In which I do a little brain dump about relationships, the Wolf, and responsibility.

So, I did that most horrible of things: I broke up with somebody via text.

The Wolf is a nice guy, of course, but he… well. Let me put it this way: I can only tick off four items from this list of 30 things I’ve determined are true for me about potential partners. So it would never have worked out anyway, and I needed to stop it before he got any more involved. It was my duty as a decent human being to dump his ass sooner rather than later.

I don’t even want a boyfriend, and I can’t figure out how a few hot and friendly make-out sessions garnered me one. We went from barely knowing each other to saying “Love you, babe,” in the space of a few days, and the next thing I knew I was being introduced as his girlfriend. Suddenly the entire entourage thought we were practically engaged, I had a bunch of new friends I wanted to keep, thank you very much, and his nephew kept telling me that his uncle had “never been happier.”

Scylla and Charybdis. How do I get myself in these situations?

He was sending me anywhere from 3 to 20 texts a day, everything from silly observations to poetry to not-so-subtle demands for attention and compliance with his idea of the shape and size of the relationship. Since the majority of them didn’t require a response, I didn’t send one. Making me complicit, I see now, in his idea of how involved we were.

He’s a musician and he’s got great hair and he’s romantic. He’s generous, he’s intelligent, he’s loyal, and he’s really good at Jeopardy! and crossword puzzles: that’s what he’s got going for him. Against him is pretty much everything else: no job, no car, what appears to be a fairly uneven temper, bad diet, no exercise, significant baggage, too much TV and not enough reading. He’s never heard of Maharishi or Amma, and he doesn’t even know how to use a computer.

It’s not like I have a job or a car, either, I’m just describing those things symptomatically. The relationship, such as it was, was incapable of going anywhere. All we did was bar hop, go to the occasional afterhours poker game, and make out sometimes in his driveway. I’d told him I didn’t want anything else, but he kept offering me new levels of commitment and fidelity I wasn’t interested in. He had even begun to work on being jealous and protective. He told me he loved me all the time. He made some comment once about growing old together. He was in deeper than I was, and I had to end it.

The last time we’d been out together we’d had a bit of a tiff about the frequency, or rather lack thereof, of my texts to him. He claimed there were entire days when I didn’t respond to any of his texts. I said, “Bullshit. There’s never been a day since we started hanging out when you haven’t received at least one text from me.” He suggested that we pull out our phones and prove it, and I told him he was acting like a twelve-year-old.

“Dude,” I said, “first of all, you’re wrong. Second of all, the facts in this instance aren’t as relevant as the underlying emotionality, which is what I’m more interested in. I’ve told you repeatedly that I don’t want a relationship, because I don’t want to owe anybody anything. You said you understood the parameters, and now you’re giving me this quasi-ultimatum that I must text you daily and tell you I love you? Are you hearing yourself?” He backpedaled immediately and retracted nearly everything he’d said up to that point that evening, but his willingness to accommodate me irritated me even more. We remained an item, though, when I dropped him off and went home.

Gawd. What a coward I am. Are you counting these, my many flaws? Continue reading Four Out Of Thirty, or Why I'm A Total Bitch. →