It's Not Okay: Turning Heartbreak into Happily Never After (10 page)

My college boyfriend was on the football team as well, which made me quickly realize that I had a type, and my type was a man who wore cleats. I couldn’t help it; I was just more physically attracted to burly athletes who came home sweaty and smelly. They made the pretty frat boys in their seersucker, bow ties, and side-swooped hair look like pussies. Saturdays in Baton Rouge were game days and nothing else, so forgive me if I would rather date a guy on the field versus a visor-wearing drunken slob in the stands.

The three years we dated were great; he was the epitome of a gentle giant, and I loved him . . . in a college way. But after we graduated, I packed up and headed off to my next venture: law school in North Carolina. We made separate plans for our lives with no real intention of ever merging them together. We said our goodbyes and I made the drive back home. It was the last time I ever saw him.

In law school I had yet another relationship. See, I am the relationship type, after all (take that, high school losers!). I don’t even know where to begin with this relationship except to say by the time I was twenty-four years old, I had known him for a decade. Yes, your math is right, I was fourteen when I first met him. I was a freshman in high school and he was a senior who just so happened to be the star football player. Somehow we had met at school and started talking on AIM or some other ancient dial-up that required a modem that would be interrupted the minute someone picked up the landline. There was always a flirtatious tone to our conversations, but given our age difference—I was too young to act on the natural attraction I felt for him, and he was too old—we indulged in nothing more than a flirty friendship. On the rare occasions we found ourselves walking side-by-side during class changes, we would make friendly small talk and laugh at the whispers and giggles it sparked from the catty high school girls. We knew what we were, and it was nothing more than friends.

That all changed a few years later when I was a senior in high school and we started hooking up every time he returned home on college breaks. He was the first guy I ever thought I loved, but I was young, and all the chemistry between us wasn’t enough to take the plunge into being exclusive. We stayed in touch throughout my collegiate years all the way up to law school, which was when we decided, in his words, to finally “do the damn thing.” We were for the first time in our lives no longer just hookup buddies, no longer just friends, but in a full-blown committed relationship.

Though I was in law school in North Carolina and he was playing professional football in Texas, we managed to see each other quite often. When he had a home game, I would fly to Houston and spend the weekend with him, and we’d have a blast. He wasn’t a big-time player, I wasn’t a supermodel, and therefore we defied the mold by being two kids who had known each other since high school, utterly in love and living a life far glitzier and exciting than either of us had ever imagined.

We dated for three years, in which time he stopped playing football and moved back to Atlanta. When I graduated law school, I also returned home to take the bar exam and—I hoped—land a job. I moved in with him for the summer while I studied for my exam, and everything was great. We played house, he came on family vacations with me, and we alternated Sunday dinners at our parents’ houses. We hardly fought. Everything with him was good and easy, but it wasn’t great or exhilarating.

After passing the bar exam and landing my dream job as a prosecutor, I got my own apartment and we started living separate lives. I had changed, and our relationship had steadily plateaued, becoming so comfortable that it was boring. At times, part of me wondered if the only reason we were together was due to our shared history. He was looking to settle down and get married, and although I was looking for the same thing, I just couldn’t seem to do it with him.

It wasn’t that I was unhappy being with him—he was a great guy—but I couldn’t help but feel restless as I wondered if something more was out there for me. At twenty-six years old I found myself at a crossroads. On one hand, I was ready to settle down, but in order to do so, I needed more than just “good.” I needed passion, and I needed that spark, that magic intangible that differentiates a good relationship from a great one. Looking back, had I been just five years older and ready to accept that “good” was good enough for me, I would probably have ended up with him. And I would have been happy, and we would have had a good life, but I wasn’t ready to accept good, I wanted greatness, I still do. No matter how I feel in this moment, I will never regret having passed up good for the chance of great. In fact, I’d rather be single forever than settle. (Well, at least for now . . . ask me in ten years and I might be singing a different tune.)

Six months after breaking up with him, I was on the way to L.A. about to meet my next “boyfriend,” aka Number One. Ugh, I hate that I have to include him on my “list.” But I guess that’s what I get for dating him publicly. Where do I even start with Number One, except to say the only similarity he has with my exes is that he was an athlete and had a good butt. What can I say, I like good butts (and I cannot lie). In addition to being good looking, Number One had a swagger to him.

Unfortunately, he also had the asshole gene and in my opinion was one of the more narcissistic humans I had ever met. Narcissistic
and
ungrateful. I mean this guy had been lucky enough to date not just one, or a dozen, but thirty women, all of whom had been handpicked based on his desires. You’d think anyone in his shoes would have seen this as a divine gift, but not him. Instead, he made it seem like a burden. Everything he did and said came with a justification. He was honest to the point of offensive, entitled to the point of elitism, and pompous to the point of disgust. But, I have to say, as much as I wish he wasn’t on my list, there was a lesson learned with Number One. He taught me that I had been pretty fortunate to have dated good, decent guys who treated me well. I guess you could say Number One made me appreciate all my former “good” boyfriends. I’d seen the good and the bad and now I wanted greatness. I wanted that undeniable chemistry, the spark!

Number Twenty-Six had it, or so I thought. Being my type from the start created a level of comfort between us, which put our relationship on a much faster track than any other relationships I was forming on the show. It was as if we had skipped over the “Do I like you?” phase and instantly jumped into the “Do I love you?” phase.

I immediately felt that he was the piece that had been missing in all my previous relationships. He was, in essence, my type on steroids. He seemed to have everything I had ever wanted, and despite knowing him for only eight weeks, I fell in love. I loved him for so many reasons—for the way he made me feel young and vibrant, his looks, his kisses, the comfort of our conversations, the banter, and the way I could see him being the man I still loved after fifty years. But the man I fell in love with doesn’t exist anymore. The protective, loving man I saw as my future isn’t the man I know today. To see someone go from the love of your life to your ex-fiancé forces you to question if it was all one big ruse that led to the ultimate failure, yet again.

Perhaps we shouldn’t look at our past relationships as failures, but rather as stepping-stones; each guiding us to dry land, or in our case toward the right man. Each teaching us a little lesson about what we like and more importantly, what we
need
in a relationship. Let’s think about that for a second . . .

If each former boyfriend is a stepping-stone, then each holds a significant lesson. For example, my starter boyfriend taught me that I
could
in fact land a boyfriend. He ultimately led me to my college boyfriend, who taught me the value of friendship in a relationship. Though we weren’t on the same page when it came to the rest of our lives, he led me to someone who was, my law school boyfriend. Law school boyfriend taught me that I could be content in a relationship, but that contentment wasn’t enough for me, which led me to Number One who taught me that I needed someone who actually wanted similar things in life that I did (and that most men are assholes). This epiphany led me to Numbers Two through Twenty-Five, who showed me the difference between good and great, which led me to Number Twenty-Six. Which is where I am now. So the question remains, what has Number Twenty-Six taught me? Where does he lead me?

If you think about your past relationships in the same chronological way, I guarantee you can find at least one valuable lesson that you carried with you to the next relationship, right? Maybe if we stop thinking of our past relationships as failures and start thinking of them as small discoveries that we improve upon, then one day, all of those discoveries will lead us to the ultimate exploration . . . Mr. Forever.

Maybe . . .

Lesson learned:
You gotta kiss the frogs before you find the prince.

I
t’s Day 10 now, and I have yet to leave Kelly’s house. It’s pretty pathetic. I am a twenty-seven-year-old woman, and here I am a week and three days after my breakup still moping around in unwashed, Febreze-doused T-shirts, devouring empty calories by day, guzzling wine by night, and crying around the clock. While God created the entire world in seven days, it’s taken me ten to muster enough strength to make my way to the couch and watch trashy television. And to make matters worse, this morning was the morning from hell, all because of mother-effing tissues!

I awoke to tears running down my face, yet again, along with dark red-stained lips (damn Mr. Cabernet got me again) and immediately had that pit in my stomach that today was just not going to be my day. Without hesitation, I clasp my hands, look up to the ceiling, and say aloud, “Dear God, please don’t let me run out of tissues. I will do anything you want if, when I look over to the box of tissues, it is not empty. Please!” I reach over to the cardboard box on my nightstand. Empty. Shit!

My initial thought is,
Why the hell does nobody deliver tissues
? It’s 2015 and I’ve managed to hole up in my room and survive without ever leaving this house, every necessity at my fingertips thanks to the Internet and restaurant delivery—but I can’t find a way to get tissues. My second thought is “What the fuck am I going to do?” The first option would be the environmentally friendly decision to reuse the crumpled tissues that are piled past the rim of the trashcan. But as low as I am I just can’t bring myself to stoop even lower by recycling my own snot. Thus, I’m left with only one option: make my first public appearance since this breakup. Can’t wait to be the chick roaming the aisles of Target with snot permanently baked into her skin and eyes so large and puffy they deserve their own zip code. Lucky me!

As much as I hope this isn’t a preview of the rest of my life, I can’t be so certain. I’m pretty positive that I will be alone forever. This isn’t an exaggeration, at least not in this moment—it’s just probability, taking my age and track record into account. I’m not saying my eggs are dried up yet, but being on the verge of twenty-eight means that I might have passed my prime and in doing so wasted four-fifths of my twenties on failed relationships. I have nothing to show for it except a shattered heart and a bunch of baggage that includes an ex-fiancé. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly wouldn’t mind
physically
being twenty-eight for life, but I could do without having to check the “single” box on my tax forms every year.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In fact, if someone had asked me a decade ago where I would be at twenty-eight, I would have said, “happily married with a child and another one on the way.” Perhaps it’s a tribute to my Southern heritage that I expected to marry and procreate by my midtwenties. After all, when you grow up in the Bible Belt, if you aren’t married by the time you hit twenty-five, everyone starts to whisper, wondering one of two things: Are you psychotic? or Are you a lesbian? Southern mothers want to be young fabulous grannies while Southern fathers want their expensive daughters off their tab as soon as possible, and Southern men want young and fertile trophy wives. Luckily for me, my mother is a Yankee and doesn’t give me the ole Southern mother guilt trip. In fact, she rarely misses an opportunity to tell me she is not ready to be a grandmother, so if I could hold off, that would be delightful. Apparently, babysitting grandchildren would conflict with her biweekly mah-jongg game at the country club, and I
certainly
would not want to put a damper on that.

I’ve clearly missed the boat on becoming a member of the Young Southern Wives Club or the Belles with Babies Association. And as if a bare ring finger and my monthly period don’t make this point firmly enough, the fact that I am almost the only single girl I know puts the nail in the coffin. I can only name two friends who are single like me—one is days away from being engaged and the other is divorced, so she doesn’t really count. Therefore, the way I see it, by the time I do reach twenty-eight, I’ll be the last single gal standing. Despite the pleasure I get when my friends bitch about their husbands and the hardship of giving birth and “pumping and dumping,” I would trade places with them in a heartbeat. The more I think about how many of my high school friends and ex-boyfriends have tied the knot and are starting families, the more I realize I may have won the Zero Obligation battle, but I have certainly lost the Happily Married war. Plus, by now, half the good guys have been snatched up because, like an experienced farmer, they know to pick the crops when they’re young and ripe while the other half of the good guys have come out of the closet by now, making both ripeness and women in general irrelevant to them, and leaving me totally screwed. At this rate, my time line has been shot to hell and it’s only going to get worse. Best-case scenario, my new life looks like this: