Hope guides me...

but some moments I forget it is there and I wallow in sadness.

I think being tired, and being a bit hormonal today has thrown me into a small pity party. I suppose there will be days like this, even though I am, for the most part, doing fine.

I know I shouldn't. My head knows this. I know he's a dick. I know I deserve better. But it is such a struggle b/c I haven't ever put my all into a relationship before, and I did that with this one, and still couldn't make it work. If my all isn't good enough, WTF am I gonna do?

I know that my "all" isn't all that counts. He was sabotaging things on his end. He just wasn't that into me, but said he was, and didn't want to feel guilty about the fact that he's insecure about himself, didn't want to feel guilty for fuckin' with my head and my self-esteem, didn't want to be that guy he is. So he looks to blame me, and like an idiot, I took that shit for months.

For months if he said I was insecure, I admitted to myself, "Self, you are insecure. Work on that. Improve." For months I walked around on eggshells b/c he never seemed quite happy about anything going on. Whatever plan I made was always questioned or over-ridden, and it got easier to just wait for him to make the plans (which he rarely did as he has no friends here.) For months I put up with less than mediocre sex from him, faked a lot of O's to protect his ego (Note to self: You are an idiot for doing this...) and got no sort of intimacy from him at all, in terms of a "You look great tonite" or even a daily kiss. We did at one point have a fabulous sex life, but he stopped performing at some point.

It also just occurred to me that he has done this before, this is a pattern with him. Here's how I know:

When we got back together in Dec/January, and I moved his stuff (Note to Self: Idiot! You did all the work!) in to my house, he asked me to consolidate all our owners manuals for appliances into his dorky, circa 1970's file cabinet. So I did, and when I was putting them in there, there was a letter, an email actually, that was sticking out in the folder in front. I snooped - it had caught my eye! It was a letter from the one other woman he had lived with, whom he had gotten to move from Ohio to Atlanta with him.

And then he broke up with her 3 months later. She had to return to Ohio. He began his man-whore stint at Emory Goizueta and Atlanta in general, fucking every 25-28 year old he could. Oops. Did I say that?

But I digress.

So she wrote this email post break up. And you know what, I could have written it back in Oct. when he broke up with me the first time. Here are some quotes: "I've lost weight...I go out with my friends more...I miss you...I wanted to make this work...I wanted to be a teacher so that I could be home with your kids and we could travel overseas in the summers...I wanted to be the kind of wife that J is to your dad - she takes care of him and I know that is important to you...when you said that being a teacher wasn't enough, I thought of going to get my MBA but you said that would be a waste b/c I would just drop out of the workforce to have kids...I hope you change your mind and we can get back together."

And on, and on and on. I recognized some of myself in that letter. It made me shake - I was so upset at the time. Now I never wanted to be a teacher, but for sure he and this girl Chris had discussed all the same things he and I had - children, marriage, travel. He was clearly bothered by her weight gain. (This is a recurring theme with him - he of the fatty hips, chicken arms and sunken chest. Really, who is he to judge? My fiancee from 3 years ago had the body of adonis and never once gave me crap about how I looked...)
They didn't go out much, probably b/c he messed with her self esteem, she got depressed and gained a little weight, and he looked around MBA school and thought, there's a lot of pussy here a lot younger than me and a lot cooler than her that I could hit.

So he broke up with her.

But not wanting to be the bad guy, ( he is so NICE on the surface - isn't he?) he claims she was really small town, and they were mismatched. Bullshit. He made a mistake in asking her to live with him in Atlanta - he was scared of going it alone, but once he got there and saw the buffet of young MBA students and other Hotlanta twenty-somethings, he thought, "What they hell am I doing with boring Miss Small Town Ohio?"

I confronted him over the letter. I was concerned about only about two things: One was that he wanted someone to "take care of him" (dear readers please insert wait on him hand and foot in those quote marks) and most importantly, that he would have the GALL to discourage a woman from pursuing her MBA on the grounds that she might drop out of the workforce for a couple of years to have a kid. How dare he? Heaven forbid, someone discourage a black or hispanic man- he'd be all up in their face about it. But women? This guy, through his actions, has no respect for women.

All he said was that he had changed, and he no longer thought that way. And he made a huge case about me reading the letter, thus deflecting anything he did wrong away from our conversation. The blame almost always rested on me.

Obviously, he has not changed. We all have patterns.

And now, readers, I feel better. He is despicable.