Oversharing Aplenty

There's no running in this post. Look elsewhere.

When I broke up with Jenny, I started seeing a therapist. Paying a fortune to see a woman for an hour once a week with absolutely no chance of sex... it's a lot like dating Jenny was. It doesn't take a genius to see that, as I haven't ever had a normal healthy relationship, it just might be ME that's the problem. When I get asked why I never married, I usually respond "My standards are too high. I'm holding out for someone who can tolerate me."

So, Dr. S. (not a doctor, btw) suggested I go to a meeting where a self-proclaimed "relationship expert" was speaking.
- I don't think so. Guys don't go to things like that.
"There'll be a lot of women there looking for relationships."
- No woman there would be interested in a man who went to something like that.
"You might learn something."
- And what makes this woman a relationship expert?
"Among other things, she's been married for 20 years."
- So she knows one way that works. In 20 years, I've had HUNDREDS of relationships!
(Dr. S. does not laugh.)

I didn't go.

"Well, excuse me for having enormous flaws I don't work on!" - Homer Simpson.

So, really, what's the deal with all the failed relationships? Let's review:

First there was Stacy. Paranoid schizophrenic with an eating disorder who ended up believing that all food and medicine was poisonous and starved to death. That relationship messed me up pretty seriously.

Skip ahead to Theresa. (sorry for the next sentence's grammar) She used me to get the grades she needed to get an internship, where she met the guy she dumped me for and who she used to get the job where she met the guy she dumped him for to marry the guy who was willing to pay her way through medical school. Upon starting med. school and having my brother for an instructor, she looked me up to see if I'd get her through her classes again. Either she was a sociopath or she's completely average and this is a world I do not care to inhabit.

Skip way ahead to Lori. She and I were so much alike it was scary. We were one of those couples who finished each others' sentences and unintentionally dressed alike. She pointed out to me that one of our commonalities was a form of autism - this seriously messed up my worldview for a long time - and that much of what I saw as common ground was mere personality disorder. (Killjoy.) We had the added problem of living in different cities; I considered putting my mother in a nursing home so that I could move to Chicago and take a position with her father's company (for which I wasn't qualified) so that we could be together. There was a bigger problem: she wanted children, more specifically wanted to bear children, but thought that there was too high a chance of the two of us having a child with severe autism that we were not emotionally equipped to raise. Essentially, she wanted to marry me and have another man's child. Now, if there were an infertility problem, I might consider it. If she had had a child before we met, I would've adopted without qualm. We circled this problem for a long time. Then I received a phone call from her sister saying she'd had an aortic dissection and died.

Dating me is not good for your longevity...

Now to Jenny. We'd met before I met Lori. There's no meet-cute story, I was just a frequent customer where she worked at the time - I had a serious drinking problem at the time (for the record, three years of sobriety and AA meetings and then found that I wasn't an alcoholic, it just wasn't exactly helping to be drunk all the time). I got to meet the people she dated - first a blond lumberjack-type, who couldn't (I thought) be more different from me, then a short swarthy older man fond of Members Only jackets who must've shared musical interests with her (that's all I could figure) and then someone she worked with... a woman. I wasn't about to start up with a woman who couldn't have a monogamous relationship because she couldn't confine herself to one gender. 15 years later, I wasn't so choosy! Nothing had changed except we were older. I was willing to give us a try, knowing that she would at some point have an affair with a woman (and I didn't want to know about it) as long as I had some say as to who her female friends were. I broke things off because I didn't like my girlfriend's girlfriend.

So, it looks like my mistake has always been choosing to date women who were just horrible choices.

That's who's left. If you thought it was bad being the last one chosen for softball teams in high school, try being the last single man in the midwest!

Once again, so... there's someone new on my radar. Just a bad choice. Really, really bad idea. I may or may not give details as they develop.

Now, back to the usual blog stuff again.