We all want to find love and it’s inevitable really. How do we find what we are looking for? I’ve looked across the Atlantic to find love and I really thought I had found it. How naïve I can be when I have full range of my hopeless romantic heart. All I wanted was the truth, the man that would bring me a warm heart once again. The first time around was young and misguided. I fell into a trap of dreams, the dream we are fed from an early age. We are shone movies and we are pumped full of hope for this one great love. We grow older and we have our first taste of desperate love, the love that you give up all of yourself to become consumed completely. It becomes apparent that we must leave that false hope and move into the reality of love failed. Admitting this is hardest and we begin to feel the pull of adulthood tugging at our skirt hem. We admit defeat and call it a growing experience to fuel our recovery from the worst pain of all: real heart break. Your heart breaks once and it’s likened to giving birth; you forget the pain after awhile and attempt it again. This time though we think is going to be different but it’s not. We find ourselves attracted to the same sort of men but in different skins. Unfortunately we can’t sense the similarities because lust and hope fog up the mirror of reflection. It isn’t until our heart has already attached itself firmly to the invisible wall of love that we realize we’ve picked the same person all over again. Now we are faced with the denial and the sense of hopelessness. We desperately try to find the characteristics that diversify this man from the one before. Before long we are suffering and it is inevitable, the end is near. The cycle of failed love attempts has begun its course. The question is how do we screen properly? How do we draw ourselves to the type of man that we truly see ourselves with? How do we end this cycle and learn to find love at all, most of all healthily?
I used to be the girl, and maybe all of us were before heart break, which didn’t need a man, who glowed with self confidence. I never let him get too close, too comfortable. I always found his flaws quickly and then I was able to turn away and not look back. All I ever do these days is walk backwards, run even, in the wrong direction. Gravity pulls me towards the man who left me once again. I cannot wrap my brain around the truth that he just doesn’t want me. In a sense I do have self esteem because I think to myself “How could he not see how amazing a girl I am?” I am baffled by the indifference men have to women and to the relationship of commitment. It’s as if men in their 30’s don’t feel the need to settle down. I thought that when I got older men would finally be in a state of maturity and that by some miracle would grow sensitivity to women’s hearts. I guess we expect that in our 20’s guys are going to be chasing and leaving, that indiscretion is almost expected but when you find out that our 30’s are the same a depression of realization sets in. My question is this: Do men not value commitment? Would they really rather play silly games than just grow up and be honest? In the end are they not capable of faithfulness with a woman?
Dating is very emotionally draining and mentally tiring. I suppose this is my first real experience with it. I got married at 21 and stayed married until I was almost 27. The bulk of my 20’s were spent playing house and trying desperately to stay afloat in a failing marriage. I had no idea nor would any 21 year old how to be or what it meant to be a wife. When we are 21 we don’t even fully understand who and what we are. High School romances are short lived and seldom extend after graduation. Nothing will prepare you for marriage just as nothing will prepare you for the heart break of divorce. Year 28 was spent recklessly and with all abandonment of my morals. Years 28 and 29 were filled with solace, a time to be celibate and heal from all of my war wounds. Now at 30 I am dating and finding this the most difficult challenge I may have faced in the area of men. I joined Match.com at a friend’s insistence and have been on a roller coaster of dating ever since.
Dating is really an art. It is the ultimate power struggle between a man and a woman. In this 21st century our roles as Man and Woman are becoming less and less defined. The lines have been crossed and my generation is full of uncertainties when it comes to us ending up together. It’s as if we have no clear definition of who does what and how if at all we are to approach commitment together. We have lost the age of innocence, a time where a man knew he needed to act different in front of a lady. When my parents were at this age they had clear defined roles. A man did provide, a man did open the car door, he did pay for dinner, and he did lead the direction of the relationship. We are lacking so much in my generation. Somewhere along the line we became such selfish individuals. Yes we have so many more opportunities than our parents did and we have the freedom and the equality to do more, but to gain we had to lose. Fundamentally we have these roles ingrained in our DNA but circumstances in our aging society have trumped these moral fibers. We are so consumed with the mentality of “More” that we work harder, we play less and ultimately we forget to build relationships, to take the time to create a meaningful commitment with someone you love.
Since the completion of my marriage I have found two men in which I invested my heart. They both were long distance Match.com applicants. The first was a complete fantasy, something I had always dreamed about but never thought I could have. I found quickly that with the Internet you can have whatever you want but it does come at a cost. I’ve always wanted to be in love with a man from England. It comes from visiting there when I was 19 and falling for a musician in Liverpool that I had a one night kiss affair with. I was hooked, I loved that country and I felt alive when I was there. I found Dean on Match.com. He had lived in my home town for a year and desperately wanted to come back to live. His profile actually read: “I want to live in San Diego and have babies and raise them near the beach.” I was hooked and so we formed a cyber fantasy together. Both of us wanted what the other had. We spoke every day and money seemed no object for my hearts worth. It ended badly in a hotel room by the beach in San Diego. I flew him out here with the promise of repayment because my heart was so lonely for what his words painted in my mind. He promised me the world, I was naïve. I thought that fate would take care of me, that the universe wanted me to have what I deserved after my heart had been thoroughly beaten by my divorce. I left him in the hotel room after only three of our 6 planned days. The silence, the panic on his face, the realization of who he really was hit my gut like a ton of bricks all at once. My heart was yet again broken by a man that simply couldn’t commit to me, who had the defense of shutting himself off and who in the end couldn’t be who he so desperately wanted to be.
It was my husband but only in a different vessel. I was dumb founded; I couldn’t believe that I had allowed another man to once again determine my worth, to tear my heart until it bled. I cried for two weeks, I mourned my stupidity; I reconstructed the cold metal wall that stands before my heart.
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