I Am Not The Kind Of Girl You Love
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an unspoken fear (or perhaps, even an expectation) about love.
I’ve feared that I’m not the kind of girl a guy can love.
Not really.
Sometimes, I am the girl guys think they might like. For a shortlived moment.
There was that time when my neighbor and classmate, Marty, gave me a necklace when we were in kindergarten. I had to give it back because it turned out he’d stolen the necklace from his sister.
And then when I was maybe in 5th grade, while all of my friends were prematurely dating, a guy friend named Danny told me he used to have a crush on me.
You know what? For the most part, that’s what always happened. I grew up and random guy friends would tell me that they used to like me.
“I thought you were the one,” has become a permanent fixture in my life. Or even, “He thought you were the one until you did this thing.”
Hint: it’s usually my outspoken nature that changes their minds.
I’ve had the fun fortune to be one of those people to overanalyze everything that happens to her because my parents never taught me much about love or life. I had to actually unlearn how to be a spaz.
You might think I’d have a little more luck with dudes by becoming less spazzy. But no, you’d be wrong. Learning how to better control my emotions didn’t make me more lovable to more people.
Guys still try to use me.
And my little aspie head still has a hard time with that. Like the time I was on the bus for a band trip in high school and a boy in orchestra who was sitting next to me awkwardly fell asleep in my lap.
It was either 1998 or 2000. The boy had a mushroom haircut and was a year younger than me. I hadn’t ever thought of him that way, and then he woke up in the middle of the night and started kissing me.
Silly me. I was all concerned about that make out session and what it might mean. He set me straight when we were back in Minnesota.
It meant nothing.
On another band trip, a different boy, also in the grade below me sat next to me on a bed while a group of us watched Boogie Nights in somebody’s hotel room.
I think I closed my eyes for 90% of that movie.
But he kept asking me to massage his hands and I couldn’t help but wonder if all boys were so damn needy, asking girls they barely know to touch or service them in some way.
As it turns out? Even by 40, plenty of men never do outgrow that neediness-slash-selfishness. Like Nate. We made a high percentage match on a dating website where his profile described how much he was ready to “settle down into a real relationship.”
Maybe that was true(?) but he certainly didn’t think I was serious material. Once we began to chat, he completely deviated from his profile and described himself as somebody terribly broken and wounded by his ex-fiance.
She cheated on him, so he wanted to know if I might be interested in sex and only sex. If we liked each other in real life, of course.
He “just couldn’t handle more.”
Of course, it turns out that as heartbreakingly lonely as I was from being new to Tennessee, I wasn’t lonely enough to meet Nate or any of the needy men who messaged me about their urgency for booty calls and their inability to try a real relationship anytime soon.
Even my daughter’s dad went through a phase where he stated he was suffering from ED and needed my blow jobs as “therapy.”
No intercourse–he was much too hurt after our break up where he left me pregnant and dumped me in Iowa to stay with a Facebook frien. Naw, he couldn’t trust me enough to fuck me ever again because I talked about his shitty behavior.
Couldn’t fuck me, except my mouth. He missed that, craved it even.
I suppose in his mind, I was supposed to feel sorry for him after everything. But I didn’t. Not even when I let him use me.
From my early teen years, I saw myself as the kind of girl no guy ever tries hard for. I’m not even sure why. I wasn’t especially unattractive or offputting, though it’s possible my awkwardness was even more awkward than I thought.
Even so.
I watched my friends have guys fall in love with them. I watched them get showered with romantic gestures every holiday. Teddy bears, balloons, jewelry, flowers.
And then I realized I’m not the girl you woo with such traditions.
Instead, I’m the girl you spend hours with on the phone or enjoy late night walks with until the sun comes up and the birds begin to chirp again.
You woo me with words about how you can’t believe I’m so different. You’ve never met anyone like me, and you love whatever things we have in common.
And then you leave.
It’s okay, now. But for a long time it was devastating to have everybody leave after supposedly thinking I was so special. Aka naive.
When I first fell head over feet at 18, my first love Jeff taught me that I had an unhealthy bent for Willoughbys.
I was Marianne Dashwood, the girl who was all feeling (or, sensibility). I had no sense when it came to love. He was Willoughby, pretending to be whatever he’d think I’d need.
Marianne wanted to believe the best in the man with whom she shared some esoteric connection. She wanted feeling and depth or A Room With A View.
Where was the passion, anyway?
Sure, it was fun while it lasted. It was passionate until it was nothing at all but bittersweet or tearful memories.
I am Marianne, the girl you leave as you claim that in another world you would have stayed.
And those damn Willoughbys will use you to believe in something like a better life. A better them. But they will use you every time, and then they will leave you for something safe.
Sometimes, I am the girl guys think they might like enough to love. For a shortlived moment and usually in the middle of a blow job.
I can safely say that all of this used to bother me. I used to feel that my lack of a partner on so many holidays and my history of dating men who mostly only wanted to use me spoke negative volumes about me.
There’s still a cultural script that says this is the case. We still can’t help but believe that a woman without a good man is somehow lacking herself.
Somehow broken.
And I admit that I used to wait longingly for love. As if I needed to win some approval that showed the world I’m worth something to somebody.
But of course, I’m already worth something to me. I’m worth something to my daughter too.
I find that I’m a helluva lot less lonely now that I know my own worth and am unwilling to crawl into yet another relationship where I would get used.
And I no longer feel deficient because being “loveless” is not so bad. I don’t mind being loveless or even awkward when I know now that love from the wrong kind of person usually isn’t love at all.
That’s why I’m no longer waiting dreamily for love to find me.
I am steering my own ship and braving my own storms, and I am in love with every minute of my self-led journey.
So no, I am not the kind of girl you love, because I am the kind of girl you leave.
But all of that leaving finally showed me that I don’t need to wait aimlessly.
I can be free.
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I Am Not The Kind Of Girl You Love
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