I am originally from a small town in Michigan. Michigan, if you have never had the opportunity to visit, is the Great Lakes State and very beautiful to go boating on the fresh water lakes during the summer. However, during the winter, it is a cold snowy miserable place. The economic status of Michigan has been shitty for several years now. I decided upon graduation from high school to go to public state university in Michigan that had a wide range of academic programs, the premier land grant university, and numerous study abroad programs to every continent, and had started out as an agricultural college. I moved onto a campus of over 40,000 students from a small of less than 4,000 people. It was a little hard for me to adjust. The summer after my freshman year, I decided to go to the west coast to find a job and a change of scenery.
In Los Angeles, I was running away from my boyfriend. Why Los Angeles? It seemed like the most distant place I could be at the moment I chose to leave. And I had heard that it didn’t snow there and I fucking hate snow. Cold miserable crap. A good place to go; nothing at all like where I was from, and so there fore, the men should be nothing like my ex boyfriend. They should be extremely attractive and absolutely unwilling to bring up the word marriage in any sort of context. I’m 19 years old at the time and I do not want to think about marriage in any way, shape, or form.
My first year at college was a hard transition for me. Before I went away to college, I had never lived any where except for my home town. I had never been out of the country. I had never been to a city larger than Grand Rapids. I had just broken up with my best friend and when we graduated from high school, we were not speaking to each other. It was a hard time for me, I felt completely alone. And so, the solution to my loneliness was to start up a relationship with someone I did not really find attractive, but liked me, and I liked people that liked me.
My clingy, needy ex boyfriend, who really meant the best, but, did not remotely understand me, not that I really ever gave him a chance. And to be fair, at the time, I don’t think I remotely understood myself either. I had no idea what I wanted or what I needed or what was the best course of action for me at the time. I just had no fucking clue. So a relationship is a great solution for this.
I never really truly opened up to him and shared my innermost deep and dark secrets. I simply did not feel like sharing. I don’t know if he knew that I had never had another serious boyfriend but him, but then again, I can’t ever remember having it brought up. He was always more than willing to talk about his past relationship with girls, but I never had much to say. Maybe he liked it that way, I don’t really know. Maybe he was merely waiting for me to finally open up and say everything that I was thinking and feeling and all of my deepest darkest desires, like being screwed on the kitchen table first thing in the morning. I kind of tried. But not really. It was my first really serious relationship and I had no idea what I was doing. When it comes to relationships, I still have no idea what I’m doing.
I had a serious relationship with this guy for nine months. He would come and visit me every weekend that he didn’t need to work. He worked two jobs averaging around 65 hours per week. He was older than I was and seemed to know what he wanted and I was floundering around, not sure I was any where near where I really wanted to be. He brought up marriage more than I ever care to think about. It made me uncomfortable. I wanted to go out and see the world, and do things that I couldn’t do in my home town. And he seemed more content to just do what ever I wanted. Despite all this, he was the first person that I said, “I love you” to.
After a very hot and heavy make out session on my floor, we were curled up together against the January cold.
“I have been thinking a lot about this lately,” he said. I was too subdued from the recent release of endorphins to really think too hard about what he could have been thinking about, so I merely gazed up at him. “I love you,” he said. I was caught so off guard that I didn’t know what to say so I just said a filtered version of what I was thinking.
“That’s so endearing.” If I finally got to the point where I was so hyped up on emotions that I was going to tell some one that I loved them and they responded with, “How endearing,” my confidence in our relationship would be shaken. Looking back, I’m amazed he didn’t just leave me then, but maybe he knew that I would come around.
A couple of days later, I called him on the phone, my heart was racing. He answered the phone.
“I have something to tell you,” I said.
“What?”
“I love you.” It was the biggest rush I have felt to this day.
However, did I really mean it? No. I merely did it to spare his feelings because as a woman, I felt that I needed to reassure him that he was wanted. Or rather, I did it because I thought that it was the sort of natural development that people have…oh fuck, I really don’t know why I did it and played along with it for so many months. I think it was mostly because I felt so insecure in myself that here was some poor soul who was willing to not only spend time with and say that he enjoyed my company, but that he loved me.
What was wrong with me? After I had a boyfriend that loved me and I grew discontent. For some reason I had this idea that as a person in your late teens and early twenties that you are supposed to have sex with people you barely know and you come out of each situation wiser and hipper and cooler. Which is complete bullshit. None of that happens, you just feel like a chewed up piece or gum and feel embarrassed to tell anyone what happened. While you are riding in the car with this person that you have just had sex with, you politely listen to him tell you about this prostitute that he did cocaine with and then had sex with, and this should have been a tip off that you are probably going to have to make a trip to the drugstore for some thing to get rid of crabs. It then occurs to you that if anyone in the world knew more of your secrets that you do not want leaked to the media when you running for a public office, it would be your pharmacist, the guy who is ringing up your order of feminine itch cream and lice shampoo.
Any way, the real reason you sleep around is because you are so confused you don’t know what you want and so you throw away completely good, secure opportunities while you still can. This man, who wanted nothing more from me than what I absolutely couldn’t give him with out murdering him in his sleep several years later, just wanted what any normal, sane person wants: a spouse and children. Children, who would carry on our likeness into the future generations, which is absolutely terrifying. Children are terrifying. The future president is shitting himself as we speak.
Poor man. He was nice guy who meant well, but either way, I broke up with him. All of the dinners, gifts, weekend trips, and hours on the telephone were all wasted with one final goodbye. A week later I had a one night stand with a man who never told me his name and then I moved to California. It made perfectly logical sense at the time, just like drinking an entire bottle of Canadian Whiskey right after I ate a Big Mac.
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