Picking up the pieces.

When a boy broke my heart in college I remember my mum came and gave me big hugs whilst I cried myself to sleep.I was on summer holidays so I moped around feeling sorry for myself for a few days, talking to friends about what a knob he was and that there were plenty more fish and the sea and that he didn’t deserve me etc etc. 

15 years on and I’ve found it’s not exactly the same process.

I have to go to work each day and pretend to be fine. I have a daughter to look after, who I don’t want seeing me with tears running down my face or a sad face. I have a life to lead and luckily, in some ways, I have stuff to keep me busy so I don’t have time to dwell, but when the tears come it feels exactly the same. 

A boy has broken my heart. 

He hasn’t done it in the same way as any other. I don’t even think he meant to do it, but here I am sobbing with mascara down my face feeling like a 17 year old who still just wants a hug from her mum and for her to tell her everything will be ok. But really, being honest, deep down, I just want a hug from him telling me that everything will be ok. I even think he might need that type of hug too but we’re in a place where neither of us can communicate that to one another. 

New relationships, when you have to deal with real, grown up life around you, are much harder than the new relationships you have at 17. The worst you have to deal with is infidelity but what else should be expected from a hormonally challenged 19 year old boy I guess.  

When you’re 32 there’s baggage involved. There’s trust issues which you have waded through, there’s vulnerability issues but you let your guard down and there’s communication issues. There’s children who’d been introduced, there’s jobs to deal with, there’s family who were expecting to meet him, there’s friends you’d told everything about him, there’s history for both parties and it’s all bloody tricky to deal with. 

I understand this all, yet here I am with my heart broken at 32 and it feels absolutely no different to that heart break 15 years ago. 

A new frame of mind

I’m starting to have a hard time keeping faith that all single men are not douchebags and that there might actually be some decent guys still out there. I’m starting to think that maybe I’m destined to be single forever and should actively choose this life because my heart is too fragile to take any more douchey-ness. I think I deserve someone who genuinely takes care of my heart, not stomps it into the ground without so much as a fleeting thought.

I’m also starting to wonder if it’s me. The type of person i am attracted to just seems to automatically mean dickhead, who will think it’s ok to just stop texting, or to meet a few times and then say they have problems and can’t concentrate on a relationship right now. Why are all 30 something single men flaky, commitment-phobic knobs? I genuinely want to know!

I have wasted so much time talking to men who seem genuinely interested…some for months and then they just disappear – no warning, no signs, no explanation. Some may pop back with an excuse or two but nothing credible or worth the radio silence. This seems to now be an acceptable way of ending things. It’s not.

I don’t think this is an attraction issue, those I have met have never seemed disgusted and have usually met more than once. They talk the talk, they kiss the kiss all that stuff and like an idiot I get hooked in.

But I have to make a decision for self preservation, that this can happen no more, I have been taken for a ride more than enough now and I know that I deserve better. So my new pact to myself is no more late night conversations via Whatsapp – if they want to talk to me they can pick up the phone or invite me out. Emojis are not good enough. No more long distance attempts – an hours drive is not sustainable in my life right now so why kid myself it could work? No more ‘likes’ on POF – if they like me they will find a way to contact me and no more playing games and overthinking – if they don’t like my honest answer then they aren’t the right person. I am so tired of it all.

So it seems that I will be single for the foreseeable future but no change there then, hey? But that’s ok I guess, I’ve got Charlotte, I’ve got friends, I’ve just started my new job, I’ll be moving house soon and selling my flat so lots of things to focus on that don’t involve dealing with idiots (other than colleagues and estate agents) and for now I’ll just cling on to ‘everything happens for a reason’. That’s a real thing, right?