A
male
age
51-59,
shawncaff
writes:In reflecting upon a relationship I had with a girl last year, I think a source of the many problems I had was my confusion of the illusion I had of her and what our relationship was with the reality. I thought I would relate a little bit about it in the hopes that maybe others have experienced something a little similar.(I apologize to those who have heard me rant about this before. My main point here is my reflection on what happened, and the catharsis of still getting this out of my system, rather than recounting the same old details.)In a nutshell, this girl is beautiful--a model, an aspiring actress, and a charmer. Soon after we met, I fell into a pattern of doing things for her: giving her money, driving her places, doing things for her. When my willing spirit lagged, she would encourage me by calling me "her best friend", sending me nice text messages asking how I was, and asking for my advice, making me feel important.At first I began to think that maybe if I did enough for her, she would open her heart to me and we would become lovers instead of "friends". This was the first illusion. I ignored the reality: she is in her late 20s, I am in my late 30s; she is beautiful and svelte, I am not bad looking but overweight and balding; she constantly talked about finding a rich man to take care of her, I have a job with a relatively low salary and will never be rich.I consider myself a fairly truthful person. Well, I mean I lie about some things, but I do try to see things as they are, and not how I want them to be. But what amazes me now is how I allowed this illusion to replace all objectivity. She fed this a little. When I took her to the movies, she would lean into me and whisper a question in my ear. When she met me, she would touch my chest, happy to see me. We once went to the beach together, and she put our towels down next to each other. She kissed me on the cheek as a way of thanking me for things. We took photos together, where she rested her head on my chest, and allowed me to put my arm around her, as we stared into the camera. For a guy like me (relatively conservative, shy, introverted), this all had a tremendous sensual and emotional impact.But the reality seeped in. I learned (through another source) that she was having affairs with a number of men at the same time, one with a married man, all the time that she and I were spending time together. But I managed to rationalize this, too. "She is an attractive woman," I said to myself. "Of course she has affairs. But we have something more, something deeper, something less ephemeral. And this will be lasting, rather than these flings."She did break it off with the married man after it became clear he had no intention of leaving his wife. But then I learned (also through an independent source) that in addition to the affairs, she also was a sometimes escort, having sex with rich businessmen for money. It bothered me a lot for many reasons. I wondered about how cheap our relationship was. The sex she had with them did not perturb me as much as the words of endearment she used with them. She used words like "baby", "honey"...and "love"--when they had no meaning behind them. But even then, I rationalized it. She needs to do this to survive, I thought. With me, it is real.I was so upset that at one point I offered her money if she would stop doing the escort work. She took the money, promised she would stop, but didn't. I found this out, too. I ignored her breach of contract when she apologized, and we made up a new contract. She broke this, too. This time she was mad at me for snooping around to find out. We did no talk for a week and then we made a new contract. This time, I was sure she would keep it, blocking out the reality of the previous two times. We made the contract on Thursday. I sent her a fake email on Friday from a potential "client", and responded enthusiastically. I arranged a meeting with her and me as the "client." When she showed up on Monday, the "client" did not show up but I left a note with the waitress saying, "You could not even wait a week." She was angry. We did not talk for a week again.But we did talk again. I realized money trumped everything for her, including keeping her word. But I also realized the reality that I could not change her. But I still harbored the illusion that I was special.Ultimately, I realized that despite the fact that she was loose sexually, that she lied, that she was an escort, I could still care for her and be close to her if she really cared for me. So I clung to that perception, like a survivor of a sunken ship clings desperately to a floating piece of driftwood. In the meantime, friends told me this relationship was destroying me. I was becoming depressed, and feeling worse about myself, at the same time that I harbored the hope that I was truly important to her as a person.But reality was setting in, despite my efforts to ignore it. I was distracted at work. My boss told me he noticed a change in me, and was everything all right? At one point I could not find where I parked my car and I reported it stolen. Two weeks later the police called me to tell me it was around the corner from my job--I had been so distracted with what was going on with this girl that I had just forgotten where I parked it. (And I had accumulated several hundred dollars in parking tickets.)A wise contributor on DearCupid helped me a lot, with her insights as well. I began to print out her emails and carry them around with me in my shirt pocket to give me clarity and strength. But no matter how much my resolve grew over the night, it disappeared the next day when I got a sweet text message from her or an invitation to meet with her: "I really will be so glad to see you," she would write, "if you have the time for me."Eventually, it was a small thing that shattered my illusions, forcing me to confront aspects of the reality. She had always promised to call at a certain time, and rarely did, sometimes missing a call altogether or calling several hours later. Also, it was not uncommon for her to cancel our meetings at the last minute. But what for some reason really impacted me was the Sunday last October when we had made plans to see a movie the previous Friday and had confirmed that morning...and she "forgot" to meet me.It struck me hard because that Sunday I was at work, making up a day because I had picked her up from the airport the previous Friday. My boss allowed me to take the time if I made it up on Sunday. So there I was, working away, looking forward to seeing her. I had called her to confirm in the morning. She said, yes, we would meet at around 6, but that she would call me back to tell me which theater was best for her. She never called. And as the time approached, I did not call her. She apologized the next day, saying she fell asleep at 5 PM due to the time difference. But why, I asked her, did she not call me before that, even to say she was too tired to meet? She got angry, saying she already apologized and what did I want from her, to jump out the window?This time, for the first time in all the time I knew her, I did not respond. Of course, if everything else had been in place, if there was not a maelstrom within me already at the way things were going, I would have understood. But this time, I did not allow her to get off the hook so easily.She wrote me every day and called me every day that week. I did not ignore her but I did not reply right away either. When I got a text message from her, I let it sit, not being read, for several hours. When I got an email from her, I did not look at it until the next day. She did not apologize but was trying to be coy and friendly.We did renew contact, but the separation had begun. No longer did I reply to her right away. And no longer did I see her every week. I no longer fulfilled her requests to help her with things like updating her Web site or driving her to the airport. Our relationship began to peter out. I can't say at this point that we have completely broken form each other. She still texts me every so often and I still reply after a while. But I have no longer allowed to take center stage in my life when I was merely a supporting character in hers.What amazes me, and gives me hope about life in general, is the power of truth and reality. No matter how much we allow ourselves to be swept away by an illusion, reality keeps knocking on our doors. At one point, I wanted to believe that a beautiful and charming woman full of emotion and life thought I was the most special person in the world to her....so much so that I ignored the reality that she would never think about me a fraction of the time I thought about her, that she would never think of me as a lover, that she would always try to get things from me and never give anything, that she really had no other place in her world for anyone but herself. Reality, however, had other plans. The pain I experienced was when I was repeatedly confronted with obvious evidence of her not caring very much about me, and I had to reconcile it with my illusion that she did. There is something in us as human beings that needs to make sense of the world: either we ignore reality to cling to our illusions, or we shatter our illusions to make room for reality. But we cannot live with both at the same time. I think about this when I read some of the posts on DearCupid. Many of them are posed by people like me who are upset by the dichotomy of what should be, or what they want to be, with what is: a partner who turns out to be very different than he seemed at the beginning; a partner who cheats; a sexual fling that leaves one partner wanting more, etc.I have learned that in future relationships, I will never plunge so deeply so fast into something. I will build up slowly, matching the reality of the situation and the person with what my hopes and expectations are. I will never allow myself to dive so deep into an illusion...because I know eventually I will have to surface into the painful light of reality.
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affair, at work, best friend, cheap, depressed, escort, married man, money, my boss, overweight, shy, text Reply to this Article
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reader, anonymous, writes (20 February 2011): I tend to be a jump in feet first person, and I have ended up hurt. It's so easy to fall for an illiuson of someone, especially with the internet, you are sure you know the person, only to find out that you don't at all. This of course happens in person to, they appear to be someone they are not, they show you what they want you to see, and by the time you realise, it's too late you have already fallen for who you think they are.
As we go through life all's we can hope is that we learn something, and don't fall into the same pattern over and over again, which so many people do. You should be proud of yourself you have learned a lesson and worked out that you don't want it to again. You are growing as person.
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