Second lust

I have come to admit to myself that one of the reasons I stayed single for so long was that I had  become genuinely afraid of being in a relationship again. As far as I was concerned, I was bad at relationships. I let myself get used financially and emotionally. The easiest way to prevent this from happening again was to just not date. To my credit, I don't think I repeated any of my past mistakes in my second relationship. However, many new mistakes were made with Guy#2.

I will call him Guy#2 because I don't even think that he qualified as a boyfriend. We only met up six times. But the psychological damage was significant enough for him to get his own post. So, by now I guess you're getting an idea of how this went, right?

After texting back and forth a bit, we met up at a restaurant. He was attractive but he wasn't the type of guy I would have imagined myself dating. He seemed like a late 20's version of the kind of guy you knew in high school with rich parents, a nice car, and a letter jacket. Our relationship was mostly physical and very shallow. At the end of it all, I felt like I still hardly knew him. But I think that was the way he wanted it.

After seeing each other three times in five days, he didn't contact me for almost two weeks. The following week he wanted to see me almost every day again. He would never plan ahead our meetings; he would only text me the day he wanted to see me. I did not need to have that much relationship experience to get the impression that he was seeing at least one other girl. I never asked him directly because I think I was afraid of his answer. When I went to leave the last night we saw each other, I was surprised when he asked me to stay and sleep with him in his bed. And he meant that quite literally. Just sleep. So I did and he spent the rest of the night using my stomach as a pillow. Right before I left in the morning, he had the strangest look on his face, like he was starting to say something but stopped. And when we kissed, it was a goodbye kiss. I had had one before, so I recognized it. When he fell off the map for the next three weeks, only texting once to apologize for being so busy lately, I let it go. I say I let it go like it was a simple thing or an easy thing, but it wasn't. It was very complicated to me at the time and very difficult. I let go because I knew it was what I needed to do, not because it was what I wanted.

My ego took a bit of a bruising because ultimately, he was the one that ended it, not me. And more than likely he had ended it because he had chosen someone else. Also, I had to fill in a lot of blanks for myself and on bad days I filled those blanks in with the worst scenarios possible. We didn't "break up"; we were hardly dating so there was no finality to it other than what I created myself.  All of these things combined with me never really getting out of the initial infatuation stage of the relationship, made it hard to get over. The whole thing had only lasted for two months in the summer, but it took until the winter for me to recover. I did learn one thing from all of this, which is that I don't do casual relationships well. At all.

After my second very much failed relationship attempt, I felt pretty discouraged. I know it was foolish now, but I became worried that I would never find someone I was compatible with. Someone I could talk to and understand and be understood. Someone like my brother's friend.