More of the same

Later on I realised there’s actually a fourth column to that table, which should be something of a giggle to investigate:

Girl	Regret	Reason	My mad solution
Grace	That I didn’t get into her car the second time we met.	That I was afraid because the thoughts in my head were of wanting to marry her.	Think about her when I’m single or current relationships are bad. Let it grow in my head into crazy schemes that involve breaking into America to find her. Convince myself that would be a smart thing to do and that she really is “the one” after all. Ruin current relationship in the process.
Sophie	That we didn’t get married.	I always had one foot out the door. Suffered from commitment issues. Didn’t know how special she was. Communication breakdown.	Write her a six-thousand word letter three years later telling her I still want to be with her and marry her and make children with her, thus making her think I’m deranged.
Laura	That I hurt her by sleeping with her and then repeatedly going off with someone else just as we were getting close to making it something real.	I liked having sex with her and I liked her company too. But never felt enough to take it any further. Or perhaps felt too much, somewhere knowing that if we made it real it would probably be forever.	Do the same thing again in 2012, just as I’d done in 2001 and 2002 and 2007 and tried also to do in 2011.
Julia	That I didn’t kiss her or ask her out when I was fourteen.	I didn’t know how to broach the subject. I was inhibited and afraid. I wasn’t brave enough to risk rejection.	Want her crazily at age 26 and then go visit her in 2011 and 2012 and kiss her then, which is lovely for me but no doubt confusing for her.
Nicky	That we didn’t say all the unsaid things until it was probably too late.	I wasn’t aware of my feelings until after she’d slept with someone else. I didn’t realise that I’d lost her. I thought I was okay.	Lose my mind. Cry loads and look back at all my mistakes and think maybe we could fix things if we tried. Tell her everything and talk for dozens and dozens of hours. Write tens of thousands of words about it in this blog. Think of nothing but her. Ask her to marry me even though I’m still unsure.
Various	That I got into wrong relationships without really getting to know the person.	I fell in love. We had sex. I liked the sex and wanted more of it. I ignored any problems by thinking it wouldn’t matter.	Do it again and again and again.
Various	That I tend to focus on the negative and what’s lacking rather than the good that’s there.	I’m an inherently critical person and perfectionist. I’m probably fundamentally flawed.	Think about getting therapy when I’m having a bad day and then forget about it when I go back to being happy.
Various	That I suddenly become unadventurous and somewhat limited, which is in stark contrast to what probably attracted them to me in the first place.	I prefer my adventures when I’m alone or with guys. I get a bit controlling and saying no to stuff is one way this manifests. I’m a man of extremes, and so when I’m adventuring the adventures are grand, and when I’m homebodying I’m pretty much content doing very little except snuggling.	Dwell as a dullard homebody far longer than I should until one day I suddenly break out and go back to being young and carefree and exciting. Fly off to a foreign country and hitchhike around and sleep on beaches. Meet a girl who thinks I’m like that all the time. Go back to being a dullard homebody who plays lame computer games and moans about things.
Various	That I haven’t made a relationship work in the long-term.	I’ve got problems. I’m not smart enough. I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know the rules. I haven’t met the right person. Or perhaps I’ve just never been the right person. Or maybe long-term relationships aren’t what I’m about – family, stability, etc – and my life has something more to do with growth and learning.	Look back at all previous loves and drive myself half-crazy thinking it could work with one of them. Write them letters. Sleep with them. Mull it all over and come real close but then back out, probably out of confusion over some other past love. Then meet someone else and maybe get it ever so slightly better than I have in the past, but nowhere near as good as I probably should have.

Life brings me women. I cry out to Life for a partner and Life sends them my way. Life provides the opportunities – answers my prayers; makes everything appear ‘destined’ – but then Life has no control over what I do with that. Opportunities and destiny are no guarantee of success. Some of these women are “the one” and it is “meant to be” – but that’s only the meeting, the possibility of success. All the rest of it takes effort and work from me. I have to love them. I have to learn how to love them. I have to not be such a dick. I could have made it work with Sophie, with Nicky, with Laura, maybe even with Julia, but I missed the opportunity, screwed it up by my flaws and mad thinking. I’ve gone way too far in trying to create a mode of living from scratch. When I was a boy I looked around me at people living in the ‘normal way’ – house, job, marriage, kids – and it seemed to me this was the road to misery and I rebelled against that. But what I didn’t realise was it wasn’t the external factors that made them miserable, it was what was going on inside. Miserable minds make people miserable, not being committed to one woman or having children or working the same job for the whole of your life. Society has arrived at this method of being after many thousands of years of fine-tuning. But something in my head tells me it’s gone wrong, has ideas that there’s a better way to be. So I tried to be different – free love; non-attached relationships; serial monogamy; gigoloism – and the conclusion I’ve come to is that society was right all along, that marriage and children and stability and happiness in the home is the way to go. Plus a bit of spice and adventure in the mix. I want to get back to being more traditional. I want to rediscover the simple beliefs I had when I was a kid. When you’re a kid you fancy a girl and then if she fancies you you kiss and that’s it, deal done, you’re together. You make love and you love each other and you don’t think about looking at anyone else. You know that if you do it’s relationship over. You stay true. And if you break up over something and you miss her and then one night you stay up late talking teary and getting everything out in the open you know that if you kiss and sleep together then everything’s back on. You’re together again and the rules are clear. But the world I’ve entered into is blurry and nothing’s clear. Take Nicky, for example: she decided to leave me and a few days later she left. But in the in between bit after we broke up but before she left we were getting on really well and sleeping together more often and having more fun and were closer than ever. The teenager in me would have recognised that as wanting to be with her and thinking that things would work out. But the older me, with all that freedom, says it’s just friends, just what friends do these days, just ‘friends with benefits’. I see her a little while later and open my heart to her and we’re inevitably drawn closer and we kiss, make love, feel wonderful. But it doesn’t occur to me in my brain that this means we should get back together. I play around, sleep with other women, think that everything is fine – and it’s only when I find she’s done the same that it hits home and I realise that I’ve lost her and I return to my home truth. Emotions. Humanity. Being real, and more real than I had any idea I could be. It’s like waking up. It’s like coming back to the teenager I once was, when everything was so clear. What the hell have I been thinking? How did I get so lost in these ideas, these New Age theories, these notions of a return to more primitive times, the idealised visions of what life would be like if we were living naturally? I think of Vipassana and how cold I sometimes felt that was, a real heartless path. Your girlfriend tells you she’s leaving you, feels like you don’t care whether she’s there or not, and all you do is watch your breath, observe sensations, try to remain equanimous. Accept everything, you tell yourself. Let nothing steal your joy. Let go. You do all that, through strength of mind, and you find that you’re pretty much okay. You can survive without her. And given that you’re sleeping together and sleeping with other people too, you’ve got your cake and are eating it. You’re feeling good. Good and cocky. And when you talk with your young male friends and have a go at some of that male bravado you never did when you were their age you think that’s good too. You’re fucking women. You’re getting the better of them. You’re going home alone to an empty flat and that feels like shit and you know you were much happier when she was here with you, and love the nights when she is, and don’t want her to go in the morning, but you put up with it and ease the pain by making plans for change, counting down the days till you’re not here any more, doing your best with it. Going somewhere else will make things better. Having an adventure overseas. Meeting someone new. And then one day you find out she’s been sleeping with someone else and your whole world collapses. It’s not the jealousy or the thought of the sex she’s having elsewhere – though that hurts – it’s the realisation that she’s moved on, that you’ve lost her and may never get her back. All this time you’ve kept one another dangling and now she’s cut the thread and it’s a bitch. It hurts like hell. You’ve neither got your cake nor are you eating it. And you suddenly realise what a massive schmuck you’ve been and how you’ve fucked things up and, above all that, that you’ve been living in a dream world, totally unaware of your innermost feelings, thinking you were something that you’re not. But you’re not a Buddha, nor even a Buddhist, nor even a ‘spiritual person’. In fact, what you realise now is all those ideas are bullshit: that all spirituality is is knowing your heart and going with it. Not ignoring your innerworld. Not breathing and smiling right through it. Not never raising your voice or saying the normal human thing, like, fuck, I want you, pleas don’t leave me, I feel I’ll die without you. Not trying to not want anything or anyone. Not letting love die because you’re trying to overcome attachment. Not thinking everything’s fine because everything’s been taken away from you and you’re still here. None of that is what makes a good life. There’s benefit in it to a certain extent. But what I’d give right now for a semi-detached house on a Yorkshire street with a lovely woman and a couple of kids and the chance to learn what love is. Just like it was always meant to be. Just like pretty much all the rest of my schoolmates did. And when I spend time with them and their children and then come home to my empty flat, just how rich their lives appear – how rich my time with them feels – compared to this, despite all the noise and the chaos and the stresses. Is that what life is? Not that desire to live in a glass bubble and keep all the madness of the world at arm’s length. Not that a worldly life has to be mad or chaotic or unpeaceful either. In South Elmsall where I grew up it all seemed to be drinking beer and fighting and watching TV and shouting at your children and I came to think that’s what family life was. Barely repressed hate and nobody really liking anybody. Something in me tells me that’s not necessarily true, and certainly not the way it has to be, but I guess I’ve let it affect me pretty bad. And then I got into the travelling world and everything was freedom and…I suppose I’ve never come down. I’m thirty-seven. I’m Peter Pan. I’ve been avoiding all of this for so long and I’m avoiding it still. But my New Year’s fiasco at Vipassana burst my meditation bubble once and for all and ever since then I’ve been in hell. Or, to be more precise, I’ve been feeling a lot of emotions – been restored to my humanity – and been realising, too. Waking up. Which is all Buddha wanted in the first place. Sure, there’s been a lot of joy in the last few months – don’t ever get the impression I’m not happy – just…

I miss her. I talked with her for two hours on the phone last night and I cried and I realised and I shared some more and all I feel from her is that she’s moved on. There’s a big part of me that would love to shake her by the collar and get her to feel the way I’m currently – that, fer chrissakes, this could have been our chance! we could still make it! it’s not too late! – but she’s not going there. Maybe at a certain time last year she would have. But something in her has changed.

We could get counselling. We could have a talk with a wise person. We could find out if there’s something there.

But I’m uncertain too. I’m not sure that I want her. I still think about Sophie. Talking to some friends yesterday in the sports department I talk more about Sophie and Grace than I do about Nicky. I bemoan my mind and the way I can’t help but look back and long for the simple teenage wisdom that these girls have. They’re a lot younger than me but they seem to know so much more. I long for that traditional viewpoint. To just look at my woman and adore her. To think only of her good points and of no one else. These girls think I’ve got love and am romantic and am amazed at the way I express my emotions when compared to other men – but I know how horrified they are by my complexity, by the way I overthink things. How can I just stop? By not writing? But then writing is my lifeblood. Except…

Remember when I first got with Nicky and I didn’t write anything for a few months and I said it was because it was awesome actually having someone in the real world to talk with? And it was. And why did I start writing again? Because I came to a point where I felt there was something I couldn’t share with her and I needed a different outlet. And is that where we started to go in different directions?

Windows and walls. It’s a theory I read about in ‘The Road Less Travelled’. I can’t remember how it goes but I think it’s something about how when problems in the relationship are expressed to another outside the relationship – especially someone of the opposite sex – it creates divisions and real issues. Like –

Hm. I just tried to find that passage in the book but instead alighted on one about how “certain adolescents and young adults” may find the idea of “mystical oneness” appealing because they are afraid of adult responsibilities and it seems a means to avoid all that. “Schizophrenia rather than sainthood, however, is what is achieved by acting on this supposition.”

Nice. Thanks for that, M. Scott Peck. And I couldn’t find walls and windows. But I guess the point I was trying to make was that I know I talked about things to other people that I didn’t talk about to Nicky. And I know she did the same to me. Last night she told me how she’d talk with her friend, express these powerful emotions, feelings she had about me – and I felt so sad because she’d never shared that stuff with me. “That’s good,” I said, “but you were supposed to tell me too.” How could I have done anything when I didn’t even know what was going on?

She was very good at doing things. I wish she’d helped me in that. I wished she’d pushed me to do more. Cajoled me into it. Nagged me.

And I guess I’m pretty good at expressing and talking and bringing things up. I wish I’d helped her in that. I wish I’d pushed her into it. Cajoled her. Nagged her.

Maybe if we hadn’t quit when the going started to get tough we could have broken through into something. Maybe we could have taken one another’s good points and used them to help create something whole, and to help each other find them in ourselves. Isn’t that what partnership is about? The team?

I don’t know. My sports department friends say I should just move on. Advise me to have a passionate rebound relationship. Forget about her and meet somebody new. Take all these realisations and apply them in the future. “You’re in a better place,” they say, “and you’ll meet somebody better.”

“Stop living in the past,” they say.

Amen to that.

Still…I don’t know. C’mon, what would you do? What’s your advice? I’ve said a bunch here over the past two weeks and now I’m ready to stop. I guess it’s your turn to speak. Should I try and get her to come with me to some counselling so we can have a mediated talk about all this? Or should I just try and let her go and move on?

And what of my living situation? In eight days I’m due to leave this flat. Nothing new has cropped up in Leeds. Maybe getting away would be a good thing.

I feel a certain draw to the southwest, to Exeter. I’ve long thought about living somewhere down there. Maybe a new town would be good for me. Just roll up. Take a job. Be quiet and simple and away from everything else. Get a new phone number and delete my email.

But starting again afresh? Is that wise?

Or just taking things as they come? Rolling the dice? Putting up my options and throwing it to the wind?

What about applying for real jobs? Trying to get myself into a career? Writing, after all, is but a hobby; I feel I have to accept that now. Although…

Well, it’s not like I ever send off my stuff to anyone; I don’t know how I expect publishers and agents to find it. And right now I’m feeling like I’m loving it so much I could just write forever, and do only that. Write the sequel. Write the romantic autobiography (good time for it). Write everything else I ever thought and said and did and publish the whole lot (need a pseudonym) and then wash my hands of it and walk free into the future. That would be nice.

And foreign countries? I’m feeling that less so now. The walk to Greece? The breaking into America? I suppose I could just go to Greecefor two weeks, maybe Canadaor the States for a month. Vacations, just like normal people.

But that shop assistant’s words – “Don’t leave the country” – have stayed with me, and I’ve felt them have a certain calming effect on me, that this is my country and I could just make it work here.

London in eight days. Go visit the friends in Kentafter that. Take my laptop with me and continue my writing and get stuck back into the sequel – nothing for four or five days; too much emotional processing – and then I suppose something else will come.

Should I apply to do a PGCE? Get back into education and working with children? Train to be a psychotherapist? Just do something simple with plants and earth? Wait tables?

Christ, I wish I was normal…