Over and Over Again

Is it common for the one who has been spurned to pine for their wayward lover to come back to their senses and verbalize all those tragically romantic thoughts they are harboring? ”I’ve just made the biggest mistake of my life.” “I’ll never love anyone as much as I love you.” “I feel like we’re tangled up in someone else’s lives.” “I don’t know how I can live without you.” And finally, “Maybe we’re meant to spend some time apart so we can really appreciate what it is we have.” Isn’t that the call that everyone wishes they’d get so you can rush back into your lover’s arms and forgive all for the sake of love? How few of us ever really get that call?  I got that call Monday morning at 7:30 am. 

I think I must either be a cast iron bitch and my heart has turned colder than Cybill Sheperd’s snatch or I’ve begun to move on. In the normal course of events, a call such as that would have had my heart strings tugging but there was nary a plunk. Honestly, I thought it was rather amusing and vindicating in a way. You see, I knew he was feeling those things so it came with a sense of satisfaction to actually hear them. And yet, they didn’t move my in any way. In fact, the very act of hearing them allowed me to address them as a fact and then put them away. Dear has made a big mistake. A fact. Dear still loves me and more than he will ever love Twitch. Another fact. But it doesn’t want me to rush back into anything. It just let’s me feel sort of pleased (in a slightly malicious way) that he’s coming out of his befuddled fog. 

Are our lives made of patterns that we’re destined to repeat?

I’d like to think not but evidence points to the contrary. We seem doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again until we finally address them and move on. Will I ever be financially secure? Not if I keep frittering money away and not truly facing the fact that I simply must learn how to balance a checkbook. It ain’t pretty but I’m 41 and if I don’t figure out how to live beyond paycheck to paycheck, when I’m seventy-five, i’ll be living in a velvet lined cardboard box. 

A few weeks before all hell broke loose, Dear became quite frantic one night and insisted that he was about to repeat a pattern of his and I must help him. He begged me. At the time, I didn’t get what it was he was trying to say and what he needed of me. His pattern seemed to be that he’d get into a relationship and then the sex would evaporate and instead of facing the issues and dealing with it, he’d find someone else and leave the first behind with the first lover blind-sided and furious. (There is one that still won’t speak to him, over ten years after the fact.) I knew we were having issues with our sex life. The issue: no sex. But I thought if we actually worked on that, well, it might come back with time and nurturing. I thought we could beat any pattern. After all, we’d stayed together through the early years after rehab. If we could get through that, we could get through anything. And this was the longest relationship for either of us. We should be able to break a silly old pattern.

I’d been warned. Dear’s last serious boyfriend. The one that came two guys before me. Old Turtleneck warned me one day Dear would just throw in the towel and hit the road. I thought it was bitterness speaking as we’d been able to make a success of it, when Dear had driven Turtleneck into rehab.

Now between Turtleneck and myself was The Liar. The Liar is one of the chief reasons Dear ended up in rehab. The Liar not only was a rampant Meth user, he also would have sex with other guys every minute they weren’t together and then lie about it and swear they were monogamous. This slowly eroded Dear’s self-assurance and equilibrium and precipitated his slide down the slippery slope. The Liar had done quite a number on Dear and I had a lot of work to get him to a place where he could trust again. Now, the bizarre thing is that Twitch reminds Dear of The Liar. Not only in personality (secretive, non-communicative) but also the fact that Twitch is less than honest with him about his activities. Another pattern of Dear’s picking lovers that are dishonest to him.

Twitch has patterns, too. Twitch, it seems, has a history of leaving a steady, solid, stable partner to run off with a high-energy and extroverted, yet, unstable partner. It’s nice to know he’s fulfilling his pattern as well.

We can spend our entire lives swinging over and over again on the same trapeze. But what truly makes us break our patterns? Self-awareness? Strength? The will to change? Or just growing up? Facing your demons, realizing they no longer hold power over you and laughing them away. I feel I am moving forward. I feel that by truly living on my own and thriving, I will have broken a pattern. But what patterns are still spun around me like a web? Are we ever truly free?