Bad Romance?

Friends.  Yes, it’s lovely when they can be honest with you, and tell you what they really think.  But, sometimes, I really wish they would keep their honesty to themselves.  I know I deserve someone who wants only me, who loves me for me, who wants to be with me, for who I am, and with no-one else.  But, in the absence of that person, am I supposed to be alone?

Being alone sucks.  Being alone and single and going out with friends who are all loved up, secure, happy, feeling like a wallflower, does nothing for the self-esteem.  Being single is like being unemployed. I’ve been both.  Being unemployed makes you lose confidence in yourself, you wonder if you were ever any good at what you did, whether you could ever cut it again, whether it was all just bollocks and what you used to be good at was just bullshitting your way through, and now everyone can see right through you.  That’s why you’re not getting interviews, or the job offers.  Being single is the same.  You feel unattractive, your sexuality is drained out of you, all the insecurities about whether you were any good at sex are front and centre, you feel needy, you fear coming across as desperate, you start to get used to not being sexual, to not deserving love, to being alone.

And being alone, as I said, totally sucks.  Particularly for someone prone to internalising, prone to feeling insecure, prone to the voice in the head which says you’re not good enough to be loved, that you’re destined to stay alone forever.  There’s an easy spiral into self-hatred, into despair, into believing the voice.  And then, you are those things: needy, desperate.

So, yes, I’m not waiting around for Mr. or Ms. Fucking Perfect.  I don’t think s/he exists anyway.  I don’t believe in forever anymore.  My marriage was supposed to be forever.  Then I fell in love with someone who wasn’t ever supposed to want to be married, but he is now.  I think that human beings are meant to love more than one person, that sometimes, those people are loved concurrently, and that might be at odds with the societal norms of monogamy and Mills & Boon romances and the fairy tales of our childhoods of happy ever after, but it’s the truth of life.  Life is far from a fairy tale.  It’s messy, complex, and complicated.  Bad things happen to good people, good things happen for no reason, and chaos reigns supreme. 

So, now I love others.  And they can’t give me 24/7, and I don’t even know if they could if I could cope with that, the idea of it is suffocating, stifling, strangulation.  I want to be free to explore, to experiment, to breathe.  The people I love, the people I play with, they make me feel alive.  They make me feel sexual, sensuous, desirable.  Desperate isn’t on the agenda. 

Yes, I’m alone a lot of the time.  And even sometimes lonely.  But I have times to look forward to with people who are really special to me, who give me some of what I need, if not always what I want.  I’m not their main priority, but I am important to them.  And, like the song says, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you might get what you need.

Well, I’m trying, real hard.  Different needs, fulfilled by different people.  You can judge me, you can say I’m ‘that woman’ and I deserve to be unhappy because I’m fucking people who aren’t supposed to be free to fuck people.  But being that woman makes me happy, and there isn’t much in my life that makes me happy.  And whilst I can, I’m going to take the happy.