So Thing One and I have ended.
Two years pass. I intended to date. I really did. I tried. I'm picky, but if I thought there was even a remote chance that things could work out, I'd give them my number.
A brief selection of my attempts to get out there:
1) I met a handsome man at a pizza joint, who I enjoyed having a stimulating conversation with. He asked for my number, and not long after, he called to invite me on a date. I asked if he wanted to meet for coffee, or a drink, but he had another, more romantic evening in mind... he had just bought the DVD boxed set of "To Catch a Predator," and was very insistent, despite my gentle hints that watching pedophiles caught on tape didn't really appeal to me, that I come to his apartment and enjoy the varying degrees of surprise on the suspects' faces.
2) More than one man who I was at first interested quickly switched to my roommate, who wears her pants tighter and was way more inclined to sleep with them... and made no secret of that, unlike her somewhat reserved and less blonde friend.
3) One guy wouldn't text me before 11 pm asking if I wanted to hang out, even though I repeatedly told him I had pajamas and old TBS reruns on by that time of night, and if he wanted to make plans he needed to do it earlier. By 11 pm I don't want to put make-up on and go out. I want to wear a Biore pore strip, drink a beer, and watch back-to-back episodes of "Friends."
4) Greg, as we shall call him, was my only successful date. He shared my sense of humor, and I was unusually talkative and outgoing that day. I flirted, I charmed, I looked hot. The coffee barista boys at the cafe we visited flirted with me before he came up, thereby totally laying it down that I was a good catch. The conversation was amazing--we teased and made plans to try Indian food and talked for hours, making him late for a meeting. I left on a cloud. He never contacted me again.
Enter Thing Two.
Thing Two and I had dated briefly during my sophomore year of college, when Facebook was "The Facebook" and if your friend from Spanish class told you about her ex-boyfriend, it was socially acceptable to add him out of curiosity. It was short-lived, but we stayed friends. For seven years. And then we moved out of friendship into something else.
This is it, I thought. I'm Meg Fucking Ryan!
Since the sting of the end of Thing Two is still smarting at this time I will just give you the basics:
We dated eight months. That's about thirty years in Marie relationship time.
In the beginning of the relationship, I thought, my God. I have to marry this man because no one, no one, will ever love me as much as he does.
By the end of the relationship, I no longer believed that. In fact I was pretty sure the homeless guy outside the coffee shop who told me I had nice legs could probably show me more affection.
I didn't like the person I had become. He wanted me to change myself, and I tried. It took me about seven months to realize I don't fucking want to change who I am. I'm awkward and weird and a little bit crazy, I have a bad temper and I'm moody, but I have always respected myself, and I was pushing myself away in a way I am not proud of. Besides, shouldn't I be able to find someone who could accept that about me? Who could work with it, not aggravate my bad qualities and then smugly tell me I needed to fix them?
Ladies, if a man hates your dog, dump him. That was a rookie mistake. Honestly, if I had to pick between a boyfriend or a dog farting on me, ruining my new bra, or puking on my pillow, guess which one I say "aww" to and guess which one sleeps alone on the couch for the rest of the week.
But I learned a lot in that relationship. Thing Two was the first time I've been in love. The first time I didn't sneak out of bed in the morning to put on make-up and brush my teeth before he saw me (in retrospect, perhaps we might have made it a few more months if I had). The first time I thought about someone, constantly, to the point where it interfered with regular life. The first time I thought, I could get married.
Things fade. The first time I learned that love won't always last.
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