Should I Give Up on Love?

It’s been a little over a year since the man I once thought I loved tried to kill me. This past year has been historic in so many ways and we’ve all learned so much about ourselves.

From a safe distance, I’ve watched people I thought were friends reveal themselves to be self-absorbed blobs of hatefulness. I’ve seen other folks I wasn’t real close to open up on things we’d never discussed before. I watched as my project leader received the unexpected news of her mother’s passing from Covid-19 while on a videoconference. We’ve all seen and heard things we never wanted to over this past year.

I watched on social media how one girl’s husband just sort of vanished into thin air. She stopped mentioning him, then stopped posting pictures of him, then started talking about being single in Los Angeles. She never spoke on what happened, but just before we all went into quarantine I’d seen him having lunch with another girl and the way they were laughing with each other just couldn’t be the way folks do when they’re in love with somebody else

My therapist is real big on checking in. Sometimes between sessions she’ll text or email me and the subject line is always “Checking In”. Sometimes it makes me feel like I must be a bigger mess than I ever thought. Other times it makes me feel like maybe she actually does care and it’s not just about getting paid.

The reason I’m writing this is because of her. She’s also real big on “getting it all out there”, which means making lists and such on things that are festering inside. I’ve never met her, and will probably never go to her office, but we get on Zoom and she makes me do things like mind map the day that my ex tried to kill me.

Currently we’re working on how stupid I still feel, because y’all, I feel real stupid for not seeing him for what he truly was sooner. I feel real stupid for trying to be polite with him after I broke it off. I feel real stupid for not talking with anyone about what was going on.

I thought all his controlling behaviors were just part of his take-charge personality. I thought he was a traditional Christian man and that’s why he insisted I only wore dresses to church. I still wince inside when I think on the time we were sitting in the pew and he squeezed my hand so hard I thought my bones would crack. I tried to pull my hand away and he just said “red nail polish is for whores.”

I keep looking around for good examples of love, but all I’m finding so far is just ugliness. I feel like when I look at the church, all I see is powerful men who’ve built up ministries only to get caught doing horrible things to women, and sometimes children.

I’m reading all manner of books on love and forgiveness and women’s place in Christianity and the world. Is it helping? I read through Monsters: Addiction, Hope, Ex-girlfriends, and Other Dangerous Things by Dr. Daniel van Voorhis. It made me feel like if his wife loved him through all of that, then maybe there was hope for me. I read through Sexy: The Quest for Erotic Virtue in Perplexing Times by Dr. Jeffrey Mallinson. Actually, I read through it twice. I keep going back to Worthy: Celebrating the Value of Women by Elyse Fitzpatrick and Eric Schumacher. I bought Forgiving What You Can’t Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again by Lysa TerKeust. I’ve only read through the first chapter. I don’t know why, but I just can’t pick it up again. Not yet. Does that mean I’m not ready to forgive and forget? Maybe it means I’m just not a good enough person for it.

I look at all the married folks I know and most of them seem downright miserable. I see a few folks on Twitter who seem like they’re enjoying it, but like it’s Twitter, so who knows? My therapist wants me to work on rewriting my love template. Apparently, Disney Princess stories and romantic comedies are not good love templates as they set up unrealistic expectations. I feel like we all knew that already.

I think on the girl who I made a wedding dress for last year. She was all set to get married on New Year’s Eve. I put a lot into that dress for her. She had all these vague notions of what she wanted and kept forwarding me pictures of dresses that were nothing alike. Finally I just went with what I knew would make her look like a treasure. I even made a little jacket for her so she wouldn’t freeze to death in her strapless gown. I won’t cry about how hard it was to find the right beaded appliques for the bodice. Then in the end she was real snotty to me when I reached out to her for a final fitting. She’d just found out he’d been cheating on her and came at me like I was trying to rub her nose in it. Not so. I just wanted to arrange the final fitting so I could get that thing out of my house. She was so rude to me that I just cut her off. Then she decided to work it out with him and get married anyway and demanded I bring her the dress. She downright ordered me to bring it to her like I was Robert E. Lee on his way to Grant or something. She texted me so much I had to get a new phone and number since after I blocked her she just used somebody else’s phone. Y’all that just left me so tired and feeling stupid again. Why did I ever consider somebody like that a friend? Why should I want to be friends with a girl so desperate for love that she would rush on to partner up with someone who cheated on her and then laughed when she confronted him? What kind of person am I to be associating with such foolish folks?

My friend who does life coaching stuff, even though she doesn’t call it that, keeps wanting me to hone in on what I want. I posted on Twitter that I want Trae Crowder because I feel like he could understand where I come up from and could always make me laugh, but of course I don’t really want him. I want my Trae Crowder. I want my Nate Ruess, because he could sing and dance with me and make me laugh. I want my Bobak Ferdowsi because he could explain things to me and might make me feel like I’m not so stupid all the time. I want someone like my Pa, who will be nice to me even after I’ve accidentally left a chocolate bar on the backseat of his car in the heat of Summer.

I keep telling folks that I just want to marry my best guy friend and build a family with him. I imagine we could have all kinds of fun and get into all sorts of good trouble together. But then I have this niggling feeling that maybe I’m just in a state of delusion like Wanda Maximoff and living in a television fantasy. I know Valentines Day is manufactured by marketing executives. I’ve been a wedding coordinator. I’ve witnessed with my own eyes what the pressure of the big day can do to a couple. Am I just being stupid again? Should I just pack it in and forget all this romance stuff? Would I be happier if I just let it all go?

I listen to a lot of podcasts to pass the loneliness and to help with my feeling real stupid all the time. One of them is called Freely Given. It’s two Christian moms talking about how they’re not perfect and it gives me some hope. On some episodes they had their husbands on and I listened to those a few times. I listened to what they were saying, but I feel like the second time, I was listening for how they talked to each other. Am I listening for some kind of warning? Am I listening for something that’s not there to tell me I’m not wrong in hoping for a real relationship?

Another podcast I listen to is called Protect Your Noggin. It’s with Dr. Jeffrey Mallinson and his wife, Stacie. They talk about abuse in Christianity, but also philosophy and the Enneagram and different things. It’s all real interesting, but I feel like the real reason I like it is because it’s a smart, Christian couple who are doing something together. I feel like as I’m listening to what they’re saying, I’m also listening for how they’re talking together. I wonder again on what I’m hoping to hear. Some kind of clue as to how it’s done?

Y’all, as evidenced, I’m a right hot mess on all of it. I know I need to forgive others who’ve wronged me, but I just don’t know how yet. I know that to have any hope of happiness with someone I need to become the kind of person who can be happy. I just look around at relationships right now and feel like I’m a little puddle jumper just being tossed all around on stormy water. I can’t find the dock and the lighthouse seems so far away.