1. He tells you as he is making out with you, “Someday your future boyfriend will be really glad I taught you this.”
2. He corrects and critiques the way you break your bread, showing you how to separate the roll into four equal pieces.
3. He stays up all night scraping the black factory-painted pinstripe off of his truck because he can’t sleep until it’s entirely gone.
4. He stays up all night making cardboard hotels for cats, convinced he will be rich off of his invention.
5. He owns a limo, but it turns out he’s the driver, and he likes to tell you often what he watches the passengers doing in the backseat.
6. He explains that he likes you a lot, and will share a bed with you, but doesn’t feel comfortable sitting on the same couch as you.
7. He steals your expensive perfume bottle (again) and “secretly” gives it as a present to his other girlfriend.
8. He doesn’t have driving insurance and totals his truck while on a secret rendezvous to the mountains with his other lover, and then asks you to come get him at the hospital.
9. He says, after your first dinner date, which he planned to be out of town, that he is too drunk to drive home but has conveniently already booked a hotel room nearby.
10. He promises he just wants to cuddle.
11. He says he has a romantic surprise for you, and when you enter the room there is a “toy” and a video camera set up.
12. His father tells you, after your lover has gone missing for three days: “He is just like me, a player, and he ain’t changing.”
13. His mother takes you out to an intimate lunch and tells you, “You are so smart and lovely and kind, why are you with my son?”
14. He takes you to an antique store to teach you have to shoplift.
15. He sells you a stereo that he bought with his roommates “stolen” credit card.
16. He doesn’t come and find you when you run out of the house crying.
17. He calls his ex-girlfriend when you are still in bed together.
18. He has rearranged the photos of you as a couple each time you come over.
19. He lives with his sister, has no job, is addicted to pain-killers, and is a chain-smoker.
20. He makes you gag.
21. He makes you wish you lived on another planet.
22. He says, “I don’t love you, I’m certain.”
23. He is the roommate of the other really odd guy you dated.
24. He has an ex-wife that warns, “Watch out, he is trouble.”
25. He enters a room and every woman wants to give him his number, and he takes them.
26. He has deep dark brown bedroom eyes, and he knows it.
27. He shows up late all the time, and always has a very detailed excuse.
28. He says, “It depends, are you planning on losing weight,” when you ask him if you should cut your hair shorter.
29. He tells you how to dress.
30. He tells to wear long fake fingernails painted pink.
31. He is in therapy with you and seeing another therapist with his wife.
32. He enters the athletic gym, and the male employees look at you, raise a brow, and say in a derogatory tone, “That’s your boyfriend?”
33. He was the first man you saw after breaking up with your other boyfriend who was the first man you saw.
34. He claims he cannot tell you where he lives because it is a temporary situation and he can’t give you his phone number because he doesn’t have a phone.
35. He plans a party and not one person shows up.
36. He asks your father for your hand in marriage, shortly after his mistress, holding a baby, kicks down his apartment door in an attempt to kill you.
37. He does things with himself at stop signs you know are plain wrong, but he insists everyone does it.
38. He lies to his mother.
39. He yells at you because you packed the camping ice-chest wrong.
40. He tells you that your suspicions about his cheating on you means you are paranoid.
41. He likes beer with his breakfast.
42. He takes you out to drink “brain freeze” alcoholic shots for the first date.
43. He tells you all about his special adventures with his guy friend, with a twinkle of love in his eyes.
44. He takes you to a party and you find him half-naked in the bathroom with his ex-girlfriend, and he claims she is helping to adjust his Halloween costume.
45. He tells you how you could be prettier.
46. He asks you to buy something for his mother’s birthday because he can’t afford it.
47. He takes you on an out-of-state trip, via airplane, to his hometown and disappears in the early morning to meet up with a past lover.
48. He calls you from a phone booth, a few blocks away, claiming he is out-of-town working for a few days.
49. He doesn’t say, “You are beautiful.”
(He points out your mistakes often, like forgetting to add number 50 to this list.)
Please protect your aspie daughter. Teach her she is worthy. Love her unconditionally. Pay attention to her. She doesn’t know as much as you think she does. She thinks, like herself, that everyone is kind-hearted and filled with good intention. Teach her about red flags, about predators, about liars, about trickery, and about manipulation. Teach her about appropriate behavior and conduct. Consider her an angel on earth, uneducated about the ways of this world. Hold her and cherish her. And above all teach her how special she is.
This was my first album; I used to play this song over and over and over. I memorized all the lyrics. I was so awesome.
Random thought: What if the reason why my dog is so very happy to see me every morning is because in her reality one night is 100 years!
“I think he might like me,” I told my husband, in reference to a man at a coffee shop.
“What do you mean?” my husband asked.
“Well, he was smiling and taking interest in me,” I answered.
“Honey, he doesn’t like you; he doesn’t even know you. He is attracted to your body or something about you physically. That is different from liking you.”
“Oh,” I answered.
The next day, as I was heading out the door to go to the grocery store, my husband said, “Remember if a man looks at you because he is attracted to you that doesn’t indicate that the man likes you. You are a very pretty woman who some men find attractive. But their attention doesn’t mean they like you.”
I found his words to be a mixture of both comfort and confusion.
I am slowly, very slowly, learning the social innuendos regarding communication with men. I never knew there were so many unspoken rules when speaking with men. It’s fair to say I’ve got the female social interactions down, but now there seems to be this whole other guidebook regarding men.
I think, for me, having not had the example of a healthy father and mother relationship, nor brothers, or even uncles that I knew well, as a child, meant that I never had the chance to really learn how to interact with a man, except single men I sought after to make my husband. (starting at age six)
And, I guess, too, the actions of predators in combo with the uncouth behavior of some other men, added to my confusion of my place in the world as a woman.
I only had one male friend as an adult for a very short time. He wasn’t actually a friend, really, more of a member of a support group that I belonged to, a man about fifteen years older than me, who I once in a while saw outside of the support group–maybe once or twice. I was involved with another man at the time—obsessively. So I never saw my friend as anything but a friend. And I was like a little sister, to him.
Interestingly, after lacking in male interactions for over four decades, I’m still looking at males the same way I did when I was six. They might have aged, and I might have aged, but the little girl inside of me is still wondering is that my prince?
It doesn’t matter that my husband adores me, and that I think he is a very dear man. I doesn’t matter that I logically understand that there is no prince out there. What matters is I still have this pattern. I still see men as someone who I want to make love me. That if they love me then I am of worth. But this love isn’t based on how they see me inside; it is based on how they see me outside.
Likely, (obviously) there are still some Daddy Issues; the holding, hugs, kisses and I love you’s from a father that never materialized.
The fact that I need validation of my physical worth from a male, more so than a female, and that indeed a female’s opinion of me, unless repeated over and over, does null for my self-esteem, is troublesome.
Logically, I recognize that the opinion of another is not a reflection of my worth, but somehow I still hold onto a man’s words and actions towards me more than my own belief and love of myself.
I’ve grown up some in the last few months, grown up to the point that I am hyper-aware of my thought processes, actions, and my emotions. There are very few moments in the day that I’m not an observer of self: outside of my own body watching me exist and walk through the steps of my day.
I understand what I am doing in regards to the power I grant men. I used to think it was shyness, now I think it is a not knowing, a not understanding, a confusion and displacement of ease. Standing near any man close to my age or older, causes my ears to turn red and face blush. Almost any grown male seems to put a magical spell of nervousness, meekness, neediness, and insecurity upon me. I naturally become a shy, flirtatious giggle machine, complete with batting eyes and the flushing cheeks.
I realize that I was basically unseen and unnoticed, very much invisible, in most areas of my life, until I blossomed at the age of fourteen and began to gain attention based on my appearance. I was homecoming princess, popular, and dated a very handsome boy. I learned then that my looks could serve as a form of power: a way of being seen.
I learned to equate being seen with having worth.
I am starting to reprogram my prior learnings.
I am interacting with males more and recognizing they are no less powerful or magical than females, that their opinions are not more important than others’.
The hardest part is I still don’t understand the nuances of male/female communication. I don’t understand how much I should look into a man’s eyes, how close I should stand, how I should smile, what my tone should sound like, what topics are socially appropriate. I don’t understand what most people seem to learn subconsciously through experience.
I understand now how often men have actually flirted with me throughout my life. I understand now why, in high school, I shouldn’t have been having an ex-boyfriend massage my back when I was involved with a new beau.
I am starting to understand how I surely give out mixed signals, matching and mirroring a male, thinking that reacting as a mirror-image is the safe and appropriate technique. After all, it works with females!
I feel so very alien and unprepared for earth, as I approach the male zone.
In dealing with male encounters, I don’t want to come across as a prude, or rude, or stuck up, or extremely shy, or as a flirt. I just want to come across as me. The problem is I don’t know what that looks like.
I’ve trained myself to make facial expressions based on my environment and whom I am with. I’ve trained myself to act in the best way possible, to not lose female friendships and to not embarrass myself.
I don’t have a natural facial expression. I don’t know what that even means. It used to be, if my face was relaxed that my mouth was downturned, and I then appeared mean and unapproachable. For a few years, I walked about with slightly puckered lips. Silly, but true. Now my face has been trained to be in a constant puffy-cheeked smile in public.
I looked at my husband the other night, as he was checking me out, and I said, “Okay. So I’ve added a new understanding, a new rule to this computer brain of mine. I have new input. I now know that a man looking at me doesn’t mean they like me. But now I am confused, because you look at me with desire all the time. So does that mean you don’t like me? Does that mean you only care about my body?”
My husband then spent the next several minutes explaining to me about the concept of getting to know someone, of how attraction can turn into like, and like to love, and then, after time, the person is liking the whole of you.
I stared back at him with a quizzical expression. My eyes grew wider. “I don’t understand,” I said. “In all my male relationships (boyfriends) I loved the person as soon as I met them. It didn’t change. It doesn’t grow. It just was.”
I went on to explain my perception of love. That yes, indeed, I can grow to respect a person, to enjoy their company, to take great pleasure in learning from them, and grow in companionship and familiarity, but that my love doesn’t grow. It remains the same.
I began to see, through my husband’s explaining, that clearly I don’t experience life as many people do, particularly love. I don’t experience relationships in the same way, either—or communication.
Last night while at the local store grocery store, I asked a handsome store employee for some help finding a dessert wine. I know little to nothing about wine. Just asking a man for help is a huge step for me. I have to stop myself from staring at my feet, stuttering, giggling, and staying stuff that is just plain stupid.
He asked if I was going to need the dessert wine for dinner, for dessert, or after dessert, and what dessert I was having. He said this while staring deeply into my eyes, as if searching, and connecting. I stared back for a while. Locked eyes. I was processing.
I didn’t know why I wanted the wine, or what I was going to have the wine with. I just wanted to have something sweet. I processed how the man was looking at me, and I did what I knew to do, I stared back, mirroring the man, as I processed his communication skills thinking: This man is really good with eye contact. I wonder if my mascara is smeared. My ears are on fire. I am nervous. Can he tell? I’m so glad I have this hat on.
So many thoughts, so very fast. With even more intense eyes, I offered, “I don’t know why I want the wine; I just want to drink it.”
I think I came across as giggly, clueless and cute, perhaps even flirtatious. Not my intention.
The man was standing very close, and very, very kind. (I think) He spent five minutes with me giving me a mini-lesson on wine, and showing me his favorite. I kept thinking: He doesn’t like me. He might find my eyes pretty. That’s why he can’t stop staring. And I think he swiped a peek at my butt, but he doesn’t like me.
The entire time I was listening to the brown-eyed man, I was simultaneously analyzing his body language, his choice of words, his proximity, his inflection, his everything. I noted there was some attraction going on, but I couldn’t tell if he was interested or flirting, or just nice to everyone.
In retelling the story to my husband, he took in the clues and observations of my encounter with the store worker, and reported that likely this man was somewhat interested in me. He reminded me I was an attractive woman. (He lingered at my beauty for awhile. Bless the dear man.) He explained that if a man instead of a woman had approached and asked this employee about wine, he likely would have been shorter in his explanation, not have locked eyes the entire time, and not smiled and offered out his favorite wine. He wouldn’t have been standing as close either.
I still don’t know. I told my husband, in all seriousness, (and while slightly tipsy from the port wine in hand), that I’d like him to come to the store with me the next time and stand back an aisle or two away, and watch how men approach me and interact with me, and tell me if they are flirting.
He said, “Honey, I really don’t take pleasure in watching other men pick up my wife.”
Hmmmmmmmm. Hadn’t thought of that.
For now, I guess I’ll keep watching men watch me, and calculate what it means. Take note in my little imaginary spy book. Note that a stare at my bottom doesn’t mean like, and definitely not love. Note that a prince isn’t likely out there roaming the wine aisle waiting to take me away to his castle to live happily ever after. Note that the attention towards my outward appearance doesn’t note my worth. Nor does the lack of attention. And note that though I may appear to others as an experienced butterfly, I am still very much a naive nervous caterpillar quivering inside.
I post love on my blog, on my social network page, and admit love to my friends.
It’s been very freeing and healing.
I’ve also been processing through past relationships with men.
Until last week, I saw myself as a real victim in love relationships.
In the beginning of my “dating” years, which actually started at age five, (No kidding; I always loved boys. My first “date” was at Keith’s house, where he introduced me to his favorite delicacy, peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches. I politely gagged.)….
In the beginning of my boyfriend-girlfriend years, I attracted very safe males: sweet, kind, friendly, and truthful. I was fortunate to have two boyfriends in high school (at separate times), after I moved back to California, that treated me with the up most respect and love. But something shifted at about the age of twenty. Perhaps it was being away from my extended family and not having a father that adored me. Or perhaps the shift was brought on by insecurities surrounding college or finally “growing up.” Regardless, at the age of twenty I began falling for whomever paid attention to me. For seven years my relations with men were bleak and tumultuous.
So often, in my twenties, the man I “chose” was addicted or abusive or both. I felt used physically, and was often dumped out like last week’s beer bottles—left clanging and spinning down a steep hill of depression. For years and years I blamed these men for their character and callousness. I cringed at the thought of these people not loving ME! How could they not? What was wrong with me?
A few days ago, I suddenly had a knowing. I suddenly saw in full picture, a truth. I wasn’t a victim. I wasn’t used and tossed out. There wasn’t a right person or wrong person in my sexual drama. I attracted men at the same level I was at spiritually and emotionally. (I had to leave out mentally, and just giggle. I was always smarter! Lol.)
But most telling, I realized at the center core of me the profound truth: that in fact I USED THEM.
In my mind I had thought that their “crime” was using me physically; and how could any crime be worse than that type of invasion? However, my crime was equal. I was a “villain” too. I used them. I chose to be with a man I didn’t like and didn’t respect, in order to not be alone. I used men!
Suddenly this ah-ha moment swept me away, and time stopped. I traveled back to a dozen relationships, and revisited and swept clean the energy attachment. Within seconds, I’d forgiven the men and myself. The labels were released. The words of scumbag, loser, liar, addict, etc. that I applied to the men, vanished. And then, presto, the labels slut, stupid, blinded, desperate that I’d branded to my energy field disappeared too! I began to see the men as other spirits on their journey. I began to see I was never victimized. I understood that using is using, whether it be of flesh or emotion. And then I released the using label, too. We weren’t using. We just were. We were existing, surviving, journeying. We just were. And so it goes.
(notice the tone of this…written before my ah-ha moment.)
The highlight of my dating career had to be the season I spent with the habitual lying, sexually addicted Don—a spineless man five years my senior who behaved ten years my junior. At first glance I’d fallen head-over-sandals in love with Don. The summer day he confidently strode through the Catholic daycare where I worked, I’d tucked myself halfway behind a shelf of books and drooled over his perpetually sun-kissed skin. He was everything I’d wanted, dark and handsome, and tall enough to look down at me with his bedroom eyes.
The times Don and I were together weaved in and out sporadically through a span of half a decade. When I first met Don he was separated from wife number one; when I last reunited with Don, he was struggling to patch it up with wife number two. I was the in-between, but one Don swore up and down he intended to marry.
The majority of our relationship played out like an ill-plotted soap opera, with me as the dimwitted, star-struck mistress and Don as the notorious villain.
There were definite reasons I stuck around. With Don came a familiarity of unpredictability. He was my locomotive, the one I could catch a ride on and speed through the world with a view I remembered—one of constant change and chaos.
For a long while, I’d do anything I could to win Don over. I’d forgive his shortcomings and mysterious disappearing acts, and demean myself in different ways.
In our first months together, when I was still hopeful, there’d been major red flags. Don had no home phone number or address. His scorned, soon to be ex-wife, had warned me to have nothing to do with Don. And Don’s truck was mysteriously breaking down, in an accident, short on gas, or had a flat tire, many of the nights he was supposed to be with me.
I was good at rationalizing his actions and taking his lies as truth. I found reasons to stay, like the fact that Father liked Don and that Don eventually showed up.
I was twenty-years-old and newly accepted into the teaching credential program at the university the weekend I learned of Don’s other woman. It was either the Saturday I’d scrubbed Don’s toilet, or the time I’d obsessively lined his kitchen shelves; no matter, it was the eventful afternoon I came face-to-face with a woman out for blood.
I’d been oblivious of course, hadn’t a clue Don had flirted with a seventeen year old outside of the construction site where he worked, slept with her, and possibly fathered her baby.
For some time there had been hints of another woman. All along Don had pushed back our framed photos or even turned them face down, forgetting to place them back up in their right position when I arrived. And I love you posters and cards I had made for Don had been rearranged on the wall or re-taped in another room of his cheap apartment.
The one of many climatic events of our relationship began with a loud knock at the door, an initially startling noise that momentarily displaced me, until I assumed Don missed another rent payment or lost another spousal support check. By the second series of knocks, I’d headed toward the front door, and would have unlocked the knob, if Don had not, in one swift pull, yanked me backwards by the tail of my shirt and whispered, “Don’t.”
It was then I heard her voice for the first time, a high-pitched scream to the tune of: “Open the damn door, Don. I know you are in there.”
I wasn’t that far gone in my oblivion love state, not to recognize the voice of another woman. With immediacy I scowled at Don like he’d taken my only prized possession, and pushed my palms into his chest, wanting to hurt him like he’d just pained me.
Don stepped back, taking my hands into his, and mouthing, “I’m sorry. I love you. I only love you.” He then released my hands and tugged down nervously on his neon-green tank top. “I meant to tell you. I swear,” he said, widening his dark eyes in remorse like I’d seen him do a dozen times before. “If I told you, if you found out, I was afraid you’d leave me. And she was a horrible mistake. I didn’t want her to be the reason we lost such a good thing. I love you so much. You know I do. You have to trust me.”
Before I could make up my mind about what to do, there was one final series of knocks, and the voice came again, only louder and more determined: “If you don’t open this damn door, I’m going to kick it down!”
What happened next still amazes me, and proves once again the strength that can be found in pure rage. Within a few seconds of her last knock, there was one heavy kick of her foot, followed by several more, and then, without warning the door broke off of its hinges, the side paneling splintering, and the whole of the door slammed down inside the apartment.
There, amongst the settling dust, in marched a skinny girl, no taller than five-feet, cradling a screaming newborn in her arms. Boiling with revenge, she charged Don like some creature from a Japanese horror flick, with her arms outstretched growling for revenge. On reaching Don, she punched him once in the chest and then shoved the baby at him. “Take her!” she ordered, back stepping and turning her head with a whip of her dirty-blond hair.
From behind the couch, I tracked the baby’s wrinkled arms flailing, and then gasped as the girl moved towards me. Her eyes were on fire as she shouted at full-throttle, “I’m going to kill you, Bitch!”
Without thought, I ducked around Don and attempted to make my way to the doorway. Don didn’t waste anytime. Before I had a chance to maneuver myself around the girl, Don had tossed the baby on the couch, grabbed his bike, carried it down the apartment stairs, and rode off.
For a few seconds both the girl and I stared out the doorway with disbelief, and then we stared down at the tiny infant crying on the couch, until the girl’s raging eyes met mine, and she roared, “You’re dead!”
From where she stood, prepared to launch, I could smell my scent on her, the expensive bottle of perfume I received from my father for my birthday, which had recently gone missing from my bathroom shelf.
As the girl stormed forward, I managed to swerve around her. She lunged at me, barely swiping my shoulder. I jumped over a small ottoman, snatched up my car keys and practically flew down a flight of concrete stairs.
In the narrow carport, I started my sedan and backed up. Just as I was about to turn out of the apartment complex, the frenzied girl’s enormous boat-of-a-station wagon came charging forward and blocked my way out.
Seconds later, leaving the baby wailing on the front seat of the car, the girl marched across the parking lot to my car window and ordered, “Roll down your window!”
Caught between a place of disbelief and hysteria, I shook my head and whimpered, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
The girl’s face turned from one of frozen-ice to empathetic-disgust. She tapped on the glass of the window a few times, and then rolled her eyes up letting out a long heavy sigh. Finally, seemingly understanding my predicament, she waved me off with a shake of her hand, before stomping back to her car.
After she sped off, I remained in the parking lot, uncertain of what I’d gotten myself into, and more uncertain of how I would ever find my way out of my contorted labyrinth.
I was going to write about this awesome salad I made…….that’s guacamole along the edges, and beets I peeled and steamed, and all organic!
Or my adorable Violet (aka Spastic Colon) that I overfed with people-food so much that she threw up all over the house. This is her looking at me wondering why I didn’t take her on my walk to the lake. It was 95 degrees outside, that’s why. And you, Violet, poop out after one lap when it gets over 70 degrees. You no longer like the sun. She didn’t understand.
Well, I guess, I just did write about both, but not at length. Here’s the real scoop….
I’ve been walking around the lake near our house, once or twice a day. While I’m walking, I practice eye contact. Eye contact is not something I learn naturally, and not something I ever feel comfortable with. Not something I enjoy. And not something that I like practicing.
I “taught” myself how to make eye contact with strangers at the age of thirty-five. I realized I was having a hard time at it (eye contact), and needed to make a change, the time I was attempting to look up at a male sales clerk at a local take-and-go pizza parlor, and I got so nervous, that I wrote a check for $400 instead of $14. He wasn’t eye candy or even close to my age. But pretty much all males under 80 and over 10 make me nervous. I didn’t realize the error in my ways, until the establishment cashed my check.
I get nervous looking at anyone I do not know well. Especially men. I have become much more comfortable with women my age and older, small children, and senior citizens. They feel safe to me. Every other age group, when I think about locking eyes, I squirm inside from nervousness.
I now set my eyes just beyond a person or on a person’s forehead, in an attempt to appear friendly and approachable. I’d say I make eye contact with 80% of the females I pass (like in a store) and about 40% of males, well maybe 20%.
Lately, I’ve been wearing sunglasses when I walk the lake, and a plastered on real-looking smile. I listen to music and this helps me smile. And I remember all the smiles I’ve been practicing in the mirror and on camera. My face fidgets all over the place, while my smile tries to find a home. I am more comfortable with my mouth closed. Though I think my teethy smile is prettier. So I probably look perplexed and intense when I smile.
My hugest practice-smiling comes when a man my age approaches me while passing me on the jogging/walking trail at the lake. There are typically a couple dozen of men my age any given day that pass me. I have learned, through trial and error, to stare down the female, if a couple approaches, before I glance very quickly at HER male with a smile. If I smile at the male first, I tend to get a very shifty-darty eyed look from the female. I find this interesting, but logical.
I have also found that men about ten years my senior or more, tend to smile at me first, and even nod or say hello, while men my age look suspicious. This could be me jumping to conclusions. I wonder if I should start taking notes.
With every person that passes me, I stand up straighter, glance slightly that person’s way, and then look at the forehead. With sunglasses on, I can hover there longer. Sometimes I get nervous and move down to the chest or legs. Which in retrospect, maybe isn’t such a good path for my eyes to follow. The whole time I’m looking I have a cheesy closed-lip smile and I hold my breath.
I’ve been practicing really super hard, and was feeling fairly pleased with my progress. Until tonight. Now I’m going back to the proverbial drawing board in my mind and trying to connect the eye contact dots.
At the lake, on my last loop around, a man my age approached me. He came up real close. I think he ran up to me from his car. He said, “Hey,” grabbed my wrist gently, and placed a folded small piece of paper in my hand. Between the “Hey” and hand grabbing, I figured this guy had special needs and needed my help.
He didn’t. But that was my first thought—trusting soul I am.
And so I smiled big, wanting him to feel safe, if indeed he had special needs.
As he stood there, I unfolded the note and read it quickly. Kind of in shock, and not fully comprehending what I’d read, I fell back on habit and manners, smiled again, and said with a giddy voice, “Thank you!”
At any given time, from the age of fifteen to twenty-seven, I tried to have a best friend and a boyfriend. This pair of people anchored me: the best girl and the best boy. In some ways, people would consider me lucky, as I seemed to attract the handsome boys. But some handsome boys, and boys in general, I later discovered, could be bad boys, too.
Many people with Asperger’s Syndrome have reported that they didn’t have a romantic relationship for a long time, if ever. Me? I instinctively clung to boys starting at the age of five. Probably as a result of the gap I needed to fill based on the absence of my father and the busyness of my single mother. Being an only child in a world of ghosts, precognitive dreams, and extreme sensitivities to people, places, things, while having an acute sense of sight, sound, hearing, and touch, left me longing to cling to something, if only for balance and retreat.
As I reached my teenage years, I became liken to a high-quality, food storage, plastic cling wrap. I’d seal a male over with my entire essence, and remain stuck there, in full-grip mode. I remember thinking I was experienced with relationships. Keen on how they worked, what to do, and how to keep a “man.” But I wasn’t. I was weathered for certain: rusted around the outside like a metal pole set out in the rain one too many winters. But I definitely wasn’t experienced. I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to take care of my needs and wants, beyond lassoing a male to do things for me. I was quite pathetic, in an unintentional, hadn’t-meant-to-be, way.
By my early twenties, after graduating from college with honors and starting my first teaching job, I was deeply ashamed of the woman I’d become. And more times than not, I didn’t know the part of ME that I played in life—didn’t know my lines or even where to find the script. From one moment to the next I was changing. In one scene I played the role of the dedicated soon-to-be school teacher, and in the next a desperate crazy fool clinging to whatever man she could get her hands on. A fisherman in the game of love, I’d learned to bait my hook and cast my pole, but hadn’t known to catch and release.
As time passed, each man I met, no matter where or when, who showed the slightest interest in me, soon became my new love interest. I was fortunate in high school to have had two boyfriends (at different times) that treated me tenderly and with respect. However, later, I dated men from all walks of life, most of whom were extremely damaged in someway or another. And all who were addicted to something or someone.
The worst of being with a man came in not what they ever did, but what I let myself do. I made men my bed, and I slept in them while walking through life. And I fooled myself repeatedly into thinking I was content. It didn’t matter if the bed was too small, or too big, or if it had lumps. It didn’t matter if the mattress was missing all together and I was made to sleep on the cold hard floor. It only mattered I was in the bed, or at least what I’d thought to be a bed. My mind fooled me. My heart fooled me. My logic fooled me. While all along my spirit wept.
There has never been such a horrible part in my life as the years I walked half-blind to my own wanting. In essence I was a prisoner, unable to move forward, sideways, or even backwards without pushing, dragging, or tricking myself in any given direction. Best to stand still in one spot—best not to move an inch—if that was possible. But it wasn’t. I had to keep going. I had to keep stepping somewhere.
The highlight of my dating career had to be the season I spent with the habitual lying, sexually addicted Don—a man five years my senior, who behaved ten years my junior. At first glance I’d fallen head-over-sandals in love with Don. The summer day he confidently strode through the Catholic daycare where I worked, I’d tucked myself halfway behind a shelf of books and drooled over his perpetually sun-kissed skin. He was everything I’d wanted, dark and handsome, and tall enough to look down at me with his bedroom eyes.
The times Don and I were together weaved in and out sporadically through a span of half a decade. When I first met Don he was separated from wife number one; when I last reunited with Don, he was struggling to patch it up with wife number two. I was the in-between, but one Don swore up and down he intended to marry.
The majority of our relationship played out like an ill-plotted soap opera, with me as the dimwitted, star-struck mistress, and Don as the notorious villain. I can laugh now, find many lessons in the journey with Don, even thank him for the crash-course in what-not-to-do ever again; but back then, having no other models for beneficial love relationships and no avenue for escape, I was stuck in the mire of pain and misery, a self-invented trap that I had no idea of how to release. I cried daily. I wrote dark or needy poetry. My focus from morning to-night was Don. My life was Don. My reason for living was Don.
There was the time I dialed his number obsessively, about twenty times, just to hear his voice on the machine; the time his lover called me and said: “Just so you know I’ve been sleeping with Don every morning after he leaves your house. I’m those ‘business trips’ he’s been on.”; the time he totaled his uninsured truck out-of-town, and called me to come get him from the hospital, even though he’d been secretly rendezvousing with another that day; the time Don and I threw a Halloween party (which I obsessed and over planned about) and no one came (except a few of my teaching program college mates), because all of Don’s “friends” didn’t respect him; the time I drank an entire bottle of wine and slammed my finger in the closet, because I’d yet again been waiting for Don to show up.
He had a habit of just not showing up. Just not being there. I’d come to expect it. To recognize the raw acid-burning pain in my chest that signified the abandonment soon to come. There was pain continually lurking behind the wall of my psyche. I’d be in bed, the only one awake, and ritually would cry up to the heavens, begging for a way out, for understanding, but mostly for a way to make him love me.
I didn’t know any better. No one had taught me. And Mother, though I love her, hadn’t prepared me. Everything I’d learned from romance came from Mother or movies, or maybe from watching soap operas or another person. I didn’t have standards. I didn’t know what standards were. And I didn’t know why someone wouldn’t or couldn’t love me. I thought everyone was good, everyone just, everyone honest, everyone sorry.
Everyday Asperger's 