Learning | Experience (#8–Revelation iii)

From Email #1:

… I know that pursuing Susan is pretty fruitless. I was pretty much responsible for getting the friendship off the ground (outside of work, that is), but you know, man, I’m so good. I don’t chase; It’s not like I’m sending her 100 emails a day or saying "hey, let’s get together" or being the initiator and she’s going "Oh, I donno.." At times, with past women, that might have been the case. No, this is very mutual. She initiates constantly, she proactively seeks out spending large amounts of time with me/talking to me.

Sun she was bored and called me and I invited her over, Tue she called me and came over for Xmas, her idea. Wed I was off for 2 hours in between shifts so I invited her to lunch. Thu she called me pre-trivia and we talked, then went to trivia night, Friday we just emailed a coupla times about random shit, Saturday her best friend Louisa was in town so she invited me out with Louisa and L’s boyfriend Mark and we all hung out (Susan’s bf, Martin, was on a ski trip), Sunday she called and I invited her over for awhile, yesterday she worked and we went to Raina’s party, then today she called and we had Buffy marathon for basically the entire day, cut short because she works tomorrow.

See? Mutual. And I think that’s what makes me a little angsty, that I meet a great girl who’s very into me but nothin’s gonna come of it unless it’s years down the road, and you know, shit, I don’t want to be single years down the road. =p  I mean, sure, I’d love to be able to look into a crystal ball and say, "whoo-hoo, she’ll leave Martin in three years, I’ma be there", but that ain’t the way life works. Though I admit, angsty though it is, I’m glad Martin is awesome. Because if he wasn’t, I’d probably be subtly trying to break them up, which isn’t healthy. Instead, I really like him.

…she and I have a lot of fire in our relationship, a lot of repartee and challenge, which of course, much like the movies, does create rapport and tension (of the good kind). I haven’t had discussions so thought-provoking with a woman in a very long time (I was going to say "anyone", but since our emails are often very thought-provoking, I couldn’t honestly say that. Be flattered.) Add that to the genuine caring/warmth/generosity that we display toward each other, and man, I donno. She treats me very well.

I’m objective enough to be like, ok, she has to be getting something out of this because we aren’t going to get together, and so I think we’re mutually feeding off each other’s interest. Obviously she has to love having another man around who digs her totally… I provide something that she doesn’t have in her current relationship that she desires/needs. Not only that, but I’m almost always available and willing to spend time with her. And of course, what I get out of it is intimacy (just not physical), attention, adoration, friendship, and feeling like it’s great that I can be alluring to an intelligent, attractive, rich, capable woman. =p Who happens to be a lot like me personality-wise, hence the immediate comprehension of each other, but isn’t identical, which means that we can disagree on a number of things. It’s as fascinating examining how we’re different as it is how we’re alike.

I keep waiting for the point when she and I have to have an in-depth talk about this not-dating thing. Our acknowledgement of it generally comes in fits and spurts, because I think we’re having so much fun that neither of us wants to muck it up. God forbid we agree we’re seeing too much of each other, or that we need to restrain ourselves. That’s lose/lose.

Hence the not-dating. It’s the only term I can think of that fits. And man, it sucks. But it’s also pretty gd cool, and she’s the first woman I’ve been this happy around since Rebecca, who was The Greatest Month Ever (and by this point, it’s pretty hard to top that, nor will it likely ever be). Rebecca turned crazy after a month. Susan and I, on the other hand, keep becoming better. We’re on like three months now, ever since I sent her my corny, "Hey, let’s spend time together" email on 9/27. Wow, I had to look that up. It seems like forever. Though really I only started subbing in mid-August. Weird. I guess when you see someone seven days out of every nine or ten, you can lose track of time.

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on my relationship with [Barrett], and have really come to grips with a lot of things. Being a year out does help with retrospection, of course. One thing which kinda bugs me is how often I remembering wanting the feeling I had with Rebecca (or with Susan) in that relationship. In some ways, I think that Barrett’s primary draw was that I liked her but she offered commitment and stability, which I needed/craved/wanted, particularly after the Dana/Linda/Rebecca Gang of Three which gave me a lot of instability and turmoil and confusion. I found someone safe, I mean, she had me when she said "I will not abandon you". Which of course, I made sure to mention to her when she DID. Yet when we broke up, I was almost more upset about losing the relationship, about losing the Us more than losing the Her. I knew the ways we didn’t fit, and the things that had always nagged me, but I’d reconciled myself to them.

I loved her, certainly, and cared very deeply for her, but she never set my soul aflame like crazy Rebecca did, or like Susan does (particularly when we’re most relaxed and some of our dynamic leaks out around our

carefully trimmed and proper edges).  Barrett gave me stability. She gave me the chance to calm down and have a normal relationship that lived and died of its own accord. I emerged from it with a clear sense of what I want, which is no longer "a relationship", but "a specific type of relationship". A Rebecca pre-crazy relationship. A Susan relationship. Obviously I can’t explain how it feels, but *I* know the difference. I know what I want, and one thing I’ve learned from this Susan episode is that you know? Chances are I can get it. I just have to have the opportunity.

You didn’t really think that was all I wrote, did you? Email 2:

More thoughts before bed. This honestly just hit me as I was replying to you, and now I’m intrigued by my own thoughts.

Just for kicks about five seconds ago, I tried to consider what would happen if Susan and I got together in some scandalous way, which would be fairly huge, particularly since we have a big group of people now, a couple of which look at us askance on occasion, to the point where we just don’t tell people how much time we spend together (except for Martin, whom Louisa decided–after being around us all night–is a saint.) Trivia nights would be ruined, for example. Susan’s friends are mostly Martin’s friends because she doesn’t cultivate many friendships (tonight, she said I’m the only person she made an effort to befriend since 8th grade. We were looking through old yearbooks at the time.) This is one of our similarities, in that we’re quite charming and easy to like/be acquaintances with, but we keep people at arm’s length and tend to discourage people from wanting to make demands on our time.

She’s pals with Raina, though Raina’s one of the ones that gives us The Eye every now and again. At least one of Martin’s friends is trying to become better friends with me (she’s the wife of his best friend, Phil), and I think she’s great fun, but at the same time, hello, I don’t cultivate acquaintancefriends, and only really care to invest myself/spend time with close friends, AND if you’re a close friend, I obviously talk about my crush on Susan. =p  So that automatically means everyone in my social group can’t be a close friend, even if I wanted to.

I’m such a ridiculous all-or-nothing person, and sometimes it makes me chuckle. Because really, "I can’t spend solo time with you because you’re not a BFF-caliber friend" is pretty lame. Yet it’s who I am. And it’s who she is. Which makes our Notdating perfectly feed itself, because we just don’t want to spend time with any other friends except in groups, which means that we can have our own little private bubble of Notdating, and that we’ve simultaneously found a close friendship *and* kept the world at arm’s length. I’ve often said that I’m on an island, and I keep everyone else in the world off of it. If you’re on the island, you’re a close friend, and in rare company. What I always wanted in a relationship is someone who can build a nice castle on that island that’s just ours. So we have the Castle, then the Island of Close Friends, then The World, which we visit on occasion but don’t really want to reside in. I know it sounds silly. =p But it’s how I interact most comfortably with the world, and what makes me happiest is the Castle, and that’s what I have with Susan. Our own little world that we retreat to. It doesn’t stop us from having a healthy social life, full of fun, popularity, and interesting times.

It’s interesting as well how wonderfully my life enables..um, Castling. I guess. The close friends I’m in the most contact with don’t intermix. They’re all spread all over the place. The only two that interact are Susan and Heather, and that’s sporadic. . . they’re all part of my life, but NOT each other’s, so I have an incredibly, amazingly compartmentalized life where, aside from Susan and Heather occasionally working together, the only thing most of you know about each other is what I relate. There’s no actual interaction to overcome my perceptual bias. Cody won’t meet Susan won’t meet Jen won’t meet Adam won’t meet Scott.

I could analyze this stuff all night, so I’ll stop. I’m curious if your friendships are likewise compartmentalized, because I never actually sat down and thought about it in this way.

Night again. =p

 

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