Summarizing Failure - Part 1
I have made so many mistakes regarding relationships, be they friendship or more, and it might be helpful to catalog those over time. This series won’t be contiguous, but as I feel like it or think of things, I’ll write them down.
I wrote last week about 8th grade and the subsequent beginning of my first real dating relationship the next year. Let’s talk a bit about that.
First, she was Christian, sheltered, and conservative. Her parents were Baptist, she went to church every Sunday and did Vacation Bible School and other such things. She was beautiful, blond, tiny, and had never had anything bad happen to her.
That isn’t exactly true; I think she’d lost some pets over the years, and I think her grandfather died of old age. But in general, she’d had a pretty safe, sheltered life. Growing up on the north side of Springfield, she’d never really traveled, never even been to the south side of Springfield. I was fourteen and she was fifteen when we started dating. I felt significantly older than her, but we were both young and stupid, which was something of a common skein throughout my life as it is for so many others.
Where she was a conservative Christian, I was a fairly liberal Wiccan. I practiced witchcraft, had a number of gay/lesbian friends, etc. Of course, I didn’t tell her this. I don’t know that being honest even crossed my mind until we’d been dating for about 6-8 months.
Regardless of her sheltered lifestyle, she was kind of unstable, and I talked her out of running away from home on a number of occasions. Her parents were rather oppressive, and she wasn’t happy. Probably clinically depressed, but all I could do was hold on; I didn’t know how to help or heal her.
So when I told her of my beliefs and practices, it blew up, as you might imagine. At first, she tried to “save” me, but she didn’t really know how (again, we were young, and subsequently stupid). She talked and talked, and when that didn’t work, she tried to seduce me into converting… which almost worked. But instead, I left.
She knew nothing about Wiccanism or witchcraft, and was convinced I was cavorting with demons (rather than fighting and sending them packing) and casting harmful spells on her (which I would never do). She spread it around the entire school, told people I was a threat to her and wanted to kill her, and told me that it would be better for the world if I were to be killed, hung on a cross and burned. I was evil, as far as she was concerned, so I set out to prove her wrong.
It took probably 6 months to convince her that I wasn’t a force of destruction and evil in the world. I worked to undermine her religious conviction because I viewed her as wrong; I tried to do good things, not bad, so clearly I was right and she was wrong. After that time, she finally accepted me, and we started dating again. But there was a lot of tension; we fought more than we were at peace, and though I tried to be supportive and good to her, it was very difficult. She came very close to breaking up with me several times, and each time I would tell her that she needed to do what was right for her, best for her, and she’d stick with me.
As for me, I had it in my head that she was The One, that we’d be married someday. That this was a destiny sort of thing, and we were solid. We made it until our junior year of high school, when she told me that we should take a break for the school year. We were both busy, and she wasn’t sure she could handle a relationship, speech & debate, and school.
“Can we just be friends?” The guy only has two options. Either 1) agree, and you’re still friends with the potential of renewing the romantic relationship, or 2) refuse, and now you’re neither in a romantic relationship nor friends, and have no chance of reconcilliation. I agreed, because I had no choice.
Turns out, she’d started cheating on me a month previously, and I found out a couple of months later that she was seeing someone else (and had been for a while). I was angry, and hurt, but I also blamed myself.
If I had never forced myself on her emotionally, never worked to erode her beliefs, to prove myself as “good and wholesome,” or something like that… the guy she cheated on me with was an atheist, and I had thought that he and I were friends. But as far as I was concerned, she’d never have accepted him if I hadn’t worn her down.
Which is pretty self-centered of me. Not everything revolves or is dependent of me, but that’s how I felt. I lost her, and blamed myself for years.
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