I read on a woman's profile a few weeks ago that she's offended by online dating because she finds it to be like online shopping: everyone's just looking for the next best deal.
After having done 21st century dating (online and speed) in addition to 20th century dating, I've come up with some thoughts of my own (I am a (non-practicing) attorney, so discussing is in my nature) that I thought I'd share.
Online dating is the personal analog of the professional online job hunt. You hunt around, looking for a post for which you think you can succeed. You want the right attributes, you want compatibility, and you need the sense that it's a job you have a shot at getting. Sometimes you apply for jobs that are beyond your skill set, but hey, what the hell, it's just another email. Every once in a while, you find that posting that makes you think, "Wow, I'm perfect for this job!" and you happily send off your materials, only to hear nothing. The frustration over that pattern leads to a certain cynicism about what people are posting: is anyone for real? Does anyone actually want what they say they do?
The faceless internet doesn't do much to help you figure that out. People can say whatever they like and get away with it; there's no one to keep them honest. Maybe the grass-is-greener phenomenon / online shopping experience is due to the skepticism that anyone really is who s/he says s/he is. Most people are not good at investing in their relationships in the first place; it's probably even harder for them when they have a healthy dose of salt mixed in.
Generally, I think online dating leaves me wanting more because of inherent qualities in me rather than in the qualities or behaviors of others. I take people at face value; I am honest (sometimes too much so (see: this post)) and expect that others are too, even though I should probably know better by now. I'm naive, but I'd rather be naive than jaded. When something is right, it's just right; I don't need to date 3 other people at the same time to figure that out. When I date you, I date you in good faith that this will either work out or it won't, but it won't be because you were unknowingly participating in a contest with someone you've never met.
I am probably too easily invested. I get excited about sharing myself if I like you, because people I really like don't come along every day. If I want to spend time with you, it's because I think there's chemistry; if there isn't, I don't need a string of dates to figure that out. If I want to see you, I also don't want to wait a week or two to see you again. Just because the flame burns brightly at the beginning doesn't mean that there won't be a steady flame after the initial part of the relationship.
Ok, so maybe I should have titled this "online dating theory for dating me" or something like that. I just assumed that was implied. :-D
Friday, July 22, 2011
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
My Life 2.0
I re-published the posts that Sarah asked me to take down last year. At the time I thought that we would eventually get back together and as I did while we were together, I wanted to do things that I thought would make her happier with me.
A year later and I no longer have any such hope. I've stopped talking to her and am doing my best to stick to that.
A year later and I no longer have any such hope. I've stopped talking to her and am doing my best to stick to that.
Monday, June 22, 2009
on the darkest mornings
I wake a little early, just to reach over and feel that you're still
there. To feel like there's someone on my side in all of this, to
feel like I'm not alone.
Even if you're not facing me, even if you're turned away and still
sleeping, just feeling the warmth of your body makes me feel better.
On the darkest mornings, I can't do these things. I am alone, and the
bed is cold. I can't rub my feet against yours or kiss your forehead.
On the darkest mornings, I wish that I could. I wish that you knew
how much I want it — on the darkest mornings.
(This was something I wrote Sarah last November. Doesn't seem to matter now, but I kinda liked it, and these are definitely the darkest mornings.)
there. To feel like there's someone on my side in all of this, to
feel like I'm not alone.
Even if you're not facing me, even if you're turned away and still
sleeping, just feeling the warmth of your body makes me feel better.
On the darkest mornings, I can't do these things. I am alone, and the
bed is cold. I can't rub my feet against yours or kiss your forehead.
On the darkest mornings, I wish that I could. I wish that you knew
how much I want it — on the darkest mornings.
(This was something I wrote Sarah last November. Doesn't seem to matter now, but I kinda liked it, and these are definitely the darkest mornings.)
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Closing Time
My girlfriend of twelve (12) years, Sarah, broke up with me two weeks ago.
We had what she termed an "adult conversation" about our relationship during which she aired a bunch of her grievances, and I mostly acceded to their validity. They weren't (for the most part) things that were wrong with me; they were things that were wrong with how we interact. We met when we were 19, and because we met so young, we had a lot of built-in childish behaviors that we'd never really resolved. Beyond the behaviors, she felt that she couldn't really trust me. All of the time spent telling her that I loved her and showing her that I was always thinking of her and showing her that I didn't want to be anywhere else hadn't counted for anything. She still didn't trust me or my feelings for her.
When we had this conversation, I really thought that it was just her venting and that she'd feel better about things in a few hours or maybe a day. A couple days went by and we were still there and we were still acting mostly like a couple, so I didn't know whether it was real or not. I offered to move out to a friend's house and she was ok with that, so I did. I continued to escalate the stakes, each time thinking that she would say "stop!" I started packing, I told her we needed to stop talking (though we haven't been so good about that), and finally it was real: we were broken up.
I hadn't really intended to be broken up, so I immediately started to try to get her to see that things weren't so bad, that we could work things out. Poems, emails, texts, nothing seemed to do the trick. I kept thinking that all she really needed was to remember; to remember what our relationship meant to her and how she felt (and to large degree) still feels about me. But it was not to be.
She kept on reaching out to me, though. She loves me and is worried about me, so she kept IMing and texting and calling. Every time she did, my heart leaped, for I thought it meant that she had reconsidered, that she wanted to try to work on things. But what she said when we talked made it clear that it was not her intent to try to reconcile. She may have thought she was trying to be nice to me by reaching out to me, but in the end, she was just cruel.
I knew things were serious on two Fridays ago, June 12. I went to the house to work from home, and we IMed while I was there. She was willing to change her Facebook relationship status (it seems like a little thing, but there wasn't anywhere else where it was even semi-official that we were together as a couple), and she made it clear that we had probably passed the point of no return. I cried a little bit, but I was still in denial about everything that was going on, so it just didn't seem real.
That night, I was alone at the house where I'm staying, and I felt really lonely and like I just needed to talk to her to get her to know that it would be ok if we just worked on things. This was an ill-conceived plan to be sure. I drove past the house and realized that I shouldn't just stop in, so I parked elsewhere in the neighborhood and called her and asked if I could come by. If nothing else, I could have used some time with the dogs. I knew they still love me. She said that it was ok, she would go out; if I wanted to meet, she wanted to meet in a public place. That just made me feel like a total creep. I had never been physically abusive to her, that she felt she couldn't be alone with me hurts more than almost anything else in this breakup. She wasn't feeling well, so I told her it was ok, I would wait until the next day. We had scheduled for me to have some time in the house alone.
Saturday, June 13, I texted her and asked to talk at home, so I went over to the house to talk to her. It had been a few days since we had seen each other, and I really thought that when she saw me, she'd remember. But she saw me, and it was still over. I cried all day. I hadn't really cried since sometime in high school, and now that I've started again, for the time being I can't seem to really stop. While I was there, she kept on dancing around the issue of whether it was really over; she didn't seem to want to say the words. I told her that I just wanted her honesty, and finally she said, "I think it's over."
She went out for a few hours and I packed up some stuff and threw out some stuff. I took one of the desks from my office out to the patio and took my baseball bat to it. Just as stress relief, and I needed to take it apart anyway, since I didn't plan on moving it. At some point in the afternoon while I was crying I just wanted to feel some physical pain, so I punched the bathroom door, leaving a hole in it and a cut in my hand. Sarah has subsequently felt freaked out by this behavior, but I really don't think it's freaky behavior (feel free to comment though).
I packed up some of my books to go to goodwill; I was thinking at the time that I was going to get rid of as much stuff as possible. Now that it's a week later, maybe I'll just keep them for the time being and see if I want to put them on a bookcase once I've moved into a place of my own. I packed up some other stuff, and as I was dealing with some stuff in my office, I found the letters Sarah wrote to me in the first two years of our relationship. I started reading through all of them, and it just made me sad to think that what we felt for each other then hadn't stayed.
I walked the dogs and waited for her to come home. I texted her about talking some more and she again suggested meeting at a public place. It may be a good thing to do just to make sure neither person gets too upset, but the way she did it really suggested some fear of physical harm. Again she made me feel like a creep; I wondered if she had ever really loved me or trusted me, that she felt she had to say that. I wanted to talk to her because I realized that I wanted to ask her if she was still in love with me, a question that she had asked me numerous times. When she had asked me, it had offended me, because I felt that I showed her constantly how I felt about her. I told her, I showed her, in some ways I'm not sure what else I could have done. But when she asked me and I was hurt that she felt a need to ask me, I mostly said no. So I waited for her to come home, and I asked her. And she said no. For the first time ever, I knew that she didn't really love me anymore.
I cried some more and we both knew I needed to leave. I took a few of the bags that I had packed and put them in the back of my car. I came back in the house and she told me that I really needed to leave. I went out to my car, started it, and started crying. I waited there for a minute, turned off the car and went back up to the house. I just wanted to beg her to let me stay, not to make me leave, that we could make things better again. She repeatedly told me to leave, basically walking me back to my car. She tried to give back the ring that I had given her in 1998, the ring with the blue topaz that I had bought in 8th grade. It wasn't an expensive ring, but it was a sign that we were together; it was a sign that she was mine. Now she wasn't, and she was kicking me off my lawn.
I went back to where I've been staying, my friend's house. He doesn't live here anymore, he stays with his girlfriend since she has cats. Ironically, he got engaged as all of this stuff with me was going down. Just me in this 3 bedroom house doesn't make me feel like I have much of a home.
I kept crying throughout the night, getting less than 2 hours of actual sleep. I had a work trip to Boston on Sunday, so I was up fairly early to leave for that. I wrote her a long letter on the plane, thinking that I may not give it to her, but wanting so badly to give it to her. Giving her yet another affection that would not be received.
As I got to the hotel in Boston, she called me to make sure I had gotten in ok. She asked me where I had stayed the night before, and I told her that it was the same place I had been staying. She asked where my car had been, and I told her that I had parked it across the street, in the direction that I would need to travel to go to the airport. "You did a drive by?" I asked her. She said that she had gone to a friend's house, and driving past was just a coincidence because of that. When we hung up, she said "You know I still love you right?" I told her yes, and that I still loved her too.
After this conversation, I had a pretty good evening. I called some friends to discuss what had happened, and I IMed with some people, too. The conversation seemed to me to be a real sign that she was relenting a little bit; she had thought about it some more in my absence and had reconsidered her position.
I typed up and sent her the letter I had written her, for she had said on the phone that she was reading everything I sent her. She started IMing me later in the evening, and what she said made her actions moot. She hadn't reconsidered at all. She may have been trying to care for me, but all she did was hurt me by sending me mixed messages about her intentions. I kept telling her that if she didn't want to reconcile, we didn't have much to talk about for the moment. Like moths to a flame, though, we kept wanting to talk to each other. On some level, we're still best friends (because no one has supplanted the other in that capacity yet), and the desire to reach for each other because of that continues.
We talked a bunch on Monday again, and every time we talked, I was looking for the magic combination of words that would make her reconsider. Words that would make her remember, words that would make her know that what we had was real and we didn't have to give up on it. We just needed to work harder and go to counseling. I never found that combination.
Monday evening I realized that I hadn't really told co-workers because I was trying to deny that it had happened. If no one knew, maybe Sarah's position would soften, because then no one would know that she had come back to our relationship. I think in some ways some of her resolve was just to prove to herself she could be tough with me and not back down. After I started to tell co-workers, I really started to feel better. Trying to move past the denial and bargaining stages was a good thing; I needed to move to acceptance and start to put together a plan for myself, a plan that would carry me through the next few difficult weeks.
After going through the steps of doing this, I started to feel much better about things. I let Sarah know that I was telling people at work so that she wouldn't be caught off-guard when someone else knew. She was upset that I had told a certain person whom she considered to be her friend (though I have also talked with her a lot). I also told her that I wanted to talk to her Dad one last time. I had always liked him and wanted to make sure that he knew I appreciated that they'd made me one of the family when I was at his house. She was upset by this, too, and asked me to wait, and that we'd talk on Thursday, when I was scheduled to get back from Boston.
Most of Tuesday passed without contact. It wasn't until that evening when I was at the Red Sox game that I got a text from her: "Spit on a sawx player for me." A vile thought and a totally unnecessary text to me. Again, hopes buoyed. Maybe now that I had told co-workers and I wanted to talk to her dad it was sinking in what it meant for us to be apart. Maybe she was starting to realize that we should try a little more.
We IMed later that evening, and again, my hopes broke apart on her ramparts. Talking to me had meant nothing.
I flew back to SFO on Wednesday on the 6am flight, showered, and went to work. I didn't know what else to do. Living in someone else's house isn't 100% comfortable for me, so working from home didn't hold much appeal. We both work in the same office, which is an open office. We sit about 40 feet from one another, so we saw each other a few times without talking. After she had a long lunch, I IMed her and asked if she had brought any of the utility bills in. We needed to transfer them to her name; everything had been in mine.
We went into a conference room to do it; I told her that I didn't want to talk, and that I just wanted to get it over with. I didn't even want to look at her, because that still broke my heart.
She couldn't just get it over with, though. She had to talk to me some more. She had to ask me again whether I knew she still loves me. Of course I do. I don't remember what else she said, but it wasn't a bad conversation, and we laughed a few times. She reached over to touch me a few times, too, which I didn't really want, because that really sent me mixed signals. At one point I told her that I still really wanted to reconcile and she said, "Me too." I was confounded by this. I guess she just won't let herself, even if she wants to. We completed the transfers with a minimal of crying and went about the rest of our day. I'm sure we talked that night on IM or something, but it was still killing me to do so.
Thursday I did work from home just to try to give her some space. I didn't want to be the overbearing ex-boyfriend trying desperately to convince her that things weren't so bad. I know that's what I've been, but that doesn't mean that it's what I want to be. We chatted later in the day, and I told her I was looking for a place to rent, a place that would allow me to have a dog, so that Spot can live with me. I told her that I'd like her to bring me the reference letters we had gotten 6 years ago when we left North Carolina.
I went for a bike ride, and when I got back, I started talking with someone about the situation, and their take was: why are you moving out when she wants to break up? Your life is 10x worse right now than hers, and it's all her doing. Maybe it's the lack of sleep or the adrenaline of the bike ride (or living alone in someone else's house), but this was really making sense. I showered and decided to go back home. I packed two bags of stuff, and drove over. When I got there, she wasn't home, so I went and found the information about the landlord and I called her to let her know that I would be renewing the lease by myself (which is up at the end of the month). I watched some TV and ate one of the yogurts I had left in the fridge.
The house was in squalid condition. The dishes hadn't been washed since I left (the sink wasn't overflowing or anything, but the dishes I had washed before I left were still in the rack), and none of the couch cushions had their covers on (Lilu has become incontinent...the medication apparently has made it ok, but that doesn't mean that there weren't some casualties first). There was a distinct mildew smell in the air, the fetid smell of the unused sink.
I had parked my car around the corner so that she wouldn't see it; I wanted her to see me first, to know that I wasn't threatening her in any way. Which didn't end up working, but it was nice in theory. When she got back to the house, I heard her come to the door, so I opened it for her and said, "Hi babe! Hi doggies!" and started to give the dogs some love. Sarah had been on the phone, so she hung up and said, "What are you doing here?"
I told her that I wanted to stay in the house that was our home together. I told her that it was still her home and would continue to be her home until she chose to leave, but that I wasn't leaving her or our home. Big mistake. She flipped out and become totally hysterical. She called our friends to come over to mediate, and she just ranted for 20 minutes until they arrived. Because this plan made sense to me and seemed fair to me, I was calm the whole time. I wanted a plan on Sarah relinquishing the house. After they arrived, they decided that nothing was going to be resolved that night, one of us should go with them. After a few more cycles of hysterics and calm, I finally gave in and said I'd go for the night. I felt kind of awkward to have them in the middle in the first place; I didn't want to make it contentious.
The next morning, I woke up with the realization that I was exactly where I was the day before, before I forced the issue. I was still living elsewhere, and I had no firm plan on when I could be back in the house. So I forced the issue again, except via email. I wanted her to know that I was planning on moving back into the house immediately. This was again probably a mistake; she got really pissed and replied to my email, saying that she needed a couple of days to get some stuff out of the house. She came over to me at work and asked, very pissily, if I had gotten the email and if it was ok. I said yes, and she stormed off.
I caught up to her walking down the hall, and asked if we could talk in the collaborative workspace at work (just an open area with some tables and chairs and whiteboards and stuff). We went over and sat down and she started crying, saying that the whole experience was scary, intimindating, manipulative, and hurtful. I apologized and told her that I didn't mean to make it any of those things. I pointed out that it had a vague romantic edge to it, even if the execution wasn't so good. She thought that was barely true.
About 10 minutes after telling me that I was being manipulative, she started crying and asking me why, if I love her, would I ask her to leave a house where she feels safe, where people in the neighborhood know her, and where she knows people keep an eye on her? A few minutes of this and my heart, as always, melted for her. Without prompting, I took my keys out of my pocket and took the house and garage keys off the ring and gave them to her.
Overall, it was a good talk, though, and I think I undid a lot of the damage from the night before. She said that she was glad that those feelings weren't the last thing that she was going to remember about me.
I left work soon after the conversation, and I felt like shit the rest of the day. The only contact I've had since then was a request to bring something to work for me. As much as I long for her company and contact, I hope that is the last contact we have for a few days.
We had what she termed an "adult conversation" about our relationship during which she aired a bunch of her grievances, and I mostly acceded to their validity. They weren't (for the most part) things that were wrong with me; they were things that were wrong with how we interact. We met when we were 19, and because we met so young, we had a lot of built-in childish behaviors that we'd never really resolved. Beyond the behaviors, she felt that she couldn't really trust me. All of the time spent telling her that I loved her and showing her that I was always thinking of her and showing her that I didn't want to be anywhere else hadn't counted for anything. She still didn't trust me or my feelings for her.
When we had this conversation, I really thought that it was just her venting and that she'd feel better about things in a few hours or maybe a day. A couple days went by and we were still there and we were still acting mostly like a couple, so I didn't know whether it was real or not. I offered to move out to a friend's house and she was ok with that, so I did. I continued to escalate the stakes, each time thinking that she would say "stop!" I started packing, I told her we needed to stop talking (though we haven't been so good about that), and finally it was real: we were broken up.
I hadn't really intended to be broken up, so I immediately started to try to get her to see that things weren't so bad, that we could work things out. Poems, emails, texts, nothing seemed to do the trick. I kept thinking that all she really needed was to remember; to remember what our relationship meant to her and how she felt (and to large degree) still feels about me. But it was not to be.
She kept on reaching out to me, though. She loves me and is worried about me, so she kept IMing and texting and calling. Every time she did, my heart leaped, for I thought it meant that she had reconsidered, that she wanted to try to work on things. But what she said when we talked made it clear that it was not her intent to try to reconcile. She may have thought she was trying to be nice to me by reaching out to me, but in the end, she was just cruel.
I knew things were serious on two Fridays ago, June 12. I went to the house to work from home, and we IMed while I was there. She was willing to change her Facebook relationship status (it seems like a little thing, but there wasn't anywhere else where it was even semi-official that we were together as a couple), and she made it clear that we had probably passed the point of no return. I cried a little bit, but I was still in denial about everything that was going on, so it just didn't seem real.
That night, I was alone at the house where I'm staying, and I felt really lonely and like I just needed to talk to her to get her to know that it would be ok if we just worked on things. This was an ill-conceived plan to be sure. I drove past the house and realized that I shouldn't just stop in, so I parked elsewhere in the neighborhood and called her and asked if I could come by. If nothing else, I could have used some time with the dogs. I knew they still love me. She said that it was ok, she would go out; if I wanted to meet, she wanted to meet in a public place. That just made me feel like a total creep. I had never been physically abusive to her, that she felt she couldn't be alone with me hurts more than almost anything else in this breakup. She wasn't feeling well, so I told her it was ok, I would wait until the next day. We had scheduled for me to have some time in the house alone.
Saturday, June 13, I texted her and asked to talk at home, so I went over to the house to talk to her. It had been a few days since we had seen each other, and I really thought that when she saw me, she'd remember. But she saw me, and it was still over. I cried all day. I hadn't really cried since sometime in high school, and now that I've started again, for the time being I can't seem to really stop. While I was there, she kept on dancing around the issue of whether it was really over; she didn't seem to want to say the words. I told her that I just wanted her honesty, and finally she said, "I think it's over."
She went out for a few hours and I packed up some stuff and threw out some stuff. I took one of the desks from my office out to the patio and took my baseball bat to it. Just as stress relief, and I needed to take it apart anyway, since I didn't plan on moving it. At some point in the afternoon while I was crying I just wanted to feel some physical pain, so I punched the bathroom door, leaving a hole in it and a cut in my hand. Sarah has subsequently felt freaked out by this behavior, but I really don't think it's freaky behavior (feel free to comment though).
I packed up some of my books to go to goodwill; I was thinking at the time that I was going to get rid of as much stuff as possible. Now that it's a week later, maybe I'll just keep them for the time being and see if I want to put them on a bookcase once I've moved into a place of my own. I packed up some other stuff, and as I was dealing with some stuff in my office, I found the letters Sarah wrote to me in the first two years of our relationship. I started reading through all of them, and it just made me sad to think that what we felt for each other then hadn't stayed.
I walked the dogs and waited for her to come home. I texted her about talking some more and she again suggested meeting at a public place. It may be a good thing to do just to make sure neither person gets too upset, but the way she did it really suggested some fear of physical harm. Again she made me feel like a creep; I wondered if she had ever really loved me or trusted me, that she felt she had to say that. I wanted to talk to her because I realized that I wanted to ask her if she was still in love with me, a question that she had asked me numerous times. When she had asked me, it had offended me, because I felt that I showed her constantly how I felt about her. I told her, I showed her, in some ways I'm not sure what else I could have done. But when she asked me and I was hurt that she felt a need to ask me, I mostly said no. So I waited for her to come home, and I asked her. And she said no. For the first time ever, I knew that she didn't really love me anymore.
I cried some more and we both knew I needed to leave. I took a few of the bags that I had packed and put them in the back of my car. I came back in the house and she told me that I really needed to leave. I went out to my car, started it, and started crying. I waited there for a minute, turned off the car and went back up to the house. I just wanted to beg her to let me stay, not to make me leave, that we could make things better again. She repeatedly told me to leave, basically walking me back to my car. She tried to give back the ring that I had given her in 1998, the ring with the blue topaz that I had bought in 8th grade. It wasn't an expensive ring, but it was a sign that we were together; it was a sign that she was mine. Now she wasn't, and she was kicking me off my lawn.
I went back to where I've been staying, my friend's house. He doesn't live here anymore, he stays with his girlfriend since she has cats. Ironically, he got engaged as all of this stuff with me was going down. Just me in this 3 bedroom house doesn't make me feel like I have much of a home.
I kept crying throughout the night, getting less than 2 hours of actual sleep. I had a work trip to Boston on Sunday, so I was up fairly early to leave for that. I wrote her a long letter on the plane, thinking that I may not give it to her, but wanting so badly to give it to her. Giving her yet another affection that would not be received.
As I got to the hotel in Boston, she called me to make sure I had gotten in ok. She asked me where I had stayed the night before, and I told her that it was the same place I had been staying. She asked where my car had been, and I told her that I had parked it across the street, in the direction that I would need to travel to go to the airport. "You did a drive by?" I asked her. She said that she had gone to a friend's house, and driving past was just a coincidence because of that. When we hung up, she said "You know I still love you right?" I told her yes, and that I still loved her too.
After this conversation, I had a pretty good evening. I called some friends to discuss what had happened, and I IMed with some people, too. The conversation seemed to me to be a real sign that she was relenting a little bit; she had thought about it some more in my absence and had reconsidered her position.
I typed up and sent her the letter I had written her, for she had said on the phone that she was reading everything I sent her. She started IMing me later in the evening, and what she said made her actions moot. She hadn't reconsidered at all. She may have been trying to care for me, but all she did was hurt me by sending me mixed messages about her intentions. I kept telling her that if she didn't want to reconcile, we didn't have much to talk about for the moment. Like moths to a flame, though, we kept wanting to talk to each other. On some level, we're still best friends (because no one has supplanted the other in that capacity yet), and the desire to reach for each other because of that continues.
We talked a bunch on Monday again, and every time we talked, I was looking for the magic combination of words that would make her reconsider. Words that would make her remember, words that would make her know that what we had was real and we didn't have to give up on it. We just needed to work harder and go to counseling. I never found that combination.
Monday evening I realized that I hadn't really told co-workers because I was trying to deny that it had happened. If no one knew, maybe Sarah's position would soften, because then no one would know that she had come back to our relationship. I think in some ways some of her resolve was just to prove to herself she could be tough with me and not back down. After I started to tell co-workers, I really started to feel better. Trying to move past the denial and bargaining stages was a good thing; I needed to move to acceptance and start to put together a plan for myself, a plan that would carry me through the next few difficult weeks.
After going through the steps of doing this, I started to feel much better about things. I let Sarah know that I was telling people at work so that she wouldn't be caught off-guard when someone else knew. She was upset that I had told a certain person whom she considered to be her friend (though I have also talked with her a lot). I also told her that I wanted to talk to her Dad one last time. I had always liked him and wanted to make sure that he knew I appreciated that they'd made me one of the family when I was at his house. She was upset by this, too, and asked me to wait, and that we'd talk on Thursday, when I was scheduled to get back from Boston.
Most of Tuesday passed without contact. It wasn't until that evening when I was at the Red Sox game that I got a text from her: "Spit on a sawx player for me." A vile thought and a totally unnecessary text to me. Again, hopes buoyed. Maybe now that I had told co-workers and I wanted to talk to her dad it was sinking in what it meant for us to be apart. Maybe she was starting to realize that we should try a little more.
We IMed later that evening, and again, my hopes broke apart on her ramparts. Talking to me had meant nothing.
I flew back to SFO on Wednesday on the 6am flight, showered, and went to work. I didn't know what else to do. Living in someone else's house isn't 100% comfortable for me, so working from home didn't hold much appeal. We both work in the same office, which is an open office. We sit about 40 feet from one another, so we saw each other a few times without talking. After she had a long lunch, I IMed her and asked if she had brought any of the utility bills in. We needed to transfer them to her name; everything had been in mine.
We went into a conference room to do it; I told her that I didn't want to talk, and that I just wanted to get it over with. I didn't even want to look at her, because that still broke my heart.
She couldn't just get it over with, though. She had to talk to me some more. She had to ask me again whether I knew she still loves me. Of course I do. I don't remember what else she said, but it wasn't a bad conversation, and we laughed a few times. She reached over to touch me a few times, too, which I didn't really want, because that really sent me mixed signals. At one point I told her that I still really wanted to reconcile and she said, "Me too." I was confounded by this. I guess she just won't let herself, even if she wants to. We completed the transfers with a minimal of crying and went about the rest of our day. I'm sure we talked that night on IM or something, but it was still killing me to do so.
Thursday I did work from home just to try to give her some space. I didn't want to be the overbearing ex-boyfriend trying desperately to convince her that things weren't so bad. I know that's what I've been, but that doesn't mean that it's what I want to be. We chatted later in the day, and I told her I was looking for a place to rent, a place that would allow me to have a dog, so that Spot can live with me. I told her that I'd like her to bring me the reference letters we had gotten 6 years ago when we left North Carolina.
I went for a bike ride, and when I got back, I started talking with someone about the situation, and their take was: why are you moving out when she wants to break up? Your life is 10x worse right now than hers, and it's all her doing. Maybe it's the lack of sleep or the adrenaline of the bike ride (or living alone in someone else's house), but this was really making sense. I showered and decided to go back home. I packed two bags of stuff, and drove over. When I got there, she wasn't home, so I went and found the information about the landlord and I called her to let her know that I would be renewing the lease by myself (which is up at the end of the month). I watched some TV and ate one of the yogurts I had left in the fridge.
The house was in squalid condition. The dishes hadn't been washed since I left (the sink wasn't overflowing or anything, but the dishes I had washed before I left were still in the rack), and none of the couch cushions had their covers on (Lilu has become incontinent...the medication apparently has made it ok, but that doesn't mean that there weren't some casualties first). There was a distinct mildew smell in the air, the fetid smell of the unused sink.
I had parked my car around the corner so that she wouldn't see it; I wanted her to see me first, to know that I wasn't threatening her in any way. Which didn't end up working, but it was nice in theory. When she got back to the house, I heard her come to the door, so I opened it for her and said, "Hi babe! Hi doggies!" and started to give the dogs some love. Sarah had been on the phone, so she hung up and said, "What are you doing here?"
I told her that I wanted to stay in the house that was our home together. I told her that it was still her home and would continue to be her home until she chose to leave, but that I wasn't leaving her or our home. Big mistake. She flipped out and become totally hysterical. She called our friends to come over to mediate, and she just ranted for 20 minutes until they arrived. Because this plan made sense to me and seemed fair to me, I was calm the whole time. I wanted a plan on Sarah relinquishing the house. After they arrived, they decided that nothing was going to be resolved that night, one of us should go with them. After a few more cycles of hysterics and calm, I finally gave in and said I'd go for the night. I felt kind of awkward to have them in the middle in the first place; I didn't want to make it contentious.
The next morning, I woke up with the realization that I was exactly where I was the day before, before I forced the issue. I was still living elsewhere, and I had no firm plan on when I could be back in the house. So I forced the issue again, except via email. I wanted her to know that I was planning on moving back into the house immediately. This was again probably a mistake; she got really pissed and replied to my email, saying that she needed a couple of days to get some stuff out of the house. She came over to me at work and asked, very pissily, if I had gotten the email and if it was ok. I said yes, and she stormed off.
I caught up to her walking down the hall, and asked if we could talk in the collaborative workspace at work (just an open area with some tables and chairs and whiteboards and stuff). We went over and sat down and she started crying, saying that the whole experience was scary, intimindating, manipulative, and hurtful. I apologized and told her that I didn't mean to make it any of those things. I pointed out that it had a vague romantic edge to it, even if the execution wasn't so good. She thought that was barely true.
About 10 minutes after telling me that I was being manipulative, she started crying and asking me why, if I love her, would I ask her to leave a house where she feels safe, where people in the neighborhood know her, and where she knows people keep an eye on her? A few minutes of this and my heart, as always, melted for her. Without prompting, I took my keys out of my pocket and took the house and garage keys off the ring and gave them to her.
Overall, it was a good talk, though, and I think I undid a lot of the damage from the night before. She said that she was glad that those feelings weren't the last thing that she was going to remember about me.
I left work soon after the conversation, and I felt like shit the rest of the day. The only contact I've had since then was a request to bring something to work for me. As much as I long for her company and contact, I hope that is the last contact we have for a few days.
Friday, April 11, 2008
I can't quite go home
When I lived in Austin, I used to travel for Learning Tree quite a bit. As a result, I flew out of Austin all the time, and when I arrived back in Austin, the smell of the airport is what welcomed me home. The Austin airport is all one terminal, so all of the restaurants smells mingled with whatever other smells there were (it was a new airport at the time, too, so maybe that had something to do with it) to form this smell that I knew of as "arriving home."
When I've visited in the past, I've always noticed that the smell was still the same, and it gave me that same "arriving home" feeling as it did when I lived here. It was actually something that I looked forward to when I got off the jetway.
I'm in Austin this weekend, and when I arrived the other night, I noted that the airport no longer smelled exactly the same way as it had; it was similar, like a variation on a theme, but definitely not the same. While I don't live here and may never live here again, it makes me a little bit sad that there's one fewer place that reminds me of "home."
When I've visited in the past, I've always noticed that the smell was still the same, and it gave me that same "arriving home" feeling as it did when I lived here. It was actually something that I looked forward to when I got off the jetway.
I'm in Austin this weekend, and when I arrived the other night, I noted that the airport no longer smelled exactly the same way as it had; it was similar, like a variation on a theme, but definitely not the same. While I don't live here and may never live here again, it makes me a little bit sad that there's one fewer place that reminds me of "home."
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Breakfast of champions
This week is the bar. That means that on top of all of the anxiety, stress, and self-doubt I have about the exam itself manifests in crazy ways, including a practical nervous breakdown now (day 2 of 3) because I feel terrible about how today's exam went.
With the stress and anxiety, my stomach's been turning over and about...so my breakfast both days has been:
With the stress and anxiety, my stomach's been turning over and about...so my breakfast both days has been:
- Lipton Iced Tea - Peach
- Nature Valley - Oats 'N Honey Granola bars
- Swig of Pepto Bismol on my way down to the test
Friday, August 11, 2006
The QA Dilemma
Now that I'm working again, I have come to certain realizations.
The first of which is that I made some mistakes when looking for jobs this past spring. I was more interested in finding a job than in finding the right job. Granted, having a job with income is going to be better for me than the semi-employment of teaching computer programming classes. But it wasn't the path to long-term success. I really should have looked for a job that I wanted rather than taking the best offer that I received before leaving school.
This has led me to wonder whether I wouldn't have been better off just staying in Pittsburgh, where the cost of living was relatively low, and the expectations are likewise low for the people there. Doing a few classes a year probably would have gotten me by, and I could have had the same low-key semi-unhappy lifestyle that I had before, but at least I would have had a lot of free time.
So the mistake here was taking a QA job. QA people tend to have an inferiority complex, and I'm no exception. There is a lot of angst about QAers about whether they are good enough to be developers, and the general consensus seems to be that we're not. If we had been good enough to be developers, we would have been hired as developers instead of just QA. The attitude of most developers reflects this perceived inferiority, in that they rarely care what QA thinks, and definitely do little development with QA in mind. QA will always take longer than development, and yet it's given the shortest shrift in the development cycle. All of this leads to relatively unhappy and burnt-out QA people. Plus one.
The second realization is that this is a problem not limited to me. This is a general QA person complex. It also leads to a few general issues with QA departments. One is that it tends to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: QA people feel they must not be good enough for development, they become unproductive, and their work suffers (QA quality or development quality is irrelevant). Another is that QA people become less aggressive with the developers over time because the developers essentially "teach" them that the developers are not going to be that helpful to the QA people.
The third realization is that in general, of course it's going to be harder to get good QA people, too, because most of the people are who would be good QA people would rather be developers, and people who are confident about their abilities are not going to take the QA job unless they're really into QA. Which, I don't think, most QA people are (really into QA, I mean). And I don't mean to say that there aren't really good QA people who really like QA.
I don't really know what all this ends up meaning at the end of the day, other than I gotta figure out how to get out of here.
The first of which is that I made some mistakes when looking for jobs this past spring. I was more interested in finding a job than in finding the right job. Granted, having a job with income is going to be better for me than the semi-employment of teaching computer programming classes. But it wasn't the path to long-term success. I really should have looked for a job that I wanted rather than taking the best offer that I received before leaving school.
This has led me to wonder whether I wouldn't have been better off just staying in Pittsburgh, where the cost of living was relatively low, and the expectations are likewise low for the people there. Doing a few classes a year probably would have gotten me by, and I could have had the same low-key semi-unhappy lifestyle that I had before, but at least I would have had a lot of free time.
So the mistake here was taking a QA job. QA people tend to have an inferiority complex, and I'm no exception. There is a lot of angst about QAers about whether they are good enough to be developers, and the general consensus seems to be that we're not. If we had been good enough to be developers, we would have been hired as developers instead of just QA. The attitude of most developers reflects this perceived inferiority, in that they rarely care what QA thinks, and definitely do little development with QA in mind. QA will always take longer than development, and yet it's given the shortest shrift in the development cycle. All of this leads to relatively unhappy and burnt-out QA people. Plus one.
The second realization is that this is a problem not limited to me. This is a general QA person complex. It also leads to a few general issues with QA departments. One is that it tends to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: QA people feel they must not be good enough for development, they become unproductive, and their work suffers (QA quality or development quality is irrelevant). Another is that QA people become less aggressive with the developers over time because the developers essentially "teach" them that the developers are not going to be that helpful to the QA people.
The third realization is that in general, of course it's going to be harder to get good QA people, too, because most of the people are who would be good QA people would rather be developers, and people who are confident about their abilities are not going to take the QA job unless they're really into QA. Which, I don't think, most QA people are (really into QA, I mean). And I don't mean to say that there aren't really good QA people who really like QA.
I don't really know what all this ends up meaning at the end of the day, other than I gotta figure out how to get out of here.
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