Monthly Archives: October 2013

relationshipping

Should I delete him?

Should I delete him

Asks my friend.
Me: Do you really want to get over him?

pause

Her: Yes.
Me: Then yes, delete.

I take one course of action to get over someone and thus far it has been 100% effective.
But I need to qualify that I have not been married with children.

The Rumi, aka Don’t Look Back, method:
1) Delete from contacts
2) Delete all text history
3) Delete or hide them from FB (and all other social media you share)
4) DO NOT respond to non-essential, emotional bullshit solicitations (i.e. requisite conversations about unjoining finances are an unfortunate necessity but responding to explanatory emails about his/her feelings blah, blah, absolutely not).

Too harsh?  What, like love-hurt isn’t?

Because this is what I know when it’s over but I’m not over them:
It fucking hurts.
The sorrow, the anger, the goddamn grief.

For instance, after a long-term relationship ended, my ex of not even a week was already dating someone, a specific someone they started talking to prior to our breakup.  That felt awesome: decade long relationship, one-week turnaround.  And a few weeks later, when their new someone came to our still-shared house to spend a lovely weekend with ex (because that new burgeoning love period is brimming over with so much damn infatuation), as my dumb luck would have it, I got to hear new someone be given a fat fucking orgasm by ex…goddammit y’all.

I thought I was doing so well.  I processed through writing as decade-long memories flooded me, Dylan on repeat in the background, and spent priceless time with invaluable friends who listened to me, quietly sat with me or simply joined me for a whiskey, give or take an occasional cry.

I thought I was getting a handle on the can’t-hardly-breathe stage and moving towards taking it week by week.

A few more weeks pass, my ex has left the state to live with said someone and I am told that they plan on getting married within a month.

Wow.

There’s an annoying last step that completes my method:
5) Time.

Sweet, slow, tortuous, curious thing, time passing.

Standard
relationshipping

The line moves

The other daywith every relationship.

I’ve got boundaries on my mind.

Namely, the ones we set for ourselves.
The ones that change.
The delicate space between tolerance at maximum capacity (crossdressing, say) and the dealbreaker (transsexual, perhaps) fascinates me as it’s often a very narrow reach.

That narrow reach is where growth happens.
I become a different person.

For instance, prior to my trans ex-GF, I shot down open relationships; actually fairly early on in our relationship I said, “No way.”  But hearing her out and witnessing the subtle and dramatic physical and personality changes during her transition forced me to reconsider my position and we tried it out.  Although it turns out open relationships aren’t my thing, I don’t regret going there because that experience forced an ideological transformation.

Just like witnessing her transition so intimately effected another phrenic shift in the realm of my acceptance and tolerance levels, which were stretched in so many new directions.  The shift isn’t so literal as to mean that I’m open to coupling with a transsexual in the future without hesitation; rather, that my genuine attempts to maintain a relationship with a transitioning GF opened my mind to questioning my established boundaries up to that point.  

Every relationship has set me up for the next one.

My previously unresolved psychological scars from childhood led me to a string of unhealthy flings, experiences and relationships.  If not for my emotionally unsatisfactory relationships with men I would not have dated and committed to a long-term relationship with a woman.  If not for broadening my sexual identity I could not have given a transsexual relationship an earnest effort.  If not for a new understanding of my closely examined personal needs in a relationship, I wouldn’t…

I can’t fully answer that one yet.

The next relationship is always so different yet a natural evolution from the previous one.
Once the successive door opens there is no going back.

Thank you for the growth.

P.S.  Um, thank you WordPress for the Freshly Pressed feature(!!!).
P.P.S. Thank you all for stopping by, reading, commenting, basically giving my words some of your precious time…it means a lot.

Standard
relationshipping

Where is the line?

My eyeballs need cocaine

The line that is not to be crossed.

It’s interesting, this notion of a hard limit. Every time I think, “I would/could never _______,” I am proven so, so wrong. I think the universe must have many a field day as I eat such rigidly constructed mantras on a regular basis.

I said I would never live in the South.
I spent eleven years in Memphis, TN.

I said I wasn’t into women.
I was in a lesbian relationship for ten years.

I said I would never, could never cheat on someone.
I cheated.

I told my ex-girlfriend I was not heterosexual, bisexual because of my history but totally gay from here on out.
I haven’t chosen to date a girl since we broke up.

I said I would never join finances again.
Of course I did.

I told her, “No way,” to open relationships; that’s a deal-breaker.
Totally tried it in hopes of making the relationship work.

I will never live in Japan.
Yeah, like that didn’t happen.

I didn’t think I would date a transsexual.
Best thing I’ve done yet.

At this rate I should be living in Los Angeles, practicing yoga on the daily and equipped with a station wagon full of kids in the next five years.
And a dog.

Standard
random love

This is not crossdressing…

Truth or tact

or is it?

Some men wear bras.
In the everyday.
Why?
They say for physical and psychological comfort.
I think the psychological comfort in the vein of security and safety trumps the physical.
In short, they wear them because they want to.

Here’s my source.

On the one hand I think, so men wear bras…and?
Who cares, right?
Except anything that defies the majority thinking regarding traditional gender roles is fascinating to me, especially since my most recent relationship witnessed crossing gender boundaries and then some.

Someone said in the JapanToday article, “…this shouldn’t be a problem since men and women are supposed to be equal.”
I couldn’t agree more and yet I’m still curious as to the why.
Perhaps it’s because I’m completely cisgender (I so identify in my physical female self) that I’m very interested in the male processing.

But as I think about it, is it any different than the underwear women who aren’t so cisgender choose?  I’m not so fascinated when I know a woman prefers boy shorts/boxers/briefs and avoids underwire, padded, push-up, lacy, satiny ‘torture devices’. Yet men in bras fill me with curiosity and more than a few questions.

And it’s not a gay thing.

There’s still that annoyingly inaccurate and immediate ‘must be gay’ shout-out whenever anything remotely deviates from traditional gender roles.
Gotta love that insistent mentality that is so dismissive, ignorant and dated.
Get with it, people; meaning- think smarter.

So is it any more or less different?
Not really.

Then why do I get the feeling that when it’s found out that a guy wears bras, it’s a deal breaker?
IS it a deal breaker?

When my BF turned into GF, that was a deal breaker because I’m not so much a lesbian.
But if he just had a thing for bras would it have been?
I don’t think so.
Well…if he bought his own.

Standard
random love

Witnessing the sex

This is not love

happens.

Aside from the hindsight hilarity, it is really fucking uncomfortable to witness people I know having sex.

For instance, we take a detour and get a room in DC.  There are five of us and two beds; I get first pick of sleeping position since I’ll be driving at daybreak, which will be happening in a number of hours.  Really big guy chooses the other bed, the side that hugs the wall and as far away from me as possible.  I don’t remember anything else as I must have crashed.

Because the next thing I know I’m getting jostled as someone elbows me in the kidneys.  And I hear make out sounds next to me.  Awesome.

Why am I awake?  Just sleep.  Just fucking go to sleep, Rumi.

They move to the floor.  Good.  Just stay there.
And they do.
For eight minutes (maybe it was longer, maybe shorter).
I try to block out loud and drunken, right-before-sex kissing sounds.  I also try to block out the rapid humping sex sounds that soon follow while feeling a little sorry for her because it sounds so…lame.

Aw crap, guys.  Why are you crawling back onto the bed?  Really?
I’m really hoping they stay put.  I mentally command them to just go to sleep, while hoping even more so that I pass the fuck out.
But neither happens, of course.
Instead, there’s more stupid lame sex rightnexttome and there’s no way I’m sleeping because at this point I’m getting mad.  There’s the whole floor, for starters. Why not go back there? And a bathroom.  Why not try it out? And I have to drive for so many hours the next day because not enough people in this room can drive a goddamn stick.  AND I do not get off on witnessing the sex like this.

This is my introduction to my new roommate, by the way.
And because she’ll be moving in after this trip, I hesitate to say anything. But because she is who I’ll be living with for at least six months is exactly why I should jump up and tell them to get another fucking room.

Setting precedents is not always a strength of mine.

Standard
relationshipping

The brink

This is not love

is not a fun place to be.

I’ve been there and made it back.
I’ve also been the final straw that made a most important person in my life lose their shit.

This was my most disgraceful hour.

Sometimes life deals a truly shit hand, one that bypasses asking why and heads straight to anger, shock and a loss of faith.  This particular hand included an extremely vicious and unrelenting cancer.  When My Person’s mother was diagnosed, everything progressed so rapidly, I have no recollection of those years.  Many years later, it’s still a blur.  I remember specific mundane and major occurrences in extreme detail but it’s amazing how fast five years can whiplash you.

My Person was 868.3 km/539.5 mi. away.  This inter-state commute had paved a familiar course in our lives.  Cancer was a familiar occupant in our household; fucking cancer held all of our attention hostage all the time.  So while MP was trying to keep cancer and its toxic treatment’s effects at bay, what am I doing?

Getting drunk at a bar with someone I should NOT be getting drunk with.  He and I know what’s going to happen.  We are both someone’s boyfriend/girlfriend.  This was not a spontaneous meet, nor an “I got so wasted [fill in the blank]” situation.

Does it even matter that sex didn’t happen?  Not really.  With every passing second after leaving the bar together, I was smashing through years of trust, sometimes wavering but mostly solid and built with love.  How rapidly I  knowingly destroyed said trust was shocking.  I didn’t know I was capable of inflicting hurt like this.  I wouldn’t know the full extent until MP got back.

Why…?

I could say that MP and I had gone through too much at that point in our relationship, that our intense life experiences combined with getting together at such a young age was about to strike us out.

Life experiences included: being rendered homeless, car wrecks, discrimination, almost death, hospitals, hate, death, chronic illness, psych ward, drugs, birth, unemployment, death, therapy, terminal illness, hospitals, mental illness, grief, rehab, alcoholism, motherfucking hospitals.

But really, I was a coward.  

I hinted at wanting out, we had many a fight and breaking up was articulated by us both at various points, but I cheated to force a confrontation that I couldn’t otherwise broach.

I cheated on MP whose mother was suffering from a horrific cancer because I was too weak to have The Talk for real.

No wonder I got the call from the bridge.

It was and will be my one and only cheat.

Standard
relationshipping

The heartbreak

This is not love

hurts.
Badly.

It just does.
But if it doesn’t hurt, how real was it?

Also…
Is it worse to cause or receive it?
I say yes.
Because…

So far as being the one to receive the heart-smashing blow…well, we all know that familiar pain.  That literal physical pain which makes it hard to breathe, stemming from the shock of the over.  Especially when it’s unexpected.  God that’s hurtful.  And the grieving process can be so long and annoying.

And being the breaker-upper?

Young me had a certain fear of getting dumped, especially when my person at the time described waking up next to an ex one morning and- poof- out of love.
Just like that?
Just. Like. That.
Daaamn.

I found myself looking over my shoulder every few months.  Is it time?  Is this the morning?  But months turned into years and the sweet honeymoon evolved into dealing with life’s annoyances, joys, tragedies and permutations together.

And one day it was me who felt the impasse.

I had never done the break-up before.  There was anger, feelings of betrayal and many tears shed.  My person had to leave the apartment to process.  Then the phone rang.

I can’t remember the conversation verbatim.  Some key words included driving, what?, bridge, stop, jumping, WAIT, STOP, sorry, HOLD ON, you, hate, I’m calling the cops, DON’T call the cops, I’ll do it, just STAY ON THE PHONE, ILOVEYOUILoveyouIloveyouiloveyou.

I heard the cars so I knew it wasn’t a stupid fucking joke.  We shared a car, the one that was on the bridge and I had to stay on the line.  I felt completely trapped but fuck that, I just needed to know my person was going to be alive.  Like 8 minutes ago I needed to know and counting.  I have never known such consummate fear; I don’t remember blinking or breathing while waiting, absolutely terrified and paralyzed and waiting.

So I would say my first attempt at breaking up was a total fail.

I would also say that you don’t really know someone until you try to break up with them.

Standard
relationshipping

I gave it up.

I gave it up

It took love and a beautiful transsexual-in-transition woman to make it happen.

I’m talking control.
This control thing is a strange bird.  I liked having it but releasing it is infinitely better for me.
And that’s not been the easiest thing.

Looking back, all of our shared experiences were actively growing baby steps that ultimately enabled me to simply let go, a realization revealed many, many months after the fact and only upon sober reflection.

I now understand that our adventures, though seemingly 100% spontaneous, had a deliberate quality to them.  She purposely led me on a sometimes dark and mysterious path that forced me to let the fuck go of rigidly held expectations and change my mental processing.  Of course we got absolutely shit-up-a-creek lost at moments but always managed to find our way back.

Control was lost, trust gained.

That trust proved absolutely priceless when we were completely devastated by unexpected death, freshly flown too many damn miles to get back to grieve on-site.  So we quietly sat, side-by-side on bar stools in a strange city, shattered on the inside and shed silent tears in our drinks, absolutely heartbroken.

Shared grief strengthened trust and the presence of control was significantly diminishing from my life, which led to what has been my ultimate letting go experience…of him.

I decided to just be so he could as well.

Relief.

I stopped fighting her transition, freaking out, questioning an ‘us’ and…
acceptance happened.  

Quietude.
It’s not overrated.

Standard