Days 0859, 0860, 0861, 0862 & 0863

Oh dear. Just 107 days from the 1000 I gave myself back in 2013 and I’d still prefer to change the plans of three other people just to avoid sharing a crowded pub forecourt with Halfman and his wife.

863 days later and I’m still finding out sleazy stories about him that make me wonder how my sleazeometer didn’t kick in at all.

I know hormones and loneliness and escaping a brutal 15-years … yada yada. But still, how could I not see it?

Those lines he fed me … Even when I objectively knew I was being treated to his best ‘sleep with me’ repertoire … I still let it work on me. Some of it was me thinking ‘this is an adventure even if ill-advised but some of me wanted to be charmed and let it happen.

When I think back to the two bits of conversation that led to our first kiss. Well, it’s embarrassing to give them oxygen.

But it feels good to dig them out and mock them as well. And maybe they will float away once they’re out there.

The first is such a huge sociopath warning sign: he told me his wife had rung him at work the previous week and ‘she was so painful’ – that was his code for her wanting something from him (like support and feelings). Anyway, she was upset and not liking herself and asked him: ‘why do you love me?’

Which is just so sad to me – it breaks my heart that she had to call him to ask.

And his response recounted to me was: ‘And I thought, I don’t know why but I need to get through this conversation. So I googled ‘why do I love her?’ And got this list of 101 reasons. Things like ‘because you support me’ and ‘you make me feel like I matter’.

And that is when he turned to me and said: And I thought these are all the things You do for me, not her. This is the way you make me feel.

Pretty good line, really. If I was 12.

I had a twinge: What a horrid thing to do to your wife – to mock her cry for help like that.

And then I thought: I’ve only ever just been respectful and kind to Halfman. Funny that he interprets that as something else.

And then the twinge passed. And not long after he was bemoaning his marriage and scooping me into his arms for a kiss under the freezing moonlight.

It is humiliating to think of how sophomoric it sounds now. How revealing of his lack of respect or feeling for others. And yet I let myself fall for it at some level.

Ugh.

Days 0812, 0813 & 0814

In the same week that I learned just how much of a demi-dick Halfman was, I also had this experience, which I have yet to fully compute.

My childhood friend came to visit. He was other things to me too but above all, he had always been a friend. I trusted him to care about me.

Turned out he expected, and was frustrated by, my desire to go slowly and be friends first.

Now I wouldn’t claim I treated him perfectly – ever. I stuff up on that front all the time.

But when someone who you trust more than any other male gets angry and frustrated because you’re not sleeping with them … well, fuck that (but not literally).

Even a Good Man appears to have a sense of something ‘promised’, something ‘exchanged’. In other words, a sense of ‘if I put myself out for her, she should put out’.

In spite of the Halfman revelation coming at exactly the same time and sending my sparkplugs into meltdown, I could at least see how ridiculous and wrong that was.

And unfortunately there’s no turning back from that kind of attitude.

So I lost a dear friend. And so did he.

And that, as they say in the classics, is that.

Days 0745, 0746, 0747, 0748, 0749 & 0750

I’ve been struggling to put my thoughts together on the subject of ‘crazy making’ – that thing where someone makes you feel like you’re going mad by denying or questioning your reality.

That thing where a husband screams blue bloody murder at you one afternoon for putting a fork in the dishwasher basket so it faces the front door and will scratch the inside if it happens to dislodge and rub against the inside of that door just so. Because who wants a scratched inside door on your dishwasher. How embarrassing.

And then the very next day, you ask – despite your better self who feels humiliated and quite sure this whole thing is stupid – ‘Have I put the fork in there in an acceptable way?’ and he says:

‘What? What an odd question. There’s no right way to put it in. Just put it in the basket. Don’t be stupid.’

And in spite of yourself, you feel relief wash over you that you haven’t ‘done it wrong’ and that the 3075th silly rule to do with the dishwasher wasn’t even real.

And then he proceeds to question why you would ever think he’d said such a thing.

And then …

A week later he is yelling bloody blue murder at you for the exact same thing.

Can you imagine a life of that? A life, the days of which, are filled with a turning-upside-down of what you thought you were told was important, what caused you angst and worry and self hate and which you genuinely tried to ‘fix’, didn’t even happen?

And then, you escape, and realise even four years later, in spite of your rescued self and the support of others that proves your truth to some degree, that he still has that ability to make you question reality.

That his denial in an open forum is enough to make me wonder if perhaps I was wrong about it all and we really were ‘the best of friends’ and living a lovely life, must be the biggest indicator of how deeply Pavlov’ed I was.

No wonder my brain is fried trying to communicate that twist — that french braid — that he turned the truth into.

No wonder I fell for The Halfman who appeared too gentle and too lazy to ever intentionally hurt someone like me.

Days 0732, 0733, 0734 & 0735

I hate that a complicated inside attracts me to a person almost regardless of what they look like. Surely the outside of a person is not to be totally bypassed in favour of their brains and heart? Because the outside – especially at my ripening age – does tell you about that person. If they look mean, they probably have spent their life being mean, is all I’m trying to say.

It’s probably just the usual ‘listen to your gut’ message in the end. And when I let my brain talk me out of what my gut is telling me: things like ‘he’s treating you poorly’, ‘that thing he just said is both preposterous and mean’. I can turn these into ‘he’s had a hard day’ and ‘everybody says dumb things  once in a while’.

I am trying to retrain myself with online dating sites. I don’t actually feel much like going on a date. Life and past relationship errors are still sucking most of the marrow away from that.

Which is probably the safest place for me to be while I hone my ‘don’t make excuses’ selection technique.

Some Gut Clues are simple: a bride’s arm disembodied but still in the photo clearly taken at a – no HIS – wedding, those bloody wrap around sunglasses instead of eye balls, a drink in hand, a big engine/boy toy as companion, girlies surrounding his smiling face and any mention of liking things to be ‘orderly’.

Yup. So that just about eliminates them all. But the great thing about these sites is that I know nothing about these people. There is no compassion/empathy arising in my brain to make excuses for them.

I may have dismissed the most wonderful guy in the world. But surely, surely if there is a god, that One Guy is not wearing those crack dealer sunglasses anywhere on his being.

Day 0721

You know what?

Just because you think ‘all men get angry’ doesn’t mean I needed to stay with a man who was always angry.

Just because you make excuses that that’s ‘just him’ when he yells at you and humiliates you in public, doesn’t mean I needed to keep doing that.

And just because you think ‘you can always work harder and give a bit more’ to a relationship doesn’t mean I ‘gave up’ by escaping when I did.

I don’t judge you for staying.

Don’t judge me for breaking free.

Days 0677, 0678 & 0679

When I raised the fact that I had no friends with He Who Shall Not Be Named I got this response:

Aren’t I your friend?

When I volunteered at a women’s shelter for a short period – much to his disinterest – I was confronted by a pamphlet that said:

Does he isolate you from others and prevent you from forming friendships?

That coincided pretty much with my moving to a job where I finally found My People. So I stuck my toe in the water and started sharing some ‘ I can’t believe my spouse did x and y’ stories.

And much to my emerging horror the reactions I got weren’t shakes of the head and laughing ‘oh my’s but genuine horror quickly disguised as changes in subject.

Apparently not everyone gets SCREAMED at for cutting the capsicum in the ‘wrong’ direction.

Not everyone has to be the parents who gets up in the kiddie of the night every single time without end.

And when other people have

Minor eye surgery their partners actually don’t tell them they’re lazy, milking it and ‘GET THE FUCK UP AND HELP’ when the baby needs to be resettled in the night.

Having friends removed the scales from my eyes.

Day 0668

i just had to talk myself down from panic cleaning a glass stove top in a rented shack I have been sharing with 10 women.

When I woke up, I wandered into the kitchen for a cup of tea and spied a coffee tin, sugar and a dirty spoon sitting there.

I knew enough to stop myself.

And I did some thinking while the panic and fear throbbed through me.

I was being Pavlov’s dog yet again; expecting He Who Shall Not Be Named to scream in my face.

‘How could you be so stupid! You’re wrong for putting those there. You don’t respect me … Etc’

The room was silent but my ears still rang with the screaming. My heart pounded. Adrenalin rushed.

I cleaned the spilled food up to calm myself a bit. But I made myself stop there.

Until I have the space in my head to know  it’s me that does or doesn’t want it clean, I’m willing to sit halfway.

At least the anger I feel when I realise what a robot I am is slowly growing stronger than the fear of his unholy temper. Slowly.

Days 0655 & 0656

What is compatibility?

I don’t believe in the whole ‘opposites attract’ thing: in many ways I think that’s just a convenience that allows you to ignore things you dislike about a person because you’re attracted to them physically or otherwise.

God knows I don’t need any more reason to ignore character flaws. I do it naturally anyway.

A psychologist told me what we’re looking for when we fall in love isn’t our dad or our mum, but an idealized version of ourselves.

But that’s just a bit too icky and incestuous and EGO loving to contemplate.

Especially given my One True Love honestly did look a helluva lot like he could have been my brother.

In fact I have a photo that one of us took of the other all those years ago and I still can’t tell if it’s of me or him.

Anyway, is compatability a moral, ideological thing? Is it shared common interests? Is it almost all physical with a side of ‘meeting of the minds’? 

Or is it really just about being in the right place at the right time both physically and metaphorically?

Days 0648, 0649 & 0650

Shivers. That’s what I get when a good friend tells me their paramour has said the words ‘I’m so disappointed in you’ following unaccountable rudeness from him.

That used to be my everyday paradigm: He felt angry and would swear at and embarrass me in public and harangue me in private, and it was all my doing; my fault for not loving him enough — for not putting him at the centre of all my decisions and actions.

From the green peppers being cut in the ‘wrong’ direction at dinner to purchasing a nice pair of shoes because my old ones had one heel left and were making me lurch … all of things were inconsiderate and led to total and utter disappointment from him.

It got so I could feel the disappointment ooze out of his pores; he didn’t need to say anything. It was all there in his shoulders, his eyes, the flick of a hand gesture.

As an exercise in Pavlovian control, it was truly breath taking.

As an exercise in life, it was suffocating.

And every time I take a deep breath these days, it makes me thankful. The only person around who feels any right to be disappointed in me, is me. And frankly, she needs to step back and put down the judgment now and then too.

But the fear of being sucked into that familiar whirlpool is still there: it brings nausea to my tummy and my heart — it paralyses my brain with fear. I cannot imagine being there again: in that horrid prison of abuse and erasure.

Day 0467

I have limits. They are rather grand and ideological but I do have them when it comes to people and relationships.

What I don’t have is trivial limits in relationships. And by trivial, I mean mundane, not unimportant.

In other words, while lying to me is a relationship Deal Breaker, making me feel shitty because you’re having a bad day is not.

And I’m starting to think it should be.

That the nuance can be found in the degree of deal breakage crossings that limit does rather than in softening of the limit until it is limitless.

So, for instance, I give you an extra inch because I am being kind and reasonable. And you turn around and say, that’s mean to give me an inch, it should be an inch-and-a-quarter or you’re being selfish.

My historical reaction is: oh yes, why didn’t I give away more? I am selfish. Here is an inch-and-a-half.

What I will now say – and have always said to my kid when he pulls this one – is: if you don’t want the treat of the extra inch, let’s forget it and move on.

I had to do that with He Who Shall Not Be Named yesterday.

As with all new experiences it was scary and I questioned myself at every second.

But it built something – all that scary effort – it built a line in me and around me. I suppose I’ll have to defend it from The Beast occasionally.

But it’s a helluva lot easier to defend a line you can see and feel than to grasp madly for one you’re not certain should be there.