Now Let’s Make This Official.
So not too long ago I got my first “official” boyfriend.
You know, as in “let’s determine the relationship.” Which of course, I instigated, having been told by him that he wanted to be my boyfriend, I knew what he had in mind.
I don’t think I knew what I had in mind, though.
I keep looking to the past to try and learn from my mistakes, but I think that just forces me to do the exact opposite and make a different kind of mistake. It’s like I need a middle ground, but I keep jumping over it from one side to the other.
So here I am, in a relationship with a guy who likes me a lot more than I like him. A whole lot more. As in, he said “I love you” about a week and a half after we became official. Granted, it’s not like we haven’t known each other for a while…it’s been about three months of sparse emailing and texting. A friend asked me “well, do you think he knows you well enough to love you?” No, absolutely not. Not in a million years. People can fall in infatuation after three months, but it’s taken me years to love another person and their flaws and imperfections and the subtle nuances of what makes them who they are. That’s the fun part of love, is that it’s silent and beautiful. It’s like waking up in the middle of the night to six inches of snow on the ground where everything is lighter and beautiful and delicate. I guess.
But he said he loved me, and he knows I don’t feel the same way. Now I feel pushed even further away from my natural evolution of feelings because his are like a foghorn over a sea of meditative quiet. Whenever I try to think of my role in this or how I feel or what I want, those three words kick me in the teeth before I can spit a single word out. It’s like my feelings are air that’s trapped inside my body after taking a hit; I’m gasping and gasping trying to take all the new air in, but I haven’t gotten the old air out. It’s stifling.
And now he claims it can work. Despite being fifty miles apart from one another, him not having a car, and both of us being full time students, he’s offering up sacrifices in his life. He doesn’t need this hobby or that hobby and he wants to transfer school and buy a car and be an even better person, and that upsets me. It upsets me because I won’t give up any part of me for him, and I know he’ll resent me for it one day. Eventually people get to a point where they feel like they’ve given everything up, and all they have left is that other person, and that other person is still intact, and the resentment bubbles up and the questioning starts to happen.
Maybe he’s a bigger person than I give him credit for, but knowing that I behaved in the same way when I was new to dating, knowing myself and others who have done the same, makes me think that it’s very likely that things will pan out that way. And what’s more, I want him to have the balls to stand up for himself and value himself enough as a person to say “hey I really like you, but I really like me too.” Having one doesn’t mean losing the other. I don’t want to date a doormat.
