Denise and I continued to exchange emails. She apologized for dumping me by phone, and I was able to get to the bottom of why she didn’t want a future with me – all of the above, but mostly my lack of ambition, my comfort with being the grasshopper instead of the ant, from the old parable of the grasshopper and the ant. You know the one.
I didn’t blame her. If she truly wanted an ant, and thought an ant would make her happy, who was I to tell her she had to pick me instead? I’m not that self-centered. So we stayed friends, chatting on email and facebook about our lives. I didn’t pretend I wasn’t in love with her; she didn’t ask me to.
If this was the “friend zone” others had referred to, I didn’t mind it. She seemed to be rational and honest, both with me and with herself. And she seemed to truly care about my well-being, to be emotionally invested in how I was doing. We remained close, and she remained a light in my life.
Fast forward a few months. I’d had a few more dates with others that had started promising, then turned left into nightmare territory. I hadn’t given up, but I was losing the strength to hope for more.
I was in screaming, desperate pain. As bad as things were before I met Denise, now that I knew what my soul needed, now that I knew how it felt to have that need answered – the pain of going without was unlike anything I had ever felt before.
It was unbearable.
I needed something to give me respite from the pain, if only briefly. To allow me to gather my strength. I needed affectionate touch. I discovered professional cuddlers existed, but they charged an extremely high hourly rate. I looked for “cuddle exchange” resources, but found none.
And then something occurred to me: even if I wasn’t mate-material for her, Denise really did care about me. She was a kind and empathic woman; she liked me. She had spoken often in our recent exchanges of how sorry she felt I was in such distress.
So I asked her this: to provide some temporary relief, would she be willing to occasionally just sit on a couch with me, cuddling, so that I could find a little shelter from time to time and gather my strength to find a more permanent solution – a new mate?
That’s when she revealed for the first time that she was now dating someone.
Of course I back-pedaled immediately – obviously, if she was dating someone, she couldn’t expect the average guy to be OK while their date cuddles someone else! I mean, I – as the date – would have been fine, but then I have never been the jealous or possessive type.
But then I paused – something still seemed a little off. So I asked her if she wasn’t dating, would she have been up for it?
She said no, and trotted out a list of reasons:
– I was being dramatic. I wasn’t really in that much pain. (I actually was, if anything I underplay my pain because I don’t share myself so easily and don’t like asking for help.)
– She didn’t want to be a band-aid when I should be looking for a permanent solution. (I explained the better metaphor was that of a burn victim who needs pain meds while he arranges for a skin graft, that this was just for pain relief to enable me to keep searching, but she was not moved.)
– That she didn’t see me as a manipulative person, but she didn’t want to be wrong about that. (Wow. Just wow.)
– And that she didn’t want to take responsibility for me and have me become dependent on her. (Which honestly sounded to me like a conservative talking about the evils of welfare, that standard “if you help someone, you discourage people from helping themselves, so you should never ever help anyone.” In other words, BS.)
Denise closed with a happy positive thought – she told me she really did like me, did think I would find the right person, and that the pain is only temporary.
We ended the conversation and I sat back stunned. And then I realized my mistake.
I had loved Denise, and this caused me to see nothing but the best in her. To trust the good things I saw.
But in the end, she was just an ordinary, normal, human being. She was kind, mostly. She was empathic – to a point. She liked me somewhat and wanted good things to happen to me – as long as it didn’t involve her.
And above all, she had to find a way to frame the situation that wouldn’t cause her to question whether she was actually was compassionate in deed as opposed to words – first by downplaying my pain, then by pretending her help would actually be a hindrance to me, then be not-exactly-accusing me of being manipulative. She even ended with positivity, the ribbon on this gift of absolute non-help.
Denise was just the same as everybody else.
I had hoped for so much more – for someone I could love even if she didn’t love me back, because she was so fundamentally good, unlike most people.
Instead I got a brutal awakening and a cure of my love for her.
Sic transit Denise.
Love sucks. But I had no other option than but to keep looking for it, to answer the need for the oxygen of my soul. To try, when I was able, to stop drowning.
So that was the state of despair and pain I was in before I was killed from a rock from the sky – ironic, given that I had been thinking of the value of suicide more and more often.