The Decline of My Romantic Ideals

Mar 27, 2008

There was something so bitter and acidic, so final, in that moment when I realized that love is never worth the pain it causes.

There is nothing so degrading, so violently inconsiderate as hearing someone I once loved with all my heart say things that I would never say, even to my most hated enemy. He brings out the worst in me, too. Slowly at first, but then I spiral into episodes of uncontrollable rage and emotion to the extent that I am utterly inconsolable and not even my cat wants to be near me.

People tell me divorce is a process… a healing process, a process of rebirth. That’s bullshit. It’s a cycle. A nasty, vicious cycle of hateful comments, childish actions and horrific insults slung back and forth like mud in a redneck wrestling pit, tempered with a few civil interactions here and there that only made the bad parts that much worse, because they’re not only hurtful to the core, but they also string out any semblance of hope that maybe, possibly, there was some fraction of good left in the years we spent together, that the last 6 years weren’t a complete fucking waste. No such luck.

The most devastating part of all this is the feeling that I am utterly fucking helpless in the situation. I let myself get sucked into his lines every time. “I miss you” and “I want to see you” somehow seem like an angelic melody, because they represent the idea that, no matter how depraved our relationship has become, there is someone out there who really, really wants me. Or at least pretends that he does. That’s a tough feeling to ignore, even if it is all a lie.

I’d like to be able to say there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but I can’t even see the end of the tunnel from here. I find myself in a relationship with the most intriguingly simple yet annoyingly complex man, and I fell for him way too soon and far too fast. And now, everything about him terrifies me, not least of all the fact that he has some serious commitment issues and that our relationship has been forced into hyper-drive by our decision to move across the country together…alone. How is it that I want to escape from commitment yet run to it at the same time? And I’m freaking out because it’s not available to me, and I need some security, even a ghosted image of stability, so some pathetic piece of me remains hanging on to the one commitment I can identify – my marriage (my failed marriage, no less). It’s a complete and total lack of security in all but a few precious relationships, and it carries over into my present state of mind. He seems to think the instability is only on my end, but again... it's a cycle.

God, I could psychoanalyze myself all day and identify every textbook condition that I could possibly have, but it doesn’t help the fact that I’m a pain in the ass to deal with when I’m in this state. I want to go out and find some new friends, but don’t have any desire to subject them to the ridiculous patterns I’ve developed over the last few months. But then again, that’s what friends are for, right? So I subject my nearest and dearest to typo-littered tirades over instant messenger in the beautiful moments where the time change fails to affect us and we catch each other online at the same time.

I want this to be over… I want to wake up one day and spend the entire day not thinking about the fact that I am a fucking statistic… married and divorced before the age of 27. I have become a sad testament to the breakdown of the American family unit and an unlikely heroine for young, independent women everywhere, all at the same time. Being independent is great. But is it too much to ask for a little romance? A passionate kiss from a man who thinks you hung the moon? A little peek into the fairy tale we all wanted when we were little girls?

So we come back to this, the decline of my romantic ideals and along with it, the erection of a few more layers to my emotional wall… the moment when I realized that love is never worth the pain it causes.