Girls, Beware of Boyfriends

I’ve just ended a two and a half year relationship. Two and a half years might not seem so long for some but I’m only twenty three so it’s a pretty big chunk of my adult life so far. Added to that the fact that I’ve pretty much had a boyfriend since I was seventeen (with a month off here and there between relationships) and it feels like for the first time in my adult life I am alone and I realize that I don’t really know who I am. I am a big fan of self-reflection so I feel like the best way to find out what happened is to reflect on how I got here. I also hope that by reading this someone out there can avoid the mistakes I made. I am glad I caught on so early or I might have been doomed to repeat the cycles over and over again. So here is my story:

In high school, I was not what you would call popular, but I had my niche among the art kids and the punk crowd. I had some great friends and even better times, despite my sometimes crippling social anxiety. The boys I liked never liked me back so I nursed my crushes in secret and those that did like me, I didn’t like back – this was the way of the world and I assumed that it would never change. I was never focused on trying to get a boyfriend or being in a relationship, so much so that some guy I didn’t like back called me “asexual.” I always thought that something would come along if I didn’t worry too much about it. But something changed senior year. All my good friends had graduated, I saw my intellectual equals getting accepted at Ivy League schools while I was failing for the first time ever and on track to attend the local four year college because it was all I could afford. I was horribly depressed and vastly unhappy as I saw my chances for success in life all but extinguished by the specter of going to a commuter college. So when I found out that a friend of a guy I’d had an unrequited crush on liked me, I thought “what the heck” and plunged into what became a series of dead end relationships with what my brother calls “loser boyfriends.”

I remember reading Seventeen magazine and doing one of those quizzes about “What Kind of Girl Are You?” and because I actually have a social and political conscious, I was labeled a “hippie chick.” The analysis continued to say that my boyfriend should be my best friend. I know I never really believed that garbage even when I did have a subscription, but somehow this stuck. I put all of my time and energy into the relationship rather than into building new and lasting friendships. I never thought of myself as “desirable” so I thought I should just go with whoever would have me. When I finally made the move to break up, his mother cried. She knew I was too good for him and I felt free and oh so happy. But it didn’t last, I’d made friends with his circle of friends and now I was alone again.

A friend who stuck by me from before this disaster (not too valiantly as I discovered later he liked me too) decided to cheer me up so he came by my house with a minivan full of his friends and we went on a crazy fun night out. This is where I met the second guy. He was a few years older and smart and really nice. We were together for nearly two years, my first two years in college, and instead of spending time making new friends and meeting people, I took the easy way out and hung around him and his great gang of friends. But I did have my own ideas and I had always wanted to study abroad. To his credit, he encouraged me to go spend six months in New Zealand like I wanted. We broke up long distance a month before I was to come home because I found out that he had asked my father if he could marry me. I was twenty years old. That month I will remember for a long time, and those friends I made in New Zealand have become some of my closest friends, despite the distance. I found a little piece of myself there and I came back strong and ready to take on the world.

I spent a nice summer hanging out with friends I hadn’t seen in a while, including this one guy who had been in my anthropology classes. We’d known each other for two years and we’d been what I considered friends. Unbeknownst to me, he had also been crushing on me for exactly that amount of time but did not dare make it obvious because he knew I had a boyfriend and he didn’t want to be “one of those guys” who try to steal other guy’s girlfriends. I should have seen the red flags a mile away but again, it was easier to have him as a default person to hang out with than to do the hard work of making friends of my own. He was jealous when I hung out with male friends (and that’s pretty much all of them because I somehow relate better with guys) and I didn’t want to make him angry. Things went well for a while and then they really turned sour. But I had invested so much in this relationship and I really felt like I had no one else so I stuck it out, hoping that “this too, shall pass.” I even made the fatal mistake of moving in together, in a foreign country, as we both pursued our Masters in Scotland. When things got so bad that yelling matches turned into physical fights where he would push me into walls and, in one instance, choke me ‘till I blacked out, and I scratched and bit ‘till he let go, I couldn’t get away. I had nowhere to go and because we were there together I made few friends and did very little interesting things because he hated going out and preferred to sit around our flat smoking weed.

When we returned home, he said he wanted to turn over a new leaf, and try to make things work and he told me not to give up on him. But I had to end it and, after a few emotional tries, I finally did not have any tears left and had to tell it to him straight. I wasn’t sad, I didn’t feel anything, even when he cried, when he told me that he felt like no one else cared about him and what a bad person he felt he was and how he knew it was over the second that he lifted his hand at me. A week later he called. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do for me to take him back, I said “no” and told him that we could remain friends and that I still care about him but I just can’t be with him. But you give an inch…He invited me to go ice skating so I picked him up but things went from bad to worse and we didn’t even make it to the rink. I said “I think I should just take you home.” He cried the whole way and then begged me to give him another shot, not to let two years go down the drain and stupid me, I agreed. He took this to mean that we were back as we had been but I saw it more like a trial period, that he had to really make an effort and convince me. I only really said “okay” because I felt bad for him. Of course, nothing changed, so I admitted that I just felt bad for him and I didn’t really want to be with him. Of course he assumed that this was about someone else, that I had been seeing someone behind his back or whatever and he called me a “heartless bitch.” I had to laugh.

I am finally free, having learned a lesson the long and painful way, I plan to be single for at least two years, even if Prince Charming himself comes along, he’ll have to wait. I am taking this time to do all of the things that I have always wanted to do and I am not going to let fear and self doubt sabotage my efforts to be an independent person. I am only glad that I learned this lesson early on, and that I was lucky enough to avoid marriage to some loser guy just because it’s what all my (female) friends are doing.