On Relationships - Part III : Explanation

Let's consider a hypothetical situation...

There's this girl. Very young hearted, middle class, intelligent, pretty. Say she has a good upbringing, you know, good family, good education, and a good job, she's living her own life, no major problems.

She's had a bad relationships or two, but then again, who doesn't. She's also had a few transient ones, as good and fun they were, they were passers by to her, nothing serious.

After one of the bad relationships, she decides she does not want to date for a while. She can't even see anyone like that, after being hurt that much, she needs time to lick her wounds. She is picky in nature, so she brushes off the guys who vulture at her.

Then one day she notices this one guy. It's the beginning of a good winter. He's good looking, clean faced. Appears to be Mr Nice. They don't know each other, so she eyes him a few times on random occasions they are at the same place at the same time.

Now, in a story like this, if it was the guy who noticed her, there would be no awkwardness in him making the first move to say hi to her and maybe invite her out one day. Thinking along these lines, our heroine, after realizing she might like him, goes and says hi one day, and asks him out. She's never thought this would be awkward, she doesn't believe in "Girls gotta flicker their eyelashes and guys gotta ask them out" clishé. He stalls her for a while. She does a few other, more indirect attempts later on, and gets rejected in a very friendly manner, being told he's kind of involved with someone else.

The reader of the story now thinks, he either likes her and he is a good guy and his heart is occupied at the moment; or, he is a player. Our glass-half-full heroine thinks he is a good guy. She doesn't mind and walks on her path.

Some time later, as free and as unattached her heart is, she decides she may start considering some of the advances made to her. Summer is on her way, she feels liberated and happy. She starts dating: One guy, a decent acquaintance, falls for her too soon. After a few weeks, she distances herself. A second contender, turns out to be a friend of Mr Nice, and our heroine takes up his offer on drinks and ends up liking him. They see each other a few times, but they are in different places in their lives, and she is way too smart to waste time with him. They separately move along their individual paths of life.

All the while she realizes that dating a friend of Mr Nice is tricky business. Although she doesn't think about or care for Mr Nice anymore, after all he is taken and she never cared about taken men before, she can't deny that, if there was any chance for them, that chance is badly damaged and diminished by this. She takes it as a good omen though, she thinks, he had all the time to find her, and she is way too smart to wait for someone who may or may not want to date her in the future. She thinks, maybe this will ensure that that chapter is closed, and instead of hopes being raised in the future, that book is shut for good.

Uncertainty, she knows, is the worst.

Meanwhile, a third contender arrives at the scene and looks like he's here to stay. He is an all around good guy, a young entrepreneur (which she realizes is an overlapping quality in men she ends up liking), incredibly friendly and easy to get along with, attentive and passionate, and on top of that, scorching hot. After all, the girl is a girl and we all have our weaknesses and she has hers. So she doesn't care that he is a tad younger. Summer is in its peak, love is in the air and all, and they click right away. Long weekend getaways and fun festivals follow as fall enters with all its romance. Meeting with the family, albeit too soon, happens without any hesitation or discomfort. Gorgeous week-long vacations on sunny beaches of the south are shared while A2 is rained over by storms. Good times.

As winter drizzles it's cold in, her heart stops beating as fast as it used to. It's mostly sunny and shiny in her heart, but she knows it's not the real thing. Good times are easy to have, she realizes, but there is nothing deeper, and there should be. But she chooses to ignore this awareness, as she doesn't want to let go of the good feeling. In a short time following her realizations, though, it becomes harder to go on. Luckily for our heroine of this very hypothetical story, her young, and maybe a bit immature companion of hers is more verbal of the situation, and their relationship resolves as quickly as it once caught fire. She is glad. He sounds glad. She realizes happy endings do not necessarily require a couple to remain a couple.

Life continues. Other priorities rise. Our hypothetical heroine goes on. Work and career plans weigh heavy for the duration of next half of the year. As life has a quirky way of offering goodness, she realizes her good news are mostly on work side of her life for a while. Which is, you know, as awesome as it gets.

Then this hypothetical story clashes with real time. Spring gives way to summer. Lightness is in the air. Inhibitions are lessened, hearts are more open and vulnerable.

And her ways cross with Mr Nice again. As he comes to say hi and chat, she realizes she has seen him around in the past year or so, but hardly noticed. But then, she does notice now. He is his friendly self. She feels strangely happy that they came across and he came up to say hi. She wonders, maybe, times have changed. Maybe, you know, all this has changed in her life, so some things might have changed in his as well. So she hesitantly lets a butterfly twirl in her stomach.

Oh, life as it is, not predictable, not accountable, not trustable. It is another time, but much of a different one.

It is a weakness, to hope. When a heart is free, it tries to land on places, and a familiar place is better than unknown territory. And isn't it hidden in everyone's hopes and dreams that your paths will cross again with someone who had touched your heart once? That it will be the time. Funny, it's just another cliché, that's all.

Going back to our highly hypothetical heroine.. Since this is a story, and not a great one necessarily, but the rest of it can be written in many alternatives. Now this is exciting. I think, I think she decides that she's worth too much to care, and that maybe she must admit he might be more of a player than Mr Nice. I think she knows the flicker of that butterfly to be a blip. As free and confident as she is, she thinks, she can't be available to that sort of interactions with Mr Nice/Player. She lets reality hit her: He had all the time and means to reach her if he wanted to. She wasn't always taken, nor was he. And truly, in the reality of life, having had a few dates with one of his friends, now more than a year ago, is just another blip. So the reality is, there is no crossing paths again. There are only small towns and coincidences.

And she understands that, the end of such stories, may have a different cast than the beginning.


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Post Script: This story was written about two and a half years ago.  I publish it now as I see no conflicts any more in the story. For the reader's information, Mr Nice was hitched with another girl, turned out to be a real Mr Nice just to somebody else. I publish this story now because, what it talks about is actually how times change, albeit within the paradigm of heart issues. But times do change and after years I realize, when I read this story, they change drastically. More on that later.

On relationships - part II

Yeah so once again I am fooled.
I am 27. I have had many serious and not-so-serious relationships. I have lived with a boyfriend, I have done long-distance. I have been on both sides of the bridge of love, interest and power. I have been cheated on. Never cheated. I have compromised, I forgave. I trusted, I got jealous, and I doubted. Needless to say, I have had my fair share of the side affects of the affairs of the heart.

I have been pretty content with my life in the past year. I have my down sides but I like who I am. I am stubborn at times, and maybe a bit too straight forward. But I am also warm, welcoming, kind, strong, educated, intelligent, social and good-natured. I love the place I work at, and I am very very lucky to have a great boss. I love the city I live in. After having moved from place to place in my youth, I finally feel I belong somewhere, by myself, not because of "someone".

Many of my friends have ongoing relationships. I can't say most are healthy, but I am not sure how realistic it is to expect otherwise in real life anyway. A growing percentage of them are married. Very happily. I got used to going out with married couples a long time ago. A bit too early maybe. I spent my twenties trapped in a relationship that did not move an inch in 3 years, with a guy 7 years older than me, who  loved bragging about him being older. I regret a lot of things from that relationship but one big regret is that I feel I wasted my mid twenties with this "older" attitude instead of mingling with other young people in their twenties. You know, do all the things they do, get immature every once in a while, be out day and night, and enjoy the awesomeness of being in twenties. Regardless... I have had my own experiences, and learnt a lot, and matured a bit too soon than I would have liked. My friends started having kids, and at 27, I am getting used to be an aunt. Going out with married couples is nothing different, but when people expect or have babies, your social life changes dramatically. No more meet ups spontaneously, no more drinks outside, no more late nights, no more girl nights.

People leave your life one by one. There can be no one to count on. Friends are friends. In my culture, friends do a lot for each other. In US, they are VERY hard to find. And this is not necessarily from my own experience, I have observed this in lives of many young people. The weird thing is, no one seems to mind it. It is default here, you being by yourself.

So anyhow, the point I am trying to make, among all this nonsense, is that I have been through stuff and I am not a newbie. I have lived and observed many levels of relationships.

But at 27, having accomplished so much, my education, my job, moving to a city much like NYC, then to a whole another country all by myself, I still get fooled when it comes to the affairs of the heart.

I have embraced my singlehood a bit too much recently. I have not dated for a long time, was not even interested. My attention was on having fun, discovering new hobbies, and working hard. After some point I started dating, enjoying every bit of it. After considering marriage for 3 years to a guy that I would "settle for", I found out I was claustrophobic to the idea of a well-woven relationship. You know, the kind that in the second week you can't do anything without the other one's knowledge or indirect permission. Which has been a strange but wonderful self-discovery.

Then, at one point, you get fooled again.
Someone you know, who was totally not in your radar, asks you out for drinks, which, you know, nonverbally, ends up becoming a date. You have an awesome time. For a short while it looks like you guys are at the initial phase of dating, trying to keep an adult distance. You are kind of relieved yourself, since you don't want to rush into a relationship yourself. You just want to keep seeing each other, you know, get together,  sometimes very spontaneously,  do things together but totally spare each other the lives of each other. You don't want to mingle in each other's circle, you just want to have a good time now and then, and share sometimes shy, sometimes romantic, sometimes not-so-romantic texts and phone calls in between.

Isn't that what happens, normally? Isn't that a common thing to expect?

Apparently not. When I realized that things were moving a bit too slow even for my new found fear of relationships, I had to call it quits before I was emotionally involved. Ok I take that back I was emotionally involved a bit already. I liked him. If it was left to me, I would have moved forward a bit more, learnt more about each other a bit before I had to make a decision about a relationship. But, when someone says they don't want a relationship, it's never a "maybe". I've learnt that. I have used that excuse myself. It is never the complete explanation either. For every "I don't want a relationship", there is a "with you", hidden, unsaid, right after.

I guess all these years' of experience didn't go wasted totally. I can actually now realize a bad date on the second date, and confront it on the third. Old Jada would have stayed in, pretending not to notice anything, and tried to play along hoping that it would somehow work out at the end.

'Coz even if he was hurt by a previous relationship, even if his lines of trust receded, even if he feared.. When you like a person, when you like being with a person, every interaction makes you smile, every text/message/email rushes the blood in your veins.. You may act more cautious than normal, but those butterflies.. they will be there. And it will show. And lack of it will show too.

It is amazing how you start questioning yourself with such a small defeat of heart. Not that it hurt you deeply. It barely scratched the surface. But like a paper cut, it hurt unexpectedly.

Another issue I still have problems dealing with is the fact that men of our age almost always have baggages, and frankly, I am sick of it. I had to deal with prior girlfriends, unnamed friendships, ex-wives, the women that screwed them, whoever it is. You always want to be mature and give people space and respect to prior relationships. Interestingly, I have never seen this mature attitude pay off. In fact I believe it backfires since this is the third time I had to hear how much they liked their previous lady. I mean, come on. Serious or not, this is the last thing a girl wants to hear from you. To sum it all, I learnt very well, when you start anything with baggage, it never moves an inch.

It is funny how guys tend to obsess about the prick of a woman who screws them over. I suppose we women do that too. It is a fault of humanity. It gives a bad name for the rest of us, regardless of gender. Maybe it does really scare some people from any form of commitment when they get screwed over, but I highly doubt that. We humans are not built like that. We are built to hope (unfortunately), remember what was good and forget what was bad, and we are built to look for better things in every step we take next. I honestly believe, such affects of previous relationships only hold because those people have not moved on emotionally from those relationships.

I am done with people with baggages. Of all people, I, the rare person who never wanted to change anybody, know it very well that you cannot take a person and make him/her the lover of your dreams. I am very much in support of accepting and enjoying the differences. But baggages, man... I still don't know how to deal with. So far my verdict is something along the lines of "Do not ever date a guy with emotional baggage."

I also hate dealing with people who don't know what they want. 

This may sound very girly or needy, but it absolutely is not. I do not mean what you want in future. I mean, what you want NOW. Do you even know why you do what you are doing and why you are enjoying it? Are you self-aware when you are with me? You have to know what makes you feel good. You have to know what you want.

So. Got fooled once again. I don't think it was ill-intended, but it did hurt. And I know it was not ill-intended, at least that much I can tell, because I know that it would be easier to blame the other person than accepting the truth that he just did not feel for me. There is nothing you can do about that, you know, when someone just doesn't like you the way you'd like. Didn't you ever experience the same thing? How many times a truly nice person liked you and you just felt - nothing? So there. It happens. Both ways. It will not change anything to blame the other person, although it would have been more convenient.

This all makes me appreciate this other guy that I liked in the past. He had told me, as frank as he could be, that he was not interested in me. It was not easy to accept either, but that way I never got invested in it to begin with.

No matter how mature, strong, sensible we aim to be, sometimes rejection scars. Feeling of not being wanted is never easy to take. All we can do is to move on.

The ex in exclusive - brainstorming on levels of relationships

Several factors are contributing in my decision to write this article about relationships and the extinct art of monogamy: My personal opinions since I was a little girl, my parents, the cultural difference I noticed when I first came to US, a recent interaction with a guy, another recent chat with a friend, and a break-up 6 months ago because of the affair my (ex)boyfriend of 3 years had with a colleague of his who is married and a mother to a young girl.

Probably the last one is the major factor and recent happenings are merely the fuel.

The reaction of people to what happened when we broke up, shockingly, did not vary too much. There was a circle, the circle of the family and heart-to-heart friends, who were madder than I was. They were my thread of strength when I had none left in me. I was so weak and beaten that I still hoped he would be sorry and would "man up" enough to come back to me. I'm so glad nothing like that happened while I was still weak. I might have accepted him back - which would be one of the biggest mistakes of a life. Incredibly luckily, I had little yet enough strength when the inevitable apology came.

Then there were all these other people, whose reaction was something like: "Well it happens to anyone.", which I find very similar to telling a starving homeless guy that there are poorer and hungrier people in some other parts of the world, and lots of'em too! Yeah, very effective. This sentence later would be  followed by, after checking that I was becoming a tad better about holding myself, "Who doesn't cheat anyways?", to which my jaw dropped and my eyes popped out of their sockets.

Don't get me wrong, these people are my friends and by no means they justify what happened. But they understand in a way I never will. One of them is a guy friend of mine that I love very much. On my birthday the conversation followed as the example and I heard him say that there hadn't been a single relationship he had that he had not cheated, one way or another. Well, no more trying to hook him up with my gal friends from now on I guess.

I remember back when I was barely 20, two girls from college visited me during a winter break at my parents' home. I was quite good friends with these two girls at the time. We often went out at night, we met with my friends from town, and one night, one of the girls ended up snuggling with a guy friend of mine from town. She had a boyfriend for 3-4 years (who I also knew and to whom she is married now). I warned my guy friend about it and made my point very clear. He ended up taking her out on a walk so she would come to her senses, but before she did, they did have quite an intimate, emotional and very "hugful" stroll along the seashore. The next day, both girls thought I over-reacted. My opinion about these two girls changed forever.

I don't know why some things are very close to being black and white for me, but they are.

Why is monogamy so hard for people?

I never had any problem with it. Heck, I am a natural. When I am in love, when I'm in a relationship, I turn blind to everybody else. Even when I only have a crush, it is one and only for the duration of the crush. Apparently my heart is single occupancy.

Though, I don't necessarily think people have to be like me at all times. When you are not in an exclusive relationship, and as long as your partner knows, accepts the situation, everyone has the freedom to do whatever they want. I for one, am not the type to entertain the non-exclusive kind of relationships for myself. I congratulate my friends who can successfully maintain one of those.

One thing I came across only in US is though, the difference between many relationship terms: "seeing someone" , "dating someone" , "having a date",  "being in a relationship", and "having a girlfriend/boyfriend".

Of course, when two people start being interested in each other, they do not immediately become seriously committed as a couple. So naturally there is a range of intimacy. Sometimes the range is very very short, and whatever happens either ends soon or stays very shallow, which is also fine.

However, when does the "exclusiveness" come into play?

To me (and I've happily run across someone else who thinks like me), exclusiveness is there right from the start. Exclusiveness at this stage does not imply commitment to each other in a serious relationship or to a future together. Indeed, being exclusive has nothing to do with what the couple has internally. Thus, the prefix, "ex". 'Coz it has to do with the outside - meaning, there will be no other outside parties involved with whatever the heck we are doing here.

So you can understand my confusion about these terms:
People can "see someone" and also "some other one". People don't think it is weird.  (I'd go purple from shame of many dimensions if I was on a date with a guy who was also seeing some other people - but that's me.)
You need to openly acknowledge "you will from now on be an exclusive couple" before you can be sure the guy you're dating is not going to hold hands with someone else.
When you date someone, it doesn't mean anything more than, well, "trying each other on"???
But when you have a date, it is only "a" date, and it does not mean you are dating?
And when exactly do you become girlfriend-boyfriend?

I am, as this one guy called it, old fashioned in this sense. When I have a date with someone, I do not actively arrange other dates. When I am seeing someone, even though it may not be as serious, I am still exclusive. It is not the defining feature of a serious relationship for me, where you call each other girlfriend-boyfriend, it is merely a prerequisite. The seriousness of the relationship comes not with eliminating outside factors but building the inside factors. It comes with intimacy, with shared things (acts, emotions, people, time...), with commitment to each other. Only after then, maybe, comes the possible entertaining of a future.

My mom says I should have been born a few centuries back. I tend to disagree. I selfishly believe we need more people who think and feel like me in our time.