The [Ex] Dating Game?

Dating The Ex:

The appeal of dating the ex:

All the unanswered questions… answered?  All the would have, should have, and could have beens… ceased?  Unfinished business inevitably… handled?  One would think. But not so.

What actually happens when you date the ex:

But while old sets of questions may find solutions, they are exchanged for new sets of questions that are even more challenging and complex than before.  Only these are never resolved.  Both parties are left regretful that they risked the comfort of the uncomfortable old and replaced them for what they assumed would be resolution with the new.

What you learn from dating the ex:

Instead you learn that perhaps the past… is best left… in the past.  The memories of yester-year, should thus remain for to attempt their reenactment, and duplication would only prove foolishly immature, frustrating naive and unsuccessful at best.  To hope that they’d be recaptured, that the memories the years of separation left you with would somehow play themselves out in reality again, only prove that you can’t hit the rewind or slow motion buttons on life, love and especially past relationships– though you may try.  While old issues may have been laid to rest, new ones emerge.  The bumps in the road that may have rocked the relationship in the past are of an entirely different magnitude than the pot holes you run into when you repeat relationships.

Conclusions about dating the ex:

Flickers don’t always have to be rekindled into flames.  To do so is to play with fire which always leaves one or more persons burned, severely.  Flickers also cast shadows on our minds and hearts so that thoughts of love lost appear greater than reality will prove they are and really were.  But curiosity sometimes makes us add fuel to that fire as opposed to blowing that candle out as should be done.  But curiosity can not only be attributed to the death of the cat, but the death of the sweetness of memories, of the idea of perfect love and of the mystery of unresolved, unfinished love stories and romances with ex’s.  Something I’ve learned to not tamper with… a game I’ve learned I’d rather not play.

Don’t play the ex dating game

Living La Vida… Boo-Less

I will attempt to provide a brief synopsis of the past couple of years of my “love” life, a chronicle of events that lead to me living la vida boo-less. I will probably not do a good job as I am condensing years of feelings, experiences and thoughts into an half hour summary, but here goes nothing….About four years ago I was convinced that I no longer wanted to be single. I was 20 and ready for love! With India Aire’s song, “Ready For Love” as my inspiration at the time, it was in heavy rotation on my CD player and it’s lyrics would almost indefinitely leave me in tears every time:

I am ready for love

Why are you hiding from me?

I’d quickly give all my freedom

To be held in your captivity

Indeed this song was written with me in mind, if not every song lyric, every strum of the guitar seemed to convey accurately, like nothing else could, the melody of my heart. I was young and while every one around me seemed to be enjoying a “boo-ed up” life, I was determined to leave many a lonely night behind me. Of course, I payed less attention to other of this same song’s lyrics such as the part that said:

Lately I’ve been thinking that

You’re (love that is) not ready for me

Maybe you think I need to learn maturity

They say watch what you ask for

‘Cause you may receive…

It’s only in retrospect that I can say that indeed I didn’t know the first thing about love and even the love I so desperately sought and professed to be ready for was rooted in selfishness. Love would have been right to hide from me a little while longer because I was not ready for it. Didn’t know how to recognize it, how to sacrifice for it, how it should be displayed and acceptably reciprocated. Desperation for a relationship, any relationship left me jumping at the first guy who made me laugh until it hurt, complimented me and whose company I enjoyed without even considering for a moment if we were compatible in any way. My mission was accomplished though, I was not boo-less any more. I had what I asked for…. a boo. By the time I realized the things that I had been blind to but were existent all along:

1. We had nothing in common and hence weren’t compatible
2. We weren’t on the same level intellectually
3. Our everyday normal conversations were non-existent because they were replaced with arguments over words taken out of context
4. I finally had a boo yet was still miserable

I was two years into the relationship, time had flew by more quickly than I intended it to and I was left wishing I had know sooner that:

1. I should have been just a tad more discriminatory with a man I decided to call boo
2. Jealousy will never mean true love
3. Just because a guy is great doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a great guy for you

I had a run in with a love from my teenage years when things really started to get almost unbearably rocky with my going-on-three-years-boo. He reminded me that there did exist a man who could be everything I wanted in a boo… or so it seemed.  He appeared to be everything my current boo was not and then some. He was my ticket to the love I had been ready for. I called it splits-ville with said boo and despite my desire to be single, I jumped at what I thought would be my chance at true love finally. Of course while I was operating under the notion that if you let a man go and he comes back to you he’s yours, he was operating by others, namely if you’ve never slept with a woman while you two were together, it’s a good idea to at least attempt to. Needless to say, it didn’t last very long….that was not the love I had sang about, cried about longed for or imagined.

Now I’m living la vida boo-less and I couldn’t be happier for the time to myself to grow, to mature and be extra careful with what I ask for in 2009!

The X-Y Factor

Recently, The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, has been having a lot of segments dealing with relationships. I myself, have been late to work due to catching these segments. Don’t know what the recent obsession with relationship/love/breakup/advice has been as of late, but if nothing more I am sure it is designed to get ratings to skyrocket through the roof. It’s apparently working, at least in my household that is. Perhaps I can attribute my newly found ‘blissful boo-less state‘ to these segments. Overwhelming amounts of you didn’t need him anyway spiels are always a plus [lol, kidding, or maybe not]. People want to know about love, relationships and the like. It’s especially good to know that you and your feelings are not unique, odd, strange or so foreign that no one else can possibly relate. I think their specials are particularly helpful for those reasons. The segment, The Case of the Ex, which had a panel of “relationship experts” giving advice on getting over the ex discussed things one can do to “speed up the process”. The videos are included for your viewing pleasure and are being mentioned since we are on the topic of exes.

Which brings me to probably the most noteworthy thing I’ve ever heard anyone say when encouraging one to get over an ex. If those segments with Mike and Juliet didn’t contribute to my new philosophy, this statement surely did. And as much as I wish this was the product of my own thinking, I regretfully confess that I am stealing this from someone else. Okay, so you have to give me some credit for not passing this off as bi-product of my own brilliance, but I think everyone will appreciate this, nonetheless. So here we go, drum-roll please……

Eventually you will get to the place when your exes become whys…

And instead of crying over losing them, you will be wondering why you even dated them in the first place

It’s a true statement that the greatest healer of a broken heart is time. But it’s also true that in time the very ones you sit and cry over now are the very ones that in time: [1] things are put in better perspective, [2] reality sets in, [3] you question your younger [perhaps less experienced, more naive] self’s judgement on selecting that individual as a boo in the first place. But I can’t help but wonder that as with the alphabet, ‘x’ will always be followed by ‘y’, does that mean that that same rule may apply to the dating world? Will exes always be followed by whys??

The Blissful Life

I know I have been away for a while. This hiatus has me returning not only with a new leash on life but with an entirely different perspective all together. It’s dawned on me that I have been approaching this thing all wrong. The boo-less life is not the drab, worthless, depressing existence I had previously chalked it up to be. Well, at least that is the approach I assumed for most of what I have posted thus far. Granted, having just come out of a three year relationship, immediately followed by a three-month-relationship with an ex from my very distant past, I found myself suffering from a severe-or-not-so-severe case of the boo-less blues. But after three weeks of: tears, recounted memories, reflections, re-evaluations, rants, dissections, inspections and the like, I am convinced that a simple shift in focus enables one to see just how blissful life can be without a boo–or at the very least, my life is more blissful without the boos I’ve had. Now while I can count on one hand the amount of relationships I’ve had, that of course is neither here nor there, I do know enough to know that the boo-less blues is nothing more than a phase, a fleeting, passing moment in time that is temporary-however permanent it may feel. And get this, it’s completely normal. When you’re in love, you’re said to be wearing “rose-colored-glasses,” these tinted lenses of love that somehow manage to taint everything your boo does so that it all looks beautiful to you. It blinds you to all their faults, magnifies their good qualities, distorts their least flattering features, deletes most if not all imperfections, and causes you to overlook his/her short-comings and inconsistencies. Once you’re boo-less, I think you put on a different pair of glasses altogether, perhaps “blue-colored-glasses.” With these set of lens through which you view your life and your most recent past experiences, they may blind you to the real complications you had while in the relationship, magnify your own faults and newly found singleness, distort your self-image so that you view yourself as a failure, delete the possibility that your life is perhaps much better without that boo and makes you overlook the fact that you are still hot stuff. However I am convinced that there is a cycle every single person goes though, once I piece it together I will be sure to post it. But at the moment some of the stages include:

1. Newly found boo-less-ness
2. Boo-less blues
3. Blissful boo-less-ness
4. Frustrated boo-less-ness
5. Attempts at escaping boo-less-ness
6. Embraced boo-less-ness
7. The Boo-Less Spokesperson

Which one are you?