Tag: Heartache

This Online Dating Thing

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

A month or so before I decided to stop my emotional affair, I downloaded and paid a subscription for some online dating platforms. It was a distraction I thought. Now, whenever I am terribly heart-sore and missing him I get to swipe NO on the good, the bad, the ugly, the sexually deprived, the searcher for sugar mommy, the wanna-be mysterious (no photo no details only initials), and the gross (photo of a badly beaten up face – I have seen this yes). I have also learned to swipe left on people with selfies of bare torsos, lying down in bed, and selfies in mirrors or with huge glasses. In addition to all these, I systematically reject anyone wearing a pilot uniform. I reason that these are usually looking for a stop-over hookup. I am not into that sort of thing, although sometimes I wish I were. It is as uncomplicated as it gets. You sleep with the pilot, who is probably married and has done this sort of thing countless times, he flies away, you never see him again. Good riddance.

Occasionally I swipe right on somebody who looks half-decent or somebody who is mysterious but interesting. But even then there are the people who put you off from the word go. Someone once started his messages to me “Hi Beb”. I never responded. See I have this thing about good grammar and spelling.  Moreover, sweet-talk and flattery puts me off instantly.  Another guy started saying: You are so beautiful. He never heard from me either. I know I am above average in looks but I dislike it when men lay it on too thick.  I still entertain the distant hope that someone would be more interested in my mind than in my body. I found this in my hopeless love connection, and it moved me deeply. I now know that a profound emotional and intellectual connection is the only type of love that will work for me.

Most guys on those dating platforms are liars. Once I engage them in lengthy conversations they sometimes get caught in their web of lies and stop talking to me, also good riddance. Other worrisome types are those who come across as too needy, excessively romantic, and want to find a soul-mate immediately. These people bore me quickly and I find their sentiments insincere at worst or irrational at best. If you are a hopelessly romantic type, please consider that it took me 30 years of my adult life to be truly moved by love, and you think that you have found it after chatting with me for two minutes? There is no good way to tell you this: You are delusional, and we have very little in common.

I have been online for almost two month now. I met two people who could become good friends for a coffee and chat. I will never find love with them. Not the love that will make me forget my heartache. When I look at these people I chat with, a stifling sense of futility comes over me. I have chatted up this anonymous person whose handle is Aquarius and whom I found a bit interesting and witty. We banter back and forth, and I do not know who he is. He wrote for a living he said. And I caught myself wishing that he was my Aquarius trying to reach out to me again anonymously after I turned away from him publicly. I examine this secret (and futile) hope in my heart, and it saddens me. I think the online dating thing is part of my sickness, and definitely not the cure.

 

 

A Month After

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I have a little journal where I scribble every day. I count the days that have passed since I last saw you. It has been 31 days now, and a little less since I last texted you.

The intention of walking away from you has been waxing and waning from the moment I met you, but even a month ago when I saw you before you traveled on your latest mission it was still a half formed thought. It did not take shape fully until your birthday in mid-February. It has been a fight since then. Each day I struggle with the urge to text you. Every morning I wake up to your memory and every night I sleep with emptiness of grieving over you.

Last night I could not sleep. I managed to nod off long after midnight. I still cry a lot. I have you inside me, beneath my ribs, in the tiny space that separates my lungs from my bones. You let me know you are there by the stab of pain that stops my breath in broad daylight. Like the stitch I get while running. I am forced to stop everything and tread slowly until the pain passes. You also have a habit of grabbing my throat, choking me into a tearful halt. I struggle to swallow the grief that comes with memory.

Yet, I do not have any shared memories with you. It is just that part of me that you took with you when you left. It is horrible to love someone this much. My whole existence has turned into a shadow. I watch and take in the shimmering wet pearls of newly wet grass after the rain, the birds chirping around me, the bright blue or dark metallic sky viewed through the lacy leaves of African trees. I observe pairs of geese waddling around a green pool or gliding onto its silent waters. I see all these things, yet the color has drained out of everything for me. I see beauty with my eyes but not with my heart. My heart is forever lost wandering around with you, wherever you are.

 

The Emotional Affair : It IS a thing

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

Grief has been the hardest things to wrestle with in my strange emotional connection. I do not think I have experienced so much heartache in decades. Not even my divorce was so full of sorrow and helplessness. I know that I was gutted when my first boyfriend decided to marry his childhood sweetheart and long-time fiancee. But even then I found the strength to quit my home country and turn my attention to other projects.

My past relationships have played themselves out somehow, and have been completed so I managed eventually to deal with my grief. I now realize that I probably fortified myself with the shields of anger (in the case of my divorce) and guilt (in the case of my first boyfriend). Strangely those emotions were helpful in the short-term outcome for my sadness. Some counterpoint to concentrate upon other than the sadness and sorrow. Here on the other hand, the overwhelming emotion is plain unfiltered grief.

This weekend was particularly hard on me as I pondered again what I largely consider an unresolved relationship. It was never a love-and-leave situation, not in the traditional sense. We shared coffee and an intense emotional connection, that was it.  I could not understand why giving this up was harder and more excruciatingly painful to me than the breakdown of my marriage or leaving the first man I loved. I did not understand my endless weeping over a love that lived only in my mind. Fortunately there are writings about this online and elsewhere, and it appears that physical relationships are sometimes easier to process and get over than pure emotional ones. You see an emotional affair is a thing, and it takes courage and a lot of pain to get over it. The emotional affair has all the hallmarks of addiction. Its unresolved physical aspect makes it live on in the heart and mind, fed by imagination and fantasy, and the constant sad refrain of “What if?”. It is also a form of betrayal to the spouse. As I read on a website: What would hurt a spouse more, what their cheating partner does with his genitals or what he does with his heart?

Although I was the unattached party, I felt instinctively from the start that there was something not quite right in the connection. He,  who should be the older and the wiser, was the first to venture into the murky water of emotions. He flirted shamelessly, made sexual innuendos, and even once or twice made subtle hints to emotional estrangement from his wife. It is true that he always spoke in praise of her endless understanding and patience, yet there were those subtle references to incompatibility, lack of conversation and his long ventures on activities that exclude her. When quizzed about it one day he denied making such hints, saying he is “usually very careful”. This leads me to suspect that he has tread these murky waters of emotional affairs before. Yes, I have seen all these danger signs yet my connection to him was so strong and intoxicating that I ignored them and went along. I never started our endless text conversations, and I would have never ventured into this territory if he did not lead me there. My aversion to this did not come from prior knowledge it was just sound instinct.

The sad thing about these connections is that once the line of friendship is crossed, there is no going back to it. I tried once to reset the content of our conversation. I told him that he should always imagine his wife at the table with us, but we kept slipping back to the forbidden territory. In the end I could not take it. The meetings kept building me up emotionally to anticipate a conclusion that never came, like a piece of music that keeps gathering up in sound while the ear eagerly awaits its final movement, then abruptly ends leaving the audience in confusion.  Finally, I decided to bring my own conclusion to the piece. I have always known that this will end some day. The only question was not if, but when, and whether we end it before or after physical consummation.

I must admit here that I wanted to have him to myself for once. To steal or borrow him briefly from his life as I always told him. I was only stopped by the impracticality and difficulty of the task. Because for me, it has to be planned, somewhere out of town, not my place, nor his. Not in car, or in any place that will make the experience feel rushed and cheap. Ironically, my conservative nature came to my rescue and I made the sin so difficult to accomplish that it became easier to abandon the thought altogether. Can you imagine me waiting with baited breath for all the time it will take for all these conditions to be fulfilled? I think hell would freeze over first.

The easier way turned out to be like this:  Send a short message on his birthday, one that wished him light in his life and lightness on his shoulder in the next decades (it was a decade birthday for him). The same day I claimed that I already had lunch when he suggested we meet for lunch. He then sent me a message that he was off for  a few days. See you next week he said. I responded: OK. enjoy. That was it. I thought that I would need to reject more lunch invitations but I think he understood the inevitability of my position. It has been a few weeks since that day, and I caved in only once. I texted him a book recommendation over one weekend. He knew that I was saddened by our affair and asked how I was. I responded that I am getting there although still sad. I have fought the urge to text him a hundred times since that day and I am sure I will continue to do so. I do not think he will text me again.

I have no doubt that what I felt for the man was real. I loved him truly and completely.  For him, maybe it was an emotional affair, or a planned physical affair that went wrong. I do believe that there were genuine feelings from his side too. He was however wrong by assuming that the affair did not involve cheating, because he (we?) did cheat. I never met his wife and now I am glad I did not. I feel a bit guilty towards her even now, and if we had ever met I have a feeling that she would have known how I felt about her husband.

I am hoping that this will be my final reckoning with this unplanned and unfulfilled love affair. I forgive the man, even though he was unfair to me by pulling me into his orbit, with words he does not mean. And I forgive him for looking at me with eyes that meant what he did not say. I forgive myself for falling for him and responding to his intensity with an intensity of my own. I will work through completing my grief process at losing him and hopefully one day I will meet him quite by chance and feel nothing. For now I will continue to avoid him. Fortunately we do not move in the same constellations, and we do not work in the same place. It will always remain a mystery to me why I fell for him, it was perhaps my perception, and my intuition of his feelings. He taught me how intense love could be. One day I will be able to take a chance on love again.

My failure this time was not my misinterpretation of the danger signs. I saw them very clearly earlier on. I just misjudged my capacity for love, and overestimated my immunity to its pain.

To Be Disassembled

~ marobbie ~ 1 Comment

Is there a logic to sadness? How and why it gets hold of your throat and strangles you on a cool and grey morning or in the middle of a sunny afternoon? Is there a cure for missing someone in places that were never shared? How do you forget moments of intensity, that cut straight through the heart?

The rain will always remind me of you. Me and you sheltering under the umbrella of a picnic table, you averting your eyes and choking slightly as I silently wept. I still cry at the memory. We never said goodbye, not in words, but my tears have always known that I have to let you go. On that rainy day, I remember we shared little sweet tomatoes, and I promised to get you a package next week, when you returned from mission, sometime in the future. I never got to do it. Yesterday, I asked for two packages, and I am already choked up and saddened because I won’t be sharing them with you. I think I will have to let go of the sweet baby tomatoes too.

I have abandoned our usual lunchtime, went back to eating at noon. I eat chicken and meat again at lunch to spite your vegetarian gods. I never have coffee at the usual place, nor the usual time. I am going quickly through all the books you told me you liked, as if I am putting everything on a funeral pyre, to burn. I am incinerating pieces of my heart in the process.

If I had read the English Patient before I met you, I would have classified it as pretentious literary drivel. Who on earth would write a sentence like “penis like a sleeping seahorse” ?.  I still hate that sentence, but I mostly get the book. I relate to the raw pain of the broken characters that populated the story.  I also ask myself half a dozen times a day “How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled”.  In your absence you are no less present in my heart, like one of Kip’s sleeping bombs waiting to explode. I wish I had the talent to defuse your memory. So that I can stop the sudden explosion of sadness, the choking hold that grabs my throat at odd times. Most days I am fine, I can enjoy the sunshine, coffee, food, and my son’s company. But I do not have patience with new people. I prefer to be alone. At times I take a forest path, I sit at the water watching a pair of crowned crane flanked by a school of Ibis. I am outwardly calm and content but I never know when I will be hit by that overwhelming tide of sadness. Like today.

I let go completely on the hope that each new day will be a little easier. That my heart will heal eventually.  But the road is long, especially knowing what I found and what I was honor-bound to give up.  I was disassembled by loving you, and I fear that I will always be broken, and never feel whole again, without you. 

 

It’s a Cold and It’s a Broken Hallelujah

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I love most of Leonard Cohen’s songs, but I recently discovered the tabs for his very famous song Hallelujah. It is one song I could play and comfortably sing along on my ukulele. My voice has a very small range, and it is lower in tone than most female voices, so it is easier to follow on Cohen’s bass rendition.

I admit that I choked a few times while singing it, because now I completely relate that love is not a victory march, not someone who saw the light, it is a cold and broken Hallelujah. My voice sometimes also breaks with the pain of it.

It has proven very difficult so far to bend my crazy heart to reason.  The emotional turmoil is somewhat bearable when I have the prospect of seeing him every day, when I know that we are waking up to the same sunshine, or rainstorm, when I hope, that perhaps today we will meet, and put on just a little bit of eyeliner and lipstick in enthusiastic anticipation. It could turn out later that he is busy. He might text me saying that he has all-day meetings, or indeed ask me to join him for coffee. Whatever the outcome, I just live in anticipation of a coffee chat, a text, or a chance meeting (which has never happened apart from the first two times we ever saw each other). Yet even in his almost constant absence, he is present in my heart, as the last thought I close my eyes to when I turn in to sleep, and he is the first person I think about when I open my eyes to sunshine, or to another bout of insomnia.

It is so much more difficult when he is away. We never speak or interact over weekends either, but I learned to manage that absence, especially since we catch up on Monday or late during the week. But when he leaves town, it is torture.  He left a few days ago on a family trip, and he will be away on a working trip right after. The day before his departure we had our usual coffee and laughs. It was fun, until it was time to take my leave and say goodbye.  My voice broke over “I will miss you”. I felt as if a giant hand was squeezing my heart and a lump formed in my throat. I was close to crying especially when he said sotto voce that he will miss me too. For him this is unusual and it brought tears to my eyes as I left him carrying my heavy heart and the lump in my throat. We never embrace and we hardly even touch in greeting. I know my feelings for him are too combustible for such closeness especially at a moment of goodbye. This time his absence will be measured in days, not even weeks, but I cannot help the disproportionate amount of sadness that envelops me. I always feel keenly the pre-programmed loss of our connection. One day he will leave, or I will leave, I am going to lose him forever perhaps sooner rather than later. How will I handle missing him forever when I cannot even take his absence for a few days?

Love is a cold and broken Hallelujah, indeed.