I haven’t updated this in forever, and just to be upfront, Guy 132 actually happened a couple years ago. A new position at work, Covid, loneliness, apathy and disappointment all played a role in that two year break, until 007 was back again.

Guy 132 – Chris – Single Dad

I started talking to Chris online and he seemed nice. It took about a month of back and forth online before he asked me out, but he finally did. I wasn’t entirely optimistic going into it, but couldn’t really justify saying no without a good reason.

He lived over an hour away from me, so he suggested a restaurant somewhere in the middle. I should have known we were not off to a good start when he picked a chain my dad loves and I really don’t like at all, but I figured it was worth a shot.

The conversation over lunch wasn’t great. I felt like we had nothing in common and I was really struggling to come up with things to talk about with him. The fact that he had a 13 year old son and 3 cats who kept peeing around his house were instant red flags to me. And while I do think it is admirable that he is the primary caretaker for his son, that really isn’t something I want to get back into at this stage of my life. Maybe it is selfish, but I feel like I have been there and done that, and have no desire to go back and do it all again.

I really did try and I think he did too, but there just wasn’t anything there. We texted back and forth for a bit after the lunch, but I think we both knew it wasn’t right and let it peter out naturally.

007 – All my fault this time

I hadn’t heard from him in 3 years, since the last time I had told him to fuck off after the 4 months of talking in which he refused to ever ask me out. I was out to dinner with a friend from work and his birthday had come up in my calendar. The friend (who in all fairness had no idea about the backstory) said I should contact him and say happy birthday. I figured why not? I really did miss him and worst (or maybe best) case scenario, he wouldn’t answer and I would be exactly where I was before contacting him. So I emailed and just said happy birthday. 5 hours later, he answered and we were off to the races again.

He spent a good portion of the next day texting me back and forth. It was surprisingly non-confrontational and a nice conversation. Then he called me that night and shocked the hell out of me. Calling was never his thing. The next day is when things really took an unfamiliar turn. He actually apologized for being rude and disparaging over the years, saying he was in a bad place when he first met me. I accepted the apology after picking my jaw up off the floor and said I was sorry as well for the horrible things I had said over the years too.

Things did actually seem different at first. He called me a lot, like more in the span of two weeks than he had in the previous 7 years we had spoken. (We are up to 10 years of back and forth, for anyone keeping track.) It was a little over 2 months of back and forth with him still calling me occasionally. It really did feel different than all the other times. Or maybe that is just what I told myself because I wanted to believe it so badly.

It was maybe a week or so into talking before things started sliding back to our usual conversations, what color/type of bra was I wearing and I should send a picture. The thing that seemed to bother him the most and that he just couldn’t get past was my dating/sexual history. I had never lied about it to him, but had never gone into detail either. My problem with that is, while I have recorded it all here, it is a somewhat cleaned up version. None of it goes into what led me to make all those stupid, dangerous decisions and get involved with so many assholes and scumbags, knowing I never wanted to see most of them again. Up until he made an issue of it and kept browbeating me for answers on it, NO ONE knew what the story was there. I decided the only way to explain it was to tell the truth, because there was no way he was going to drop it no matter how many times I said I regretted it and didn’t want to talk about it. So I told him the truth. Now I am putting it out there for anyone to know and interpret however you want. I finally told my therapist after telling 007. Like I said, no one knew. Not a friend, not a family member, NO ONE.

I have depression. It is something I’ve been living with for close to 15 years. Most of the time, I take meds and I can handle whatever comes along. But just over 8 years ago, I completely fell apart. A whole bunch of shit hit the fan all at once and I just felt overwhelmed to the point where I couldn’t figure out how to deal with it and find a way out of the hole I felt like my life had become. I woke up every day feeling like I wanted the day to just be over so I could get back in my bed and not have to deal with anyone or anything. Unfortunately, I needed my job to pay for my house and my son’s college and he still needed me too.

My mom was bipolar and killed herself in a mental hospital almost 22 years ago. I saw how much that fucked up my family, especially my youngest siblings. I didn’t want to do that to my son. At the same time, I didn’t want to burden anyone with my shit and “dump my crazy”. I felt both ashamed and pathetic for not being able to pull myself together and just deal like a normal person. It became a vicious circle where things just kept getting worse and I felt even more like I was just drowning in sadness. Every minute of every day just felt like overwhelming misery and there was no way out. Then I discovered that when I had sex, my brain would turn off for 5-10 minutes (if I was lucky) and I felt nothing. I didn’t feel happy or even not sad. I just felt numb. And that 5-10 minutes of numbness was better than the choking overwhelming sadness I felt ALL the time. It wasn’t because I cared about the guy I was with at the time. It was just a brief respite from non-stop misery. And while I tell myself I would never ever kill myself after what it put my family through when my mom did it, I wouldn’t have minded at all if some kind of accident ended everything. An accident where my car plowed into a divider on the turnpike, or I missed a sharp turn and hit a tree, or mistakenly took too many meds to help me battle the worsening insomnia and just never woke up again. And then those thoughts made me feel like an even worse person than ever.

So I fucked strangers to feel numb. Am I proud of that stage of my life? Absolutely not. I haven’t had sex in over three years or even dated anyone in over two years now. And telling 007 all that felt like ripping off the biggest bandaid of my life, but then it was done. He swore he didn’t think less of me and was ok with it. He said it wasn’t something I should be ashamed of and it wasn’t a big deal at all. And I realized that yeah, I fucked up, but feeling ashamed wasn’t helping and I should have reached out for help from a friend, or a family member, or the therapist I was paying to help me. She knows now and asked why I never told her. I just didn’t want her, or anyone else, to think less of me. That would have made the whole thing worse in my mind. I know from the outside people closest to me had an idea something was wrong, but no one asked and I sure as hell wasn’t volunteering anything. I still did my job, killing myself at it half the time, spending 9 hours in the lab on weekends after 12-14 hour days all week, and my son was doing well at college. I honestly believe most people really didn’t want to know what was going on and then have to feel like they should do something to help.

So, too late for long story short, its already a long saga of my descent into misery and my incredibly slow climb back out of that hole. If you’ve never been depressed, you probably don’t understand how it entirely takes over your life, even as most people think you’re doing great. (For anyone who really wants to understand what it is like, the book Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh has the best description of depression I have ever read. I highly recommend it to anyone who is/has been depressed or anyone who knows someone who is as it made me feel for the first time that someone really understood how I feel.) Great successful job, kid in college, nice house, bills paid, no reason to be unhappy. Scratch the surface though and none of that matters. Because you can’t see that. You can’t see anything but how unbearably awful things are and the terrifying prospect that they will never get better, just worse and worse until hopefully that fateful accident ends things for you.

My therapist did know something was going on and it was getting worse and something needed to change (even without knowing all the gory details). She got me an emergency appointment with a shrink who started me on meds again (I had stopped taking them for a few years when things felt good and I told myself I didn’t need them anymore). The shrink has since told me that once you have two episodes of major depression, your odds of a third one are about 70%. He asked if I felt good about those odds when I asked about stopping the meds again. Basically, do I feel lucky? No, I absolutely do not. I will stay on those meds for life. I fully realize my therapist pretty much saved my life as I couldn’t have gone on much longer that way. But at the same time, if I wasn’t so ashamed, I could have asked for help months or probably even a year before things spiraled out of control. And I am not saying the meds instantly turned things around for me. It still took quite a while before I got my life back under control and stopped drowning in sadness and being self destructive. It wasn’t an easy recovery by any means.

There is such a stigma around mental illness, especially when your mom killed herself. I know that stuff is genetic. I am a scientist for god’s sake. One of my biggest fears is turning into my mom. That’s why I started seeing a therapist 15 years ago when I fell apart the first time. It is always better to reach out to someone for help though rather than drown in that misery and sadness alone until it is just too late. I would like to think I am in a pretty good place right now, at least for the most part. But clearly I must have been lonely or I never would have reached out to 007 again, right? To be fair, Covid came, and I was initially spending a lot of time on site at work because I had started in a new department. Then that department started a huge expansion project that shut down production, and I mostly worked from home for the next nine months. I hadn’t really made any friends in the new group, my old friends were all preoccupied with their kids, or their jobs, or for quite a few, their retirement. I was really alone almost all the time. Leave me alone with my thoughts, and something bad will happen. In this case, it was the decision that I missed 007 and wanted to talk to him again.

So I did. It started out nice, hit an ugly patch with him being what I felt was overly nosy about my past so I confessed and came clean, but we got past that and he finally shared stuff with me he had never told me before. It kind of felt like progress for the first time in a decade. But it did that gradual slide back into the same old shit. Why wouldn’t I fuck him? Followed almost immediately by, I don’t even want to fuck you because you would be boring and just lie there and it would be terrible and awkward. Back and forth over and over again, just like always. Then he said he knew I hated him, and he was just some sick science experiment to me. There have been countless times I intensely disliked him, but I never hated him. There was always this hope or belief or something that there really was a decent guy in there somewhere and he would eventually come out. And if we are being truthful here, I always felt like I was a game to him where winning for him was fucking me. I told him we would have both been so much better off taking up chess. I tried talking to him about him feeling like I hate him in one of his phone calls, but he cut that off almost immediately. The calls were never about anything involving feelings or emotions, aside from the one directly after I told him about the breakdown when he finally shared something too. We eventually got back to, you should be my fuckbuddy, and it wouldn’t be a random hookup because he doesn’t believe in those and he knows me anyway. He knows me??? He knows some random details of my life, and now the story behind my breakdown. He has seen me 3 times in ten years and knows more about my underwear than what I care about or what really matters to me. There is no way he fucking knows me. I feel like I don’t even know me sometimes.

Sometime around 2 months in, he started yet another conversation about how I would be terrible in bed. This wasn’t a new statement from him, so I told him again that I hadn’t offered and asked why he kept saying this over and over. He said he would never fuck me, he was just reiterating. I thanked him for reiterating over and over how unappealing I am, just in case I thought otherwise. And then he went and threw my past in my face yet again. Said it was funny how I would meet a guy on the internet and do all sorts of crazy shit, but with a normal guy I would just lie there. So I asked if he was the normal guy and he flipped his shit. Told me he was out and to never contact him again. I said I was kidding (and actually think I handled another one of his “you suck at sex and I would never fuck you” tirades pretty well given the circumstances, treating it as a joke instead of the incredibly hurtful, offensive comment it really was), but he said it wasn’t a joke and to leave him alone forever. For a guy who has no interest in fucking me, he seems incredibly angry that I fucked other guys and not him. It does hurt when he goes on these tangents about how I would be terrible in bed and he doesn’t even want to fuck me because it would be so bad, and throwing my past back in my face again after promising not to, well, that just fucking sucks.

So I guess the moral here is I am an awful person for never fucking him, even though he said he never wants to. He also told me recently he never wants to date me, and doesn’t care if I ever talk to him again. Then he claimed I was being weird about all that, not him. I have told him so many times that I really like him and can’t just randomly fuck him because I have feelings involved and I know it would destroy me. And I never wanted him to be part of that horrible mess I made of my life, as I truly believed he deserved better. He never once asked to see me in these last two months, or more of me than my bra and breasts. Yet I am an asshole for not agreeing to fuck him. I can’t win. I give up. I told him fine, I am out, but to please block me so I don’t make the mistake of contacting him ever again in the future. He sent me a thumbs up emoji. Clearly he’s really torn up over this.

I don’t know why I always let him get to me and believe he will be different. He just won’t. Not ever, not for me. I do feel incredibly sad all over again and wish he would at least have had the decency of having an actual phone conversation to discuss all this. I was told to fuck off over text. I don’t understand any of this and feel like I never will. And it makes me feel like there is absolutely no point in dating again when the one guy I really liked for 10 years just dicked me around, turned me into this sick twisted game, broke my heart, and left me with no self esteem yet again. You know what though? I still don’t hate him. I feel sorry for him that he thinks he can manipulate, bully and browbeat people into doing what he wants. It’s a sad and pathetic way to go through life. A little kindness, compassion and empathy would serve him so much better in the long run and make him a better person overall. So yeah, I’m crazy and I’ve made a LOT of mistakes, but I’m a good person and I deserve more than he was ever willing or capable of giving. It’s just unfortunate it took me 10 years to figure that out.