So this first time I met this one he was attached to someone and they were staying at my best friend’s house while in town for the weekend. I didn’t really pay too much attention to him but I noticed him staring at me through out the night. It was a party so I didn’t make much of it. Several months later my friend and I were up in Dallas and stayed with him and his common law wife. They had a little house they were rebuilding and ran a business together. Their kids were adorable and they were good host. Years later my friend tells me that they separated and he was moving back to Houston. Apparently he had been staying with my friend while looking for a job and a place to live for him and his kids. I admitted her that I though he was kind of cute and she just shot me a sly smile. I found out later he had seen my picture at her place and was asking about me.
A week later she called me to come hang out and maybe go hit up a bar later with a group of people that were at her place. Sure enough he was there and we said our hellos. As the night progressed I could sense his eagerness to be close to me. While at the bar we had our first chance, I started dancing with him and afterward while getting a beer at the bar we started chatting. Suddenly it was like magnets! The world around us disappeared and we were hypnotized by each other. After the bar we all went back to my friend’s house and I admitted to needing to lie down. As soon as I did he was down right next to me. We stayed up all night cuddling and talking. I woke up the next morning feeling exhilarated and horrified at the same time. I had never felt that level of intensity when meeting someone. I had one experience similar just before but nothing as intense as that night.
The courtship proceeded slowly since I was being cautious having just gotten over the previous guy and because I was in the beginning stages of taking a real look at myself. The whole damn thing was just too good to be true. It was the first time in my adult life that I was willing to fall in love. I had no idea what I was doing but I tried my best. He seemed more mature than the other guys around, intelligent, multi talented, masculine, sensitive, open, and willing to engage on an intimate level. We spent hours hanging out sharing music with each other, sitting in his back yard talking about life, he would lavish me with attention and even though I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it I ate it up. He emphasized that we should take it slow and be friends in the beginning but once the ball got rolling it was another matter. He would text me like crazy and invite me over all the time and even bug out when I was just doing my normal thing and was too busy to reply right away. We started spending as much time as we could with one another and after 2 months I met his kids; the kids and I fell in love with each other. It felt so cozy, it felt like home, like I was so lucky for everything to be going so well and I bonded big time with the kids. I was hooked and ready to be reeled in. I brought over a huge chunk of my library to share with him and a chuck of my movie collection for the kids.
I was excited finally to meet someone I could share all my discoveries and interest with who would appreciate it. He in returned loaned me a couple of art books and some music to listen to. I could tell I had intimidated him with my reading list and knowledge of art, music and film. I was equally intmidated by his age, life experience and talent. He called me a little human sponge. Months went by and when Christmas came around I was ecstatic I had so much fun decorating the place with the kids and buying them gifts. Suddenly he started acting strangely but I chalked it all up to holiday money stress. He suddenly became very unavailable. To a woman in her right damn mind, all of this would have added up to “run like hell” but thanks to a drama filled childhood and being around the rough and rowdy fast crowd my whole life I didn’t think much of it. New Years Eve was the culmination and eruption of everything that had been lurking under the “too good to be true” façade.
I was at a party in their neighborhood and when I saw the light on at his house “I though oh good he didn’t go to his father’s after all let me stop by and say hi”. The kids opened the door with the most awful look on their face, that look said it all, he was screwing someone else. So I asked them to help me get all my stuff that was around the house as they expressed their confusion about their dad’s behavior. I went back to the party in a daze. I was house sitting down the street from where he lived and the kids came over the next day crying to me and telling me to most shocking things and revealing lies he had told me about his past. All of a sudden I found myself feeling like a social worker. There’s much more to the story about that night and the days that followed but let’s fast forward a month to a show where an old school popular punk band was playing. He was there with his new lady and staring at me the whole time! Later that night I started getting all these calls from him. I didn’t reply until the next day when I was informed that his new girlfriend found out the score and dumped him. He felt the knowledge of him getting dumped would bring me some sort of happiness or consolation. I could care less.
The Grand finale was when I agreed to meet him for a beer and saw the totality of the real him for the first time. The real him the creepy lying, cold hearted manipulative side in all it’s full glory. He was pulling out all the stops in a most desperate attempt to make me believe again. It was so bizarre I just sat there quietly like a blank canvas for him to project whatever he wanted to on me. I felt like I was watching a David Lynch film. He promised to love me and apologize to my friends and end everything with the other girl. I was in shock and didn’t believe a lick of it because his kids had already exposed to me EVERY skeleton from his past that he had been hiding. I snapped out of my disassociation and suddenly got scared; this was a real crazy person in front of me. It was like watching an actor that was convinced you didn’t know he was acting. Of course the next night I went over to friend’s that lived down the street from him and on our way to the store saw the new girl’s car in his drive way. We started cracking up laughing and I went home. While at home reading something suddenly came over me I decided no matter if I got my ass kicked I was going to stand up for myself. I put my pocket knife in my pocket and went over there to confront him. I swore to myself to stick to the facts only, not to accuse and not to exaggerate. I sat there like a Buddhist monk and in front of his new girl friend simply repeated every lie he had told me and everything he had said about her.
He couldn’t deny any of it and even confessed to her some lies he had told her. He looked crazy like he was having a breakdown, he just kept whispering to him self looking at his hands in front of him saying he didn’t recognize himself anymore. Whatever! I made him tell me the truth to my face and split. Of course he still needed to contact me but I had already been looking into personality disorders and pegged him for a Narcissist, http://www.narcissism101.com/ , http://www.youtube.com/user/samvaknin . I knew the only way I would get rid of him was if I suddenly became overwhelmingly interested. They just want to feel on top that’s all. It’s a wonderful trick if you suspect you’re dealing with one because if you just cut them off with no contact they can start getting weird, annoying or even stalkerish. He would so have been the type especially with all the anger he must have been harboring for me calling him out and forcing him to confront himself. Who cares what they think or if you have to give one last fat ego massage, do it and get the hell out! They’ll feel like they ended with the upper hand and there won’t be any drama next time you bump into them. Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire but be careful because a crazy can get you acting crazy too! Like when a vampire bites you, you can become one too. I saw him last summer when his reunited band played and he asked me for a hug. He claims that that night shook him up which I doubt but you never know. He’s still with the same girl though and they have a cute house in the same neighborhood together and the kids seem happy when I see them around. So maybe it did. I hope so I do love those kids but I’m a realist.
You bet your ass after that experience I took a looooooooooong sobering look in the mirror and into my past. It scared the hell out of me, I got a glimpse of what type of man was awaiting me if I continued to live an unconscious ego driven life style. I don't believe that people are good or bad most of us are in the grey. It was important for me to look at the part I played instead of feeling victimized. It takes two to tango. In the title of this post I mention the story of Blue Beard who is the archtype of this sort of experience for an uninitiated woman or for a woman who is cut off from her healthier instincts. I'm going to post the "Down it" by Nine Inch Nails because that's how you feel after this sort of thing and the song "This must be the place (a naive melody" by Talking Heads it descibes that sort of immature way to approach relationship and that head over heels, I've found my soulmate feeling. I'm also including a trailer for a Bluebeard movie I'm going to get on Netfilx this week.
