Sorry to hear things didn't work out with "Epiphany Girl." It sounds like you're taking it in stride, so that's good. Hope to hear further updates as time goes on!
Thank you for being encouraging! I reread back a few posts and I'm glad to see the progression of the story is still making the same sense.
Hmm said:I've been struggling internally with the thought of, who can I count on? It seems I have the habit of getting eagerly attracted to girls with trust issues, which has the dual-negative of being an unstable, insecure relationship, a, which has a tendency to vanish completely when it's over, b. And I definitely don't want to build this ship to wreck.
...
Overall, I feel more on top of things than ever, romantically. I feel like I'm making new mistakes and not just repeating the old.
Those struggles from September are still the same struggles I'm facing today. Who can I count on? I'm surrounded by relative strangers. Too often for comfort, as my bonds start to run deeper, they thin out until they trickle down to nothing. It's rather unnerving and makes the whole "getting to know" you process daunting, to say the least.
All the same, I'm glad to say I've been making overwhelming progress into developing more into the person I want to be: calm, centered, in control, charismatic, all that good stuff. The loneliness has been challenging as it always has, but I've come more to peace with it. I've accepted that because I've set my standards for a lover so uncommonly, the road to success will be lined with failures and loneliness. This is how I want it, but it is still rather tough.
The fwb (I realize I've been talking about since the first post in this thread) and I decided we had "irreconcilable differences" -- she wanted monogamy and I wanted polyamory. Yet she said she was okay with the for-the-now fucking around, and I wasn't 100% gung ho for it, but I wasn't seeing a reason to stop, so we didn't. That is, until we did. The lyric you should know me better by now came to mind right off the bat. For a long while, my libido with her was iffy. The final days of our relationship, it felt like we were living in two realities having two distinct, saran-wrap-divided conversations. My patience for our relationship finally ran out, and I stopped trying to hold on. Apparently that was the only thing keeping me from seeing our glaring discrepancies. I see now what I didn't see then as red flag material, and I will use that knowledge going forward, ever-bettering my understanding of the world as it is.
That relationship ended about a month ago now. I thought it could and would end in friendship, but to no avail. Since then, I've been less interested in actively searching for romance. I believe my then-ignorance to the red flags allowed me to go too far with her, and that hurt her in a way she is not forgiving me for. I can't force another to forgive.
I've started focusing more on my immediate surroundings, as a result. I've been trying to build more friendships and build more on my friendships. I've become more disillusioned by Tinder dates, OKCupid dates, etc. Lust as a driving factor has stopped being compelling for me. I identify with my preferred gravitation toward stoicism over hedonism.
A girl messaged me on OKCupid the other day, and it helped bring some perspective. On her profile, she said she was poly-curious, and I realized just how much my life was affected by the lack of likeminded people like that. Her impulse to message me wasn’t repeated… oh well!
But not only am I surrounded by monogamously minded people the vast majority of the time, those people are college-aged kids. Really, kids. I feel like I’m more eager to get out than I am afraid of the world beyond, now. It used to be the other way around, that the “real world” was scary. A lot of people here still have this mindset. But I’m just itching to get out and meet a wider variety of people in a more relaxed environment than school allows. Freedom. College is intentionally made ethnically diverse to give people the chance to interact with different walks of life, but I feel like that philosophy needs to be taken at least a few steps further. Too much indoctrination; not enough of what Socrates called “liberal education” blah blah blah, but that’s a rant for a differently themed site. I feel like an airplane with a tiny runway. I feel like big fish in a small pond. I feel like I’m a piano and only one octave of the keys are even being played. The claustrophobia used to be crippling, but now I take it more in stride. And I’m writing this post to vent it all out, because the feeling of lostness still resides at times, and I’m sure that has to to partially with the loneliness and the not having anybody to directly express this to. At least, not to anybody who understands and passionately empathizes with it. I endure the claustrophobia because I’m investing in my future, is the rationale. I can delay gratification. That’s why I suffer. In the meantime, I develop and grow and flourish the best I can given the circumstances. My appraisal of it all is optimistic. But there’s still the suck of it all. I see both sides of the coin.
My best friend (who is female) has a steady and positive fwb relationship, and I am genuinely happy for her. I’m aware of my own very giving, considerate abilities; any envy I have for her situation (or jealousy I have of her fwb’s situation) pales in comparison to those abilities. I only bring it up because when I used to read the claim that women have so much more luck than men at dating in poly, I thought I was some kind of hot shot because I could get dates with relative ease. I see now how I was underestimating character flaws and committing faux pas to the effect where the quality of these relationships did not justify the quantity. Now, my quantity is zero, and the quality I’m shooting for is definitely higher. But my story definitely resonates the theory that women have it easier than men in the dating world as true, and I see that now. Then again, my friend is an extraordinary woman. So she has that going for her
In my earlier days of poly, and I only just thought of this while wrapping up the last paragraph, I would oscillate between having standards that were too low for me and holding a standard that was too damn high. Now, I’m getting emotionally closer to two girl _ friends who are clearly as inexperienced (if not injured) romantically as anyone I’ve dated. On the whole, it feels like less than I want. I won’t use the word “deserve” there. It’s less than I strive for, the quality of relationship. On the other hand, it’s what I have. These simply are my friends and I don’t just want to give up on them because I feel better. I don’t want to quit, but I don’t want to be sucked into a kafkaesque vicious cycle because I didn’t draw the lines right. And I don’t want to realize too late that I didn’t draw the lines right and cause unnecessary harm in someone for pushing them away. And then panicking inside, and basically laying waste to it all. I’m looking, in all aspects of my life, to be making a positive effect on those around me. I’ve dwelled too long in negativity, and I’m relearning just how powerful my ability to be positive, motivational, inspirational, and all that jazz can be. I used to be that way when I was young and naive, but I wasn’t strong about it. Now that I’ve been broken and had to put myself back together, I’ve learned just how crucial my integrity is to finding lasting, meaningful happiness. A brilliant structure that can be blown away in the wind counts for next to nothing. The adage about “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” rings true. And I just want to be as utterly sure as I possibly can be that in the way I am handling these relationships, I am not doing harm and I am only causing good. To the best of my ever-bettering ability, I think I am doing that. I’m trying to draw the line of where is too far regarding intimacy, and it’s an ever-shifting balancing act, but I feel like I’m getting it. Conclusive evidence pending. All I have are bread crumbs. And on the concept of oscillating between low standards and high standards, I'm feeling now that it's better to build on those more depressing relationships than try to jump the gun and shoot for out of my league. Staying grounded in my here-and-now, I'm not overeager trying to change where I am. I'm settling myself into my now, and the fact of the matter is, my now involves these two friends, and I have been given this opportunity, and I shall use that opportunity to learn to build better and smarter.
More melancholy a post than usual, but it’ll have to do for now.
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