A few weeks ago, I got a scathing phone call from an ex. My offense this time? I wasn’t around to rub lotion on her back. “You are never there when I need you!” she howled. From lube to Lubriderm in such a short time, with so many feelings crushed along the way.
Soon after, I attended her birthday party so she could perform her ritual of degrading me in front of her riends and treating me like the ingrate I am for leaving her dry between the shoulder blades.
This was followed by a different ex calling to bend my ear about her breakup with a boyfriend. “There, there,” I consoled her, sending inspirational messages worthy of a Hallmark stamp. “You’re the best!” she replied in text messages, until an apparent lobotomy led her to hate me again within days. “You’ve been mean to me in the past,” she wrote, “and I’m seriously considering not being your friend anymore.”
I cracked up. The thought of any of us being “friends” is somewhat comical. Really, we are simply each other’s emotional punching bags, there to take a tap or a steady barrage, depending on the other person’s mood. I always seem up for a good pummeling. Allowing myself to get knocked around is my penance for having hurt another person in the universe.
I am one of those people who believes that my world will tip off its axis if I can’t maintain peace and harmony with all who have rolled in and out of my bed. It’s almost a goal of mine to feel like the better person by becoming her friend.
But the stage being skipped in most of these relationships, I realize, is the hate: some good old-fashioned voodoo shit where you wish the other person dead and ignite piles of her belongings. I usually try to progress directly from love (or something resembling it) to like. I skip the stage that Dr. Phil would probably refer to as “anger.” As a result, I end up surrounded by the carcasses of my past, everyone dancing around one another in a little circle of bitterness.
I think this behavior is a byproduct of that bright but empty philosophy that “Everything happens for a reason!” We want to believe that we’ve loved or lusted after or screwed people for a reason. I spend unusual amounts of time looking under every rock trying to find the answer — a line of Portuguese learned from this one, a cross-stitch from that one, a new film director from another. Something. Anything. It would be too depressing to conclude that certain relationships amounted to nothing more than regular sex or placeholders. Dare I use the word mistakes? Becoming friends with the ex seems like the easiest solution to the problem. We can breathe a sigh of relief: ahhh, we were just meant to be friends. That must have been it.
Please. Tiny toothpicks jammed into the soles of my feet would probably have a better effect on my overall emotional health.
“You have a hard time letting go,” a friend told me recently. “Nuhuh,” I replied defensively, ticking off a list of exes in my wake. But my list slowly proved support for her claim, each person
still lingering in the shadows, needing everything from emotional propping up to skin-smoothing. I’ve spread myself thin like a salve, trying to repair any wounds I might have caused and prevent any future burns. It’s a pattern I can’t seem to break, despite knowing that it leaves me with less of myself for the next person who might come around.
“Why do you need to be her friend?” a pal asked of my recent pursuit of friendship with an old flame. “So she can get all the benefits of your friendship and then go home to bed with her boyfriend?” Ouch.
But she was right. There was nothing in it for me. It’s a conclusion that many of my exes seem to be realizing, too. You can’t rely on the person who’s hurt you to lick your wounds. Like can’t replace love. Rejection can’t be forgotten through acceptance. It’s work best done on your own, or surrounded by real friends who haven’t been in your pants.
Jeannie Greeley is a freelance writer who can be reached at jeannieg@comcast.net.
