I do and I don't.

Having a relationship is weird stuff. All my women friends say they want this, but really it's not so easy. There's all that stuff about space and time, like how much do we see him and does he sleep over and does he really need to leave his shoes in the middle of the room and what happened to going out and having fun? And then there's when he does something or says something that a past guy said or did and we just subconsciously get weird about it, like we remember it's what really pissed us off before and was the final straw for the last guy and this guy is doing it and what does that mean now?

And they're guys, you know, pretty simple beings who just want us to be nice to them and talk to them and let them know we appreciate them and get naked with them. Not much fuss to all of that, is there? So I pride myself on being rational and refusing to do the drama-thing and here I am reacting to this nice guy who just wants me to be happy. I see him doing things like an ex and my stomach turns and I start thinking that he's just like the other guy that drove me nuts just because there is this similarity which might not even really be a similarity at all and I'm off being nutty again.

So what happened to that rational woman who wrote that love is a verb, a decision, a commitment to allow the other person to be themself and to grow and to be the best they can be, regardless of their faults. That it's respect and affection in action, not based on feelings or what the other person does or says. And remember that woman who was determined to walk through fear, to be a watcher and learner, to stay strong in her own person? Yow. This is tough.

It's really so easy to just go with this, to point out the things that bug us in the other person and to blame our unhappiness on their actions or lack of actions. It's easy to point out their flaws and ignore our own, to keep our eyes on them instead of ourselves, to run the other way when the uneasiness gets strong. It would be easy to avoid facing our own insecurities and blame the problems on the other person, to just say it's them and not us. It's not easy at all to admit that these things are even going on in our heads, to admit that we fall prey to our ego or our fears or our feelings of impending doom. We're supposed to tell the other person what's really going on with us, tell that person who believes we are kind and sweet what's causing our odd reactions or withdrawal, but all we can think is that they'll hear that and flee. Fast. And then we'll be alone again, regretting our craziness and wishing for another great guy to come along and then, this time, we'll do it right and not react to anything from our past and just be that loving and fabulous women they think we are when we first meet them.

So what's the answer to this? Maybe it's all about fear, the fear that if we are really truly authentic, then we might be unloveable and that people will leave us. That if we are show our humanness, our not-so-healthy places, that we might be undesirable. So we want to be loved, but we're afraid to be loved, we want to be close but we're afraid to be close, we want a relationship but we're afraid to get hurt. I'll leave you with this quote that sums it up: "Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing." – George Sheehan