9:17 a.m. - 2012-11-08
you get me
I really didn't expect this to happen when I decided to try dating women. I don't know what I expected. I just thought it would be easier than dating men, I guess. I could't imagine sleeping with a guy who wasn't my husband. I figured my choice was either be a nun or be a lesbian, and I'm not Catholic so I chose lesbian.
Or maybe it was, "If you're single, you're a social pariah, so if I'm a going to be a social pariah anyway I might as well date women."
So I did. I met a card-carrying, rainbow-bumper-stickered Subaru-driving lesbian and discovered women aren't nearly as yucky as men. That didn't really surprise me. What surprises me, and awes me, is that I also fell in love with her.
I didn't see that one coming.
I didn't think I would ever have any real feelings for someone, or want to expose/reveal myself to anyone, because M leaving me had burned or broken everything in me that made love possible. At first, when I knew she really liked me, I wasn't sure how I felt and I was terrified of getting stuck in something I didn't want to be in because she had glommed on to me and I didn't want to hurt her.
I really liked her but I was afraid it would never be anything more.
And she was 30 and had never had a relationship longer than 18 months -- what the F was I getting myself into? There must be something wrong with her...
I think what got me was how much she deserves, and has never really had, someone who appreciates her and is good to her. Probably the biggest reason she's never had a longer relationship is that she just felt numb, like I did, from loving people who didn't love her back. She has a habit of going to the moon for other people and being their last priority. She's never really told people who let her down how she feels because she wasn't want to be out of control and emotional like her bipolar mom. Instead of saying something, she just builds a wall, and walls out the offender (and the rest of the world).
She talks to me. She says I'm the only person she's ever been able to talk to like that. I asked her why me, and she says she doesn't know.
Maybe it's all those years of reporting; I made a living by getting strangers to open up to me. But maybe it's more than that; we've both spent most of our lives feeling like inadequate, damaged freaks who are on the outside looking in.
We "get" each other. And we don't "get" a lot of the rest of the world -- the materialism, competition, cheating and selfishness. Right now I am going to school to change careers because I want to save kids' lives in developing countries, and most people I know think that makes me an impractical, idealistic daydreamer. A thinks that makes me a decent human being. She gets that I feel incredibly guilty that I chose starving myself over becoming a doctor (to do the same thing) 10 years ago. She gets that that's a feeling that "doing something" will cure and therapy will not. (Or if it would, it's a cure I don't want.) Matt never got it; no one I know really gets it, actually, besides A.
And I like being "got." I love her for that, and also because she is the very rare person who can drop everything and move to parts unknown -- and is willing to do it again. I've never had someone I could take with me before.
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