I tend to write love letters to boys who treat me like crap.
This was much cuter when I was much younger.
I know, I know. I really should know better by now. Telling some douchebag I love him after he’s used me to cheat on his girlfriend, gaslit me into having zero self-confidence, or treated me like crap, is pretty dumb, and. I’m letting him turn me into the crazy ex-girlfriend, and I never even got a chance to be the girlfriend!
It’s probably a really good thing I never got a chance to be the girlfriend.
Like. Sweaty sour sheets, omelets with too much onion, and who thinks chard and tomato is an actual meal, anyway?
Like. Pretending to like to hike, pretending not to notice he always seems to need a shower or five, and pretending not to notice he’s intimidated by every single other guy within a five-block radius.
Still, I can’t stop thinking about him. Why? Because I seem to really need to have some guy to think about.
It’s a pathology. It’s an ache. It’s what happens when you give a girl a romantic heart and no one to love.
Translation: It’s what happens when you give a girl a lonely heart and no one to love her.
I’m hungry all the time. I’m a big ole hungry heart. I’m a girl who chastises myself for spending money on food. I say things to men that are too intimate because I am bored by the process of getting to know them because the things they tell me about themselves are boring. I don’t care where they went to school or how many siblings they have. I want to know their souls.
I am a collector of boys’ hearts. The fact that these boys are shaped like men has no bearing on the situation. Nonetheless they are boys. Nonetheless they come to me heart in hand.
Nonetheless they hate me for breaking their little-boy hearts.
It is impossible not to. They relax and they think they are safe but they are not. They think they will be sheltered from the big bad witch of the forest but the witch is here, she is inside all of us. Even them.
They think they can be safe from her. They think they can be safe from growing up. They think they can be safe from grief, from pain, from guilt and shame and every other difficult emotion. They think it is possible to live a blessed life that pain and solitude cannot touch.
They think they will never need to do hard things ever again. Once love is found. They think I can give them that kind of love.
They think that kind of love is possible.
It is not.
That is the tragedy of being a man. That is the tragedy of these men. There is a boy inside of them who still hopes he will never have to grow up.
That boy thinks he can use me to this purpose. When I refuse, that boy turns on me as he would his most serious enemy.
I should expect it. I should know better by now.
I write letters to the boy inside the man. I write letters to the man that boy might someday become, if he lets himself.
It is a silly thing to do. A folly. I am loving somebody who does not yet exist. Somebody who may never exist.
Meanwhile I try too hard to change him. I stay too long where I know I should move on. His mask of decency falls off and he fingers me as a witch. Other women stream in to complete the performance. They throw kindling on the fire as he sets it ablaze with the list of sins I have committed against him.
Believing he could change. Trying to convince him to be better than he is. Can’t I see, he needs a woman who is a refuge. He is an abused child fleeing an emotionally abusive society. He requires a warm circle of Mothers with minimal boundaries and warm chocolate-chip cookies and perfect intentions and no needs of our own.
It is perfectly understandable to want such a thing, even to need it, as a man in this society. To request it from a lover? Less so.
The man who wants the Platonic ideal of a wife, but will give nothing in exchange for her. The boy who needs a mother, who needs to believe he is loved unconditionally, but knows nothing of love to give in return.
I, too, have a heart that screams ‘love me love me’ but unlike the men around me, who turn their lives into temper tantrums and their relationships into failed attempts at self-soothing — I get no sympathy.
There is a fine line between the acts of someone who is mentally ill, versus the acts of someone who is perfectly healthy but thrown into a society bent on driving her freaking crazy.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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