut, hoping the outcome will somehow be different from what I know will happen from past experience.

Never works.

So here, without giving too much away about the other party, are my lessons learned from failed relationships, particularly this latest one:

• Trust your gut.
• He did it to you once, he will do it to you again. Unless there’s a hell of a lot of soul searching going on in the meantime.
• He won’t change. Especially at his age. Love him as is, in this moment, right now, or walk away.
• Love is everything, but it’s not enough. Commitment is something else entirely, and few people are really up for it. When you love someone, you either are willing to make it work or you aren’t. I’ve been married and know all too well how that magic “soul mate” feeling gets lost over the years. That’s where true commitment kicks in.
• Speak your truth. It’s possible to still be in love with someone who is being a jerk to you. It doesn’t mean you have to take it.
• If he uses the term “soul-mate” or “The One” in reference to you (either you are or you aren’t) it’s a sign of spiritual and emotional immaturity. Lasting deep love only very rarely comes effortlessly. Sure, there is chemistry to ignite the spark, but there is no deus ex machina that makes everything happy-ever-after. “Soul-mate” thinking is magical thinking. A healthy relationship means adjustment, compromise, effort, change as well as happiness, great sex, passion, laughter, respect.
• Be willing to change. Notwithstanding the “speak your truth” above – if you recognize your baggage sneaking in on your happiness then by all means use that self-awareness to become a better person.
• See every relationship, romantic or otherwise, as an opportunity to become the person you are meant to be.

Hope is six years old.

“I hope I’ll get an ice cream cone today. I hope grandma doesn’t make me eat turnips. I hope I get a pony ride. I hope daddy will come back someday.”

Hope is a six year old in an woman’s body.

“I hope that if I’m very good, if I smile pretty and wear nice clothes, but I’m naughty in bed, he’ll leave her and be with me.”

The flip side of hope is despair.

Despair is Sylvia Plath readings at a coffee house. Despair is three quarters of a bottle of wine sitting in the bath when he leaves. Again.

Daddy never came back. Men never stay.

It’s worth clicking on over there to read the rest …

Blowing off a rainy hill workout to sit at the laundromat. A group of runners trots past, headlamps bobbing in the winter evening’s darkness.

Laundry Day by Peekature Studios

<<Guilt>>

OK, that passed quickly.

Hey maybe this is a good place to meet single men. Or women. Or not.

Nevermind.

Maybe the resolution last year would have been more successful if it been “Remain celibate and joyfully single” rather than the trap-door-open-for-sex-and-entanglement wording: “Remain joyfully single.”

Reverse-engineering, as far as she can tell, means taking something apart to see how it works rather than building it from scratch.

She’s discovered she reverse-engineers her relationships: she jumps into full-bore couple-hood with no user documentation. She falls in love right away and imagines herself waking up with him every morning. Convinces herself that her life is imperfect without him, impatiently waits for him to Be Exclusive. Stops seeing friends socially, drops any other romantic prospects. Imagines a life of comfortable domestic bliss.

(One of these days she’s going to realize the guys giving their assent to all this are just as unlikely as she is to be candidates for Lasting Happiness.)

Then, one day, sooner rather than later – maybe two months, maybe six months into it, she looks at him with renewed clarity. He’s got his eyes tightly closed the whole time they’re having sex, or he really does look like the cartoon guy from MAD Magazine with a vapid smile and even more vapid personality, or he won’t stop inflecting the end of his sentences up like a teenager when he speaks, or he’s petting her like he pets his dogs, or he tells his jokes too loud in restaurants, or he asks to borrow her car for the umpteenth time, never filling it with gas.

At that point, she’ll look at him with complete transparency, and a switch goes from “On” to “Off,” and just like that —it’s over. Pieces of a hurried relationship all over the floor; she has no clue how to put it back together again.

He usually senses it. The whole facade is deconstructed in a heartbeat. She tries to recapture the magic, tries to remember what she saw in him in the first place – tries to backtrack into the Just Dating stage; realizes she’s already given her heart away and invested her emotional capital in a fantasyland of Couplehood.

He of course is usually completely mystified, left with pieces of his heart and his manhood strewn about in little pieces.

Her phone rings-his name comes up on the screen-she startles; the drone and hum of the laundromat has lulled her to a stupor. She tries to perk up, moves to answer, but her plastic smile doesn’t make it to her eyes and she loses her nerve. Instead, she hits the “ignore” button and folds her towels.

The running group trots past again, going back the other way this time. She lugs her laundry home, pulls out her runners and straps on the headlamp, seeking redemption in the shiny streets.

(Then again, maybe she just hasn’t met the right one yet.)

She always hated being called a cougar – just because she had a couple of younger boyfriends doesn’t meanshe wanted to devour them, and she never, ever went to clubs to find them, take them home and discard them in the middle of the night, or at morning light.

Photo by Guppiecat

Or did she?

With Red it was about the watch.

He was 23. She was 35.

He bought a watch when they had no money and they were living in a basement suite in a mountain town.

He smoked pot almost daily. His hair was long and curly and red. And soft. He was – dare I say it – well endowed and well skilled. They were dynamite in bed. She still thinks of those times. Wistfully. Late at night. When she is alone. Once she thought she saw him on the street in Victoria this summer, soft hair spilling out from under a toque. Slight swagger. Bloodshot eyes.

(Never mind. It wasn’t Red after all.)

Back to the watch. He showed it off proudly when he got home. She was in the bath trying to soak off her work day. She worked 11 hours a day, 4 days a week. The 3 days off each week were nice, but she worked damn hard for them. To blow off steam she would come home at lunch and run the trails. When the snow came she would grab her x-country skis and go up to the groomed trails above town. She was soaking after a nice trail run, or ski, can’t remember which.

She wanted to hike and climb in the mountains. He wanted to ride mountain bike. She hadn’t found climbing partners by the time the snow came and he hadn’t made it out for a ride. He spent some time sitting in his cousins filthy little trailer, trying to convince him not to drink himself to death. But that’s a different story.

I thought we were going to discuss with each other before we spent more than 100 bucks, she said.

His face fell.

It’s my own money not our money, he said.

But you owe money to other people, she said, heart sinking into the bathwater lockstep behind his face. Somewhere she knew she was out of line but couldn’t help herself, she didn’t back down.

The next day he reluctantly took the watch back to the store.

A couple of months later before the kids came to town for a visit she broke up with him. He went to live in a rented house with a bunch of other young people.

He bought a watch.

—

Recently her lover sent a text message, saying he’d like to take her out for lunch but he had to go for a speed workout.

No problem, go run! she replied.

Wow, the last woman I dated insisted I miss some workouts, he said.

I wouldn’t want to be responsible for someone changing who they are, she said. When you date a marathon runner how can you not expect 100-mile weeks, sore quads and early nights?

She didn’t tell him – it’s not that I understand running. It’s because she’s finally beginning to understand all too well the fallen face, the immediate self-recrimination, the inevitable heartbreak of the carnivore.