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Dating: Hell is Other People


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...yeah.

I have been in touch with this place for like two years though, well before the run of this highly disturbing racist fetish/totally innocent slight statistical anomaly happened. I'm just going to map things and not talk to anyone. That's my plan and I'm sticking to it.

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On 5/9/2016 at 4:33 PM, Mandy said:

ES, you have inspired me to get an imaginary boyfriend, too!!  His name is Bucky Barnes.  He's not around a lot, is a bit of a tortured soul, and he's super hot.  Speaks a bunch of languages and all that.  He's JUST WHAT I ALWAYS WANTED. Thanks so much for the idea!   My life is now PERFECT!!!

ETA: and now, 17 hours later, I find I dreamed of the Winter Smolder last night.  Thanks.  No really, I mean it, thanks :P

Bucky sounds awesome...I'm proud that I inspired you.  Hal sends his best.  He would type something, but he's busy ironing, emptying the dishwasher, and cleaning stuff. :D

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Since getting Vinny to finally leave my apartment my dating life has been a fiasco of dudes I know crawling out of the woodwork to say hey girl. The current roster of harem members and prospects includes my ex fiancée's best friend (previously mentioned in the thread, came to Ini's wedding, lives in NYC while I remain in MPLS). He's coming to town Sunday to catch me before my Alaska trip and hanging around Minneapolis for about a month. He's a good guy but I don't think I'd keep him, we've been close friends for over a decade. There is also an occasional coworker who I have previously dated (I actually sort of chose Vinny over him at the time) who lives in Wisconsin and guests with us. Nothing has happened but he seems to be signaling he wants it to, but I'm not 100% sure. Possibly a bad idea because we are close friends and colleagues, but he's pretty foxy and a good guy. Third is the biggest potential for bad idea. I have an order for protection against Vinny, he moved from New York a couple years ago and other than coworkers the only people he knows come from knowing me or knowing his best friend who is how Vinny and I met. This friend knows everything Vinny did (witnessed some of it) and is still close friends with him because he's a super loyal guy. But he's also been very vocally sticking up for me when Vinny runs his mouth and he is also a close friend of mine. We hung out to do some street art in my neighborhood (Vinny still lives very close so if I'm walking around at night I always bring someone) and watch the new PeeWee movie on Netflix. I did not regard it as a date but I think he did since he initiated some things and ended up staying over. So I am accidentally kind of casually seeing my most recent significant exes' best friends. This will go well.

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54 minutes ago, Kay Fury said:

Since getting Vinny to finally leave my apartment my dating life has been a fiasco of dudes I know crawling out of the woodwork to say hey girl. The current roster of harem members and prospects includes my ex fiancée's best friend (previously mentioned in the thread, came to Ini's wedding, lives in NYC while I remain in MPLS). He's coming to town Sunday to catch me before my Alaska trip and hanging around Minneapolis for about a month. He's a good guy but I don't think I'd keep him, we've been close friends for over a decade. There is also an occasional coworker who I have previously dated (I actually sort of chose Vinny over him at the time) who lives in Wisconsin and guests with us. Nothing has happened but he seems to be signaling he wants it to, but I'm not 100% sure. Possibly a bad idea because we are close friends and colleagues, but he's pretty foxy and a good guy. Third is the biggest potential for bad idea. I have an order for protection against Vinny, he moved from New York a couple years ago and other than coworkers the only people he knows come from knowing me or knowing his best friend who is how Vinny and I met. This friend knows everything Vinny did (witnessed some of it) and is still close friends with him because he's a super loyal guy. But he's also been very vocally sticking up for me when Vinny runs his mouth and he is also a close friend of mine. We hung out to do some street art in my neighborhood (Vinny still lives very close so if I'm walking around at night I always bring someone) and watch the new PeeWee movie on Netflix. I did not regard it as a date but I think he did since he initiated some things and ended up staying over. So I am accidentally kind of casually seeing my most recent significant exes' best friends. This will go well.

1st bolded: how do you know this? There are alarm bells going off in my head for this guy, and that's the sentence that triggered them.

2nd bolded: I don't usually associate PeeWee with sexy times (except for that time he got arrested). ;)

(apologies if abrupt - really tired after a long week & not able to frame concern very well & worried for you after the last months)

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We have many mutual friends who have told me that Vinny has denied the domestic violence allegations (despite the court record of him confirming them) and that this guy has set them straight and that when he's brought me up in a group setting he's reminded him he's not supposed to talk about me. This guy is a good dude and in general kinda tactless and ungentle about it when he thinks people are wrong. He also always stuck up for me when we were still together and Vinny would be acting a fool.

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It's actually a really really good thing for me to have a buffer person. We go to all the same places and music events, and having someone who (with my permission) can headsup I will be going somewhere so he can skip it and avoid arrest is very good for me. And, I think it's good for him to have people around him who know more than his "she's crazy" side of things to tell him no. This friend (we need to name him at some point) is doing exactly what I would prefer and feel most comfortable with, and he asked me what that would be. He's been looking out for me in exactly the ways I request.

He came over last night and we watched Netflix and talked and fooled around and I sent him home this morning.

Now for the next few days Jason, my date from Ini's wedding is staying in town with me.

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To my mind at least, being a good buffer between you and an abusive ex doesn't make terrible taste in friends any more okay. I don't know the backstory with you and the ex, but for me that goes for any kind of violence - if someone said to me "yeah, okay, so my best buddy beats up and robs grannies occasionally, but I'm a really loyal friend so we still hang out all the time and sometimes I even tell him not to beat up grannies," I would think that person was a dipshit. I don't take domestic violence any less seriously. YMMV. 

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 I do not normally post in this thread, but today something occurred and I just wanted to bounce my thoughts and feelings off the hivemind. 

.Five years ago, I went through a tumultuous four year long relationship, and it finally ended when I came back to Texas from Florida to take care of my Mother while she was going through breast cancer treatment. She cheated on me with a good friend while I was away. After a horrible break up process that took place long distance, I never returned, blocked her on all of my electronic accounts, and haven't spoken a word to her since then. I also deleted all of my photographs of her..

 Somebody that used to work with both of us posted a group picture today that she was a part of on Facebook, and it started bringing out some of these old feelings. I no longer harbor any of the anger that I once had or the self righteous indignation, but I am still sad that we were not able to make things work. We invested a large part of our lives in one another, and despite rational thought, I hold this as one of the largest personal failures of my life. 
 I still firmly believe that the choice to not communicate at all with one another was for the best. 

 Five years later, I still find myself with major commitment  issues, and very rarely date anymore. The amount of effort and time it took to maintain this relationship was so great, and the payoff was so horrible I guess I have just not been willing to go through that. I do find myself lonely at times though. I was just wondering if anyone else has gone through this long of a phase after a relationship didn't work out? Five years is an awfully long time.


 

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5 hours ago, Mandy said:

 

It sounds like time has passed enough to dull the pain and that you're now able to get over it some, which is great.  The commitment issues... well, I can understand why you'd have them, but I feel like you can't blame everyone for the actions of someone else, right?

Personally, I am done done and done with dating, so five years doesn't sound like so much to me.  My college boy was texting me last week because his parents are moving to Houston and he wanted to see me now that he's out of school for the summer... I couldn't be arsed to even shave my legs and would rather watch CSI reruns than have him over, even for a quickie.  So I don't know if I'm able to really give much of an opinion on it all.  Wish you all the luck if you do decide to jump back in again, though!

 

Back in the day, I was a three-monther person. That started in high school and continued through college. I knew by the end of three months if I liked them well enough to move forward or slip away. And I did not sleep with them during that period. And yes, I went years without a a real "date"  I figured if I were with the wrong person, just treading water, I might not meet someone else. And I always met the best of people when I was not "looking"

I have been married twice - once for 13 years and this marriage is going on 25.  But that does not make me an expert

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On 5/23/2016 at 2:08 PM, Howdyphillip said:

 I do not normally post in this thread, but today something occurred and I just wanted to bounce my thoughts and feelings off the hivemind.

The passage of time itself helps, but I don't think that is the determining factor at all on whether you've emotionally moved on from the last experience. I once had a friend (once, because he had an emotional meltdown and treated my husband in an atrocious way so we cut him off) who had a 10 year relationship and then his husband dumped him. He was still not over his husband 7 years later, and the two prospective dates he had during that time all bailed out once they sensed that.

 

Some wounds heal better than others, and everyone is different.

 

That said, here's maybe a different perspective:

Just because the relationship didn't work out to be a forever relationship it doesn't mean that you've wasted all your time and all your effort. During the relation there must been great things happening, for you to still have these strong feelings for her. Those are part of the reward. It is sad that it didn't go the way you'd like it to, but perhaps see that despite the disappointment in that, there were still plenty of good things that came out of it.

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2 hours ago, TerraPrime said:

Snip

Thank you for your advice. You are so very right that it takes some people longer amounts of time to heal. Even the same person (myself) can experience vastly different experiences during the break of different relationships. 

 I like to fancy myself as a rational thinker, but sometimes, even with the knowledge of how I should look at things doesn't necessarily mean that I am able to keep my emotion in line. It is a process sometimes transferring the head to the heart. It starts by recognizing the issues though. 

 I am not feeling nearly as sad today. It may have been a good thing to go through a little bit of this yesterday. 

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It's taken situating myself outside the ideal of monogamy, even if the reality is that I'm yet to have more than a couple of dates with anyone other than Brook, to realise how deeply the mindset frames the way we judge everything about relationships.  The way I've seen it talked about in at least one poly book is of the 'relationship escalator', you meet someone, fall in love, move in, everything goes great, your lives intertwine and you are together forever and always after that.  Any deviation from that means the relationship was a failure.  Even after I stopped accepting this paradigm, this framing was still very potent and continued to dominate my thinking, specifically how I thought about my marriage until I caught myself recently.

There are two ways to look at it, one is the failure lens: I went over there, the relationship didn't work out long term, we hurt each other a lot in the break up and I came back home with a lot of financial loss.  Certainly a failure if that's how I want to see it.  From another perspective though, I learnt more about relationships from my ex in a year than I had in the 15 years before that. I learnt who I was, to the point of realising I was a woman and that I needed to transition.  I learnt that when I'm confident and truly want a relationship with a woman, I can go after it and still be respectful about it.  I learnt that my father loved me far more than I thought, enough to stand by me through everything that followed and this knowledge was central to me having the confidence to face that.  After the initial conflict, I also gained a friend I will love for the rest of my life, who knows me better than almost anyone else, has seen the ugliest side of me and although we aren't right romantically, when I was in a terrible situation last year she was there for me emotionally without me having to ask.  All of that is worth far far more than the superficial failures.

I'm not saying that every relationship works out that way, and plenty *are* failures, I'm just saying that sometimes a relationship ending isn't a terrible thing - you were together for a time and helped each other through that, then moved on. And maybe there were fuck ups made during the break up, because you're both human and that shit is hard, but when it's right you can forgive each other and find real intimate friendship on the other side of that, and the relationship was an immense success. Not a failure.  No idea if it's possible to look back at yours like that Philip, or if it's possible to have any kind of relationship with her now - I will concede the whole "we didn't work out because I'm a woman and you're straight" thing really eases any lingering tension.

I also feel that the idea of rationality when it comes to relationships is really quite misused. How can rationality be divorced from emotion in the context of something that's entirely emotion driven? I strive for a form of rationality that's entirely integrated with, and even driven by my emotions rather than independent to, but I know that's weird to a lot of people on here.  It seems more fitting for dating than any other topic though!

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That sounds marginally better than mine. She spent around 30-35 minutes talking about herself - work, friends, her new job, her old job, how *awesome* she is at yoga ( this led to the choice comment about how Indians should be naturally good at yoga)  - I spent most of it nodding along but she barely asked anything about me. 

I thought it was a disaster - and then this morning I get a text asking if I want to get together on Sunday. I'm quite confused. 

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What did you reply? Because by definition, that was therefore a better date than the guy who called it a night by walking me to the end of the block. There was also bizarrely profuse sweating at one point, which I really didn't understand.

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I haven't texted back yet. I'm still a bit bemused that she wants to do that again - I should say no, but I'm mildly curious if she can go two dates without being even slightly interested in me ( though she might have just been nervous) . Pfft - he could be one of those people that naturally sweats if he walks more than 50m or he could have a thyroid problem. 

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Something I feel like I've only really recognised quite recently (which is pretty sad when you think about it because it seems like it should be obvious) is that people have very different styles of sharing information. I routinely get frustrated with one of my oldest friends, because I feel like every time we meet up, all we talk about is her. I always ask about her, she never asks about me. I feel like I'm the one doing all the conversational leg-work without ever really getting my turn to talk.

Increasingly though I'm realising that it may be equally frustrating for her, when she launches into talking about her life and study and everything that's going on with her - because from her perspective, she's always sharing and giving information, and I never do. I'm waiting for her to ask; she's waiting for me to share. We have two different conversational styles. Neither way is wrong, but it can lead to both sides becoming frustrated. That could be what happened with your date. Maybe she walked away wondering why you weren't opening up much, and thinks maybe you will on a second date.

Oooorrr she could just be that self-absorbed.

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