On Tuesday, I wrote about my thoughts about trying to reconnect with a guy I’d been dating earlier this year. After we stopped dating, he had suggested that we get together sometime for lunch, but we never arranged anything. Since then, we hadn’t been in contact at all.
So, right after I posted that entry, I sent him an email saying hello and asking if he wanted to try again for that lunch, and to catch up on each other’s lives.
His first response was a curt and non-committal, though not overtly impolite, one sentence. Yesterday, though, I received a longer, more vituperative email, suggesting that he’d only gone out with me in January and February because he was “very vulnerable and depressed,” and his “clarity wasn’t the best.” Now, though, “in a much better place” and “much more sure” of himself, he knows “whom [he] would like to spend [his] time with socially,” and apparently that doesn’t mean me. He went on to decline the invitation but said he preferred not to discuss the rationale or his feelings about it.
Ok, ouch. But at least there’s a sense of closure, which is probably what I needed more than I needed to actually see or speak with him again. As time goes by, I have a strong tendency to smooth over rough edges and bad memories, often creating a nostalgia for false or selective memories of only the best times and most positive features. His response, though, and the subsequent chorus of “I told you so” from friends, jarred me back into a set of more balanced memories–including his racist conversation on the phone with a co-worker, about another co-worker; the night I treated him to dinner and a flamenco concert for his birthday, which started with him accusing me of being unfaithful (when I noted en passant in the record store that a poster of Julio Iglesias was “attractive”), and ended with him crying and screaming at me on the sidewalk after the show; the suggestion, the first time we tried to sleep together, that I might consider getting rid of my cat, since he was allergic–leaving me bewildered now why I’d even have wanted to reconnect. I think it really was just a reaction to the sentimentality and some degree of loneliness I’ve been feeling after watching Daddy & Papa, All Over the Guy, and Big Eden, among others, rather than an honest appraisal of what and whom are most suitable for inclusion in my life. But given that my thoughts even at the end of All Over the Guy were shock and dismay that those two incompatible guys could continue to try to create a relationship together, I really should have known better than to start to make that same mistake–again–in my own life. For an allegedly smart guy, though, sometimes I’m awfully dumb.
You remind me a lot of my partner. Yes it is closer but in the harshest way. He could have not responded or said that he was just extremely busy but his response, in my opinion, was downright ferocious.
I hate people like that. You are obviously better off without him.