I'm still sorting out an experience where there was enough of what I can only call malevolent relationship weirdness going on that for just a minute, I wondered if it was my fault. Was it my fault that after nearly a year of dating a man, he told me something jaw-droppingly "surprising" about himself (no, he wasn't married) followed by his unilateral decision that this issue was too big an obstacle for a continued relationship? And all just one week after encouraging me to be freer with him?
When he told me all this I cleverly pointed out: "But this is just one week after you encouraged me to be freer with you."
It seems that when I became freer with him, I became happier with him and we couldn't have that in part because the surprise he'd just shared, aka the bomb he'd just dropped, might not be conducive to my continued happiness.
When asked, "Why didn't you tell me this sooner?" he replied, "Because you couldn't have handled it sooner."
Interesting how Jack Nicholson here knew what I couldn't handle when I'd handled much bigger bombs from much better men.
"What do you want to say to me?" he asked, dipping his head tenderly to one side so that it appeared he really cared.
"I have nothing to say to you," I replied.
"Well, if you did have something to say to me, what would it be?" he coaxed.
I won't quote myself here because my response was lengthy and contained a lot of Fs.
He smiled and said he understood.
It would be a huge leap for me to imagine how this man could profess to know what I could or could not deal with much less understand how I felt. For me it had as much to do with the deceit I perceived as the revelation itself.
And that's where I come in again: Was this somehow my fault?
Maybe it was and maybe this is the reason: Maybe I just happened to attract a man who knew not that his secret was something I couldn't handle, but that it was something I should never have to handle. And instead of being open with it, or better yet, not pursuing me in the first place, he helped himself to almost a year with me under false pretenses.
In short, maybe I'm the reason because I'm the one who just happened to attract a fraud.
