Saturday, July 17, 2010

Memories: Men's Edition


There might be something to the premise that a gal sets the tone with relationships with men from her first relationship with her father.  Heck, I’m not Freud, but there is definitely something to it, at least for me.  My father dealt with low self-esteem and depression his whole life, and he drowned his sorrows in the drinking/gambling/smoking cycle.  He was absentee, like a lot of fathers in the world.  It wasn’t like he had 4 marriages, 12 kids, was dragged onto Maury all the time for DNA tests.  He just…never grew up, never took care of himself, and perpetually wallowed in self-pity and misery at the bar quite a bit.  It’s hard to make a marriage work when one person is working, paying the bills, taking care of the kid & the other person is skipping work and going to the bar all day. 
 My big question has always been why my mother married him.  He was the type to always talk about big plans (and never do them), do really stupid, impulsive things, and be very selfish.  I suppose there’s something to say about love making you blind, even my lieutenant colonel mother. 
 My father became very sick when I was 14-15 years old.  He was probably sick for even longer than that, but he hid it as long as he could.  I’m sure his horrible diet, excessive drinking and smoking, and sedentary lifestyle didn’t help, although I’ve been told it wasn’t a direct cause.  It was hard to see him go downhill because he always wanted to be my hero.  The fact that he could no longer walk, take care of himself, and someone had to feed him his dinner took away any remaining ability he thought he had to be my hero.   Even a few days before he died he still had his sense of humor.  His eyes sparkled up until the very end, and when I see Julia’s beautiful, expressive hazel eyes, I think of how he could communicate so much even at the end through his eyes. 
 There was a part of me that was always disappointed and angry at my father.  He was so smart with so much raw talent, and he threw it all away in a spiral of depression, horrible coping mechanisms, which lead to more depression, and so on. 
 Here is one of my few and only letters from my dad.  When he got sick, he actually started wanting to write/talk with me since he was forbidden to drink & smoke.  And I think he realized what he missed out on by making his vices a priority over his daughter.  But there was a limited window of time when he could still use his limbs and talk.  Within a couple of years, he had deteriorated so much that he could not talk or write.  So for a few years he would call once every few months or send a card/note in the mail.  I know it was his way of making amends.  It’s still sad to read his letters because I can see how far reaching his depression and self-hate really went.


When you get to be of a certain age, there is definitely some appeal to dating a guy like this.  He’s brooding, he’s exciting and unpredictable, you can’t quite figure him out, he’s a challenge.  When you go out, you never know where the night will lead since of course it’s not like he started out with a plan for the night.  You want to save him from proceeding on his path of self-destruction.  In essence, it is completely mimicking the courtship of my father and my mother. 
I’m the responsible one.  I always have been.  I do what I’m supposed to do.  I could navigate an airport sufficiently by myself from the age of 8.  It’s who I am, I can’t change it.  Of course I have stupid moments of “perhaps you shouldn’t have done that” like everyone else.  But at heart I try to please whomever I am dating, my mother, my work colleagues, and my friends as much as possible and try not to be flaky.  I don’t want to ever disappoint anyone. 
Dating the brooding bad boy can be very fun.  It’s definitely more exciting than dating the ultra religious boy who has you home by 9pm.  A relationship that’s very exciting like it is with a bad boy has has all the more further to drop, though, when it does go bust. 
 Have you ever heard of those t-shirts that say, “My parents went to Hawaii and all I got was this stupid t-shirt”?  That’s what I feel like saying after dating this guy for 7 months.  He was a bad boy, and he was extremely handsome.  Awful, awful combination.  All I have to show for it is this note that he left at my door back in March of 1996 plus a few printed out e-mails.  I like this note because it’s handwritten and then I can sigh at his lack of spelling ability. 

 Then there’s Paul.  He’s the reason I got into the Running Start program (i.e., to get away from him), and then I never really got away from him because he followed me to college (see http://bethlovesthe80s.blogspot.com/2009/09/obsession-part-1.html for that whole story).  I never dated him, or even liked him.  My civil interactions with him were just to keep him docile enough to not go crazy.  Well, that didn’t work.  But anyway, he left me cards and letters for me all the time in college.  Some were love letters; some were hate mail. It depended where his mood was.  Sometimes I would get love and hate mail separately in the same week.  In his head, we were in a relationship even though we were the furthest thing from it.  I usually threw away all the gifts and letters he gave me over the years, but this one I kept.  Perhaps I found it endearing that he spelled my name wrong.  How freaking hard is my name to spell?


Occasionally student interns or friends will ask for dating advice.  My best advice is to date the bad boys, but never marry one.  Yes, it’s exciting to date one and always wonder what is really going on.  But at the end of the day, you want someone who is fully-functioning, not self-absorbed, who won’t bring you down with himself, and someone you can fully trust.  Unless there’s some sort of radical transformation, most bad boys will stay bad boys until their dying day. Sad but true.
 There are holes to fill in this story, sometime I might.  Perhaps you can just use your imagination: a series of bad boys, getting through to a few of them, in the end they still decide to throw their life away, I stumble onto a fully-functioning and endearing man who I marry, and happily ever or pretty close to it.  A girl with a few bad boy memories in her box.  Yep, that’s the short story.    

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