Too Complex For Love

I have struggled, for most of my life, with relationships. In general, relationships are hard to navigate. It’s hard to incorporate another individual into your life, especially when you’ve spent a majority of your life only having to worry about yourself and your family and even friends. To be dedicated to another person, another soul, is hard. Maybe that’s why most marriages end in divorce. Maybe that’s why my generation doesn’t believe in marriage anymore. There’s simply too much to consider. How can we be expected to find someone that completes us in a way that no one else can? There’s 7.9 billion people that we share this planet we call home with; and we’re taught that someone, somewhere in that 7.9 billion, is our perfect match? It’s hard to fathom. I’m skeptical about love and relationships. Always have been, always will be. I considered myself, for a very long time, too complex for anyone to love. I find that I feel that I am still right. The first relationship that I had lasted for about 2 1/2 years, through the first half of my high school years. It was what many would consider a “first love” and it felt like that. We complimented each other in the best ways. He was kind, sweet, polite and was more than happy to share his heritage and culture with me as he wasn’t born in the same country as me. I learned a lot about Germany while we were together, and even found that some of my favorite dishes, even to this day, are German. He was also the first person that came into my life that showed me that sometimes families aren’t meant to be together and that often, the struggle with ones parents is something that can and will last a life time. He saw me through a time where my health was lacking; where I started having seizures and really struggled with the irreversible damage it was doing to my brain. He helped me through weeks of being at home because I couldn’t keep up in school and couldn’t go to class because it ran the risk of me injuring myself because of my seizures, he was there when I started taking medication that was altering my brain chemistry, he was there was I was stuck in hospitals for days and weeks at a time because, for a lack of better words, my brain was broken. I have a special place in my heart for him. When we broke up, things weren’t the best at the time. I had just found out my mom had cancer and that there was a real chance that I would never be able to be independent if I continued to have seizures during the formative years of brain development. He was having his own struggles with mental health. We lashed out at each other, trying to hurt each other as much as we were hurting. Our end wasn’t the best. But the end of the relationship was the birth of a new one. We are still close. I still consider him my first love. And my heart will always thank him for holding my hand was life was scary and the future was unclear. The next boy I dated was much like the first. Kind, loyal, sweet, gentle, always willing to listen and always willing to communicate. The way you think of when you think of a partner. I think, in the end, our downfall was because he was younger than me. He and I, we lasted the longest of any of my relationships. 3 1/2 years. Through the final years of high school for me and into my second year of college. He was the first person that I had considered I might end up marrying one day. I could picture myself with him building a life together. It was during these years that I had adamantly sworn off having children. I didn’t want kids. I was still in a place where my health was a time bomb and I was going through mental health problems related to my mom’s cancer diagnosis. My brain was constantly foggy, I was on so many medications that it would make a healthy person’s head spin. And I was also overcoming some severe mental health problems that had landed me in the hospital on a mental health hold on one occasion. It was, at the time, the lowest point of my life. And it was nice to have someone there for me. Someone who, despite all the chaos, was a lighthouse in the harbor during a hurricane. He also came from a broken home, and shed more light into a family dynamic with two parents who were no longer together. Unlike my last relationship, I got to meet both of his parents and experience them independently. And it was very early into the relationship that I realized that I hated his dad. Hated. Not only did the man make me uncomfortable, he made me feel like I was being watched, like he was studying me. He was a former police officer, so I know that my presence (a new presence in his son’s life) made him uneasy. But I didn’t like how he always looked at me like I was a criminal. And his mom? She was an over bearing helicopter parent. And that’s coming from me, who comes from a strict military family. But I didn’t mind it because together, the two of them brought someone special into the world. He saw me through junior year, senior year, freshman year of college and partway through my sophomore year. The years we had together were good. Until they weren’t. They don’t tell you that, when you go to college (even if it’s in the same town as your high school), you might as well be in a long distance relationship. We struggled to find time for each other. Between marching band for him (which takes up so much time) and my days which started at 5am with cheer practice and ended at sometimes 11pm with play rehearsals, it was hard to find the time to just be with each other. And, toward the end, it was becoming a “you need to pick me over everything else” situation for him. I didn’t show up to his concerts because I was sick or working or studying or anything else? I was the wrong one. And half way through my sophomore year, right before we broke up, my university completely shut down. The administration told us that after winter break, there would be no more classes or anything. I was juggling with helping friends, many of whom were from out of state and some of whom were from out of country, find somewhere to continue their education and even find places to live. He didn’t like that. So, he broke up with my on Christmas Day over text message. He told me that I “clearly wanted different things from him and that he didn’t want to stand in the way”. I remember looking at the text message in the early hours of Christmas morning before anyone was awake and thinking “what a shitty way to break up with someone”. I didn’t cry over it . That relationship has been over for me for quite sometime because of the way he had been making me choose between him and my success. I supported him when and where I could, sometimes even staying up 24 hours to make it happen. It was never good enough. Despite the way he ended things, I considered it on good terms. In the end he was right, he wanted different things. He wanted to be a music teacher and live on a farm and raise cattle and homestead. At the time, I was working on a criminal justice degree with a focus in homeland security. I hoped to one day work in the Pentagon. You can’t really do that from a farm in Oklahoma. So he was right. We wanted different things. And I was okay with how things ended. Apparently he wasn’t. I think he wasn’t happy with how easily I resigned to the end of our relationship; so he decided that he was going to start telling people I abused him. This man, who stood 6’2 and weighted probably 170lbs was telling people that I was abusing him. Physically and emotionally. Me. The 5’3, 130lbs ex-girlfriend. Not only was it amusing that he would claim that, but he also offered no proof to back it up. I’m not saying that men don’t suffer abuse. They do. I’ve seen the outcome of those cases myself, but thing with those cases of physical abuse, there is always proof. I wanted to tell him “Sir, your father is an ex-cop with ties to the police department. If I was hitting you, he would have my ass in jail in a heartbeat”. But I didn’t. I stayed silent. Until he told his cousin, a psychotic bitch who hated me. She would begin to text me non-stop, telling me what a horrible person I was. When I blocked her, she would just keep texting me from her mother’s phone, any phone that she could get a hold of. She told me to kill myself over and over, knowing full well my struggles with mental health. I ignored her. Never once did I response. The only time that she managed to get a response from me was when she threatened my family. I told her if she continued, I would take the threats to the police and blocked her again. She stopped after that. I still have the collection of screenshots from that conversation; hiding away in a folder as a constant reminder of a time where my character was assassinated by someone who once said he loved me. He left a bad taste in my mouth when it came to dating. I had a hard time trusting anyone with anything because I didn’t want it to be used against me like he had allowed his cousin to do with me. I didn’t date for a few years. I got stopped pursuing my criminal justice degree and did a hard turn into emergency medicine. I went through the training and education required to become an EMT and started my career just as I met another guy. He was the worst thing to ever happen to me. When I first met him, he was everything I was looking for. Charming, funny, considerate, compassionate, kind, gentle and incredibly smart. He worked in the technology sector and was incredible at what he did. I wasn’t looking for someone to fall in love with; I had sworn love off just as I had done with children. I was a first responder now; we worked long and hard hours and we had sleep issues, a chronic need for energy drinks and a hatred for human stupidity. In other words, not built for keeping lasting relationships. But something about him made it easy to love. He was sweet and gentle and was always thinking about me. He would bring me food when I was sitting at posts waiting for a call to drop. When I ordered something and had to rush away to a call before getting my food, he would always go get it and make sure to get something extra for my partner. He would take the time to wash my blood soaked uniforms for me when I couldn’t bare to look at the bloodstains. He absolutely hated blood, but he would do it anyway because he knew that the disgust that he felt was nothing compared to what I experienced to get blood saturated into the fabric of my uniform. When I say I loved him, I really mean it. We talked about a wedding. A long floor length gown with a long train for me, a tailored suit for him, in a large church in front of God and our families. A traditional wedding. That’s what we dreamed of. And I firmly believe it would have happened if not for Covid. Without going into too much detail, Covid changed us. It was the single worst time to be a first responder in recent years, and it was hard juggling a relationship where you had to be apart yet be in the same space. And when I tried to make it better, it only made it worst. I lost so many pieces of myself to him. There are parts of myself that he has that I will never get back. There are part of me that broke that will never be able to be repaired. I was done. I was content with being alone.

All this to say, I was never expecting to find someone else. It was like life saw how much the last few men in my life had broken my spirit, taken my identity and completed changed me, and decided “hey, maybe she’s had enough. Maybe we should give her someone better”. Because it did. The only problem? He’s half a world away.

Genuine long distance takes an average relationship and makes it about twenty times harder. There will be times where the interactions we have make me feel like I can conquer anything. And there are times that it makes me feel lower than I have ever been before. It’s one of those low times.

I supposed that’s why I’m writing. Didn’t someone once say that all the best poetry comes from love and heartbreak?

With all my history, all the abuse that I suffered at the hands of those that would say they love me with one breath and then say my name in spite in the next, I don’t expect a lot from relationships anymore. Anything that doesn’t involve severe emotional and physical abuse is a win in my book. I don’t consider myself high maintenance at all. I don’t want for a lot. More than anything, I just want someone to talk to, someone to rest my head on their shoulders and hold me when I can’t hold myself up anymore. My job comes with a lot of trauma, a lot of seeing things you wish you could unsee and trying hard to cope with things that were never meant to be understood. Over the last few years, that’s made me tough. I have thick skin and a “don’t give a shit” attitude. You wanna say shitty things about me? Treat me like garbage? I’ve held a dead baby in my arms. You don’t compare. My attitude now is that I deserve the bare minimum.

Want to know the last time I heard my boyfriend’s voice over the phone? May 11th when we spent the night watching Breaking Bad. As I write this it’s May 28th. You do the math. Does it add up? Does it make sense?

I’ve come to terms with the fact that he’s not one for talking about things in the same way I talk about things. The environment that I work in requires constantly communication. Down to the second at times. When I chart things at the end of a patient encounter, I’m charting to every minute I was with that patient. I am vocal with my feelings. I spent a long, long time suppressing them. Now I know that it’s not a healthy way to conduct things. So now, I communicate. Sometimes I think he doesn’t like how much I communicate. And sometimes I think he’s tired of hearing me. Of listening to me. He reminds me a lot of my last boyfriend. Incredibly funny, a wicked sense of humor and wildly intelligent. But there’s softer side to him that I know only a few people get to see. That’s a side that didn’t exist with my ex. And if it did, I don’t think I ever earnestly saw it. That’s what makes me think that this is something more.

Love is complex. It’s a simple word, only four letters. But the meaning behind those four letters are infinite. I’ve seen love in its trust forms. The love in a mother’s eyes after I had here the baby I just helped her deliver. The love in a son’s eyes as he holds his father’s hand as his father passes away peacefully. There are moments where love is almost palpable, so strong it’s almost like you can touch it. What’s distance compared to that feeling?

I find myself standing on a precipice of wanting to be angry. Where I feel that I have been forgotten, lost somewhere in the 9,057 miles that separate him and I. Where the pain of him telling me he wants to spend more time with me while actively not doing that is a sharp stab in my heart. Where the agony of him always tell me “hey, this person it having a bad time, you should go spread a little love to them” and then him staying silent while I struggle is a painful reminder of what I have always thought:

Maybe I am too complex for love.