The Loneliest Number Since the Number One

It’s been a lovely weekend, but amidst lots of plans and fun with friends I’ve also had many moments of contemplation and lots of thoughts swirling around in my head that I have wanted to focus into a blog post. Now that the time has come to write them down, though, it seems difficult to know where to begin.

I never meant for my blog to become so much about relationships and dating, and yet that is what I seem to write about all the time…forgive me, dear readers!

After the anticlimactic end of things with New Guy, I have continued to do the online dating thing and have gone out with twice this past week with a new – new guy from Match.com who I’ll call Texas Boy. (More on that another time.) I also have a date with someone else lined up tomorrow.

Embarking on a new round of dating, I’ve begin to question, What exactly am I looking for here? I’ve been doing the online dating thing off and on for…sheesh, about a year now…and I’ve always thought I knew what I was looking for in a guy, but my list of wants has always been sort of standard: smart, kind, funny, attractive, blah blah blah. As much as I feel like I hate going on 1st and 2nd dates, and I tend to think of myself more as a “relationship person,” when I really get down to imagining what it would be like to get into a serious relationship right now…frankly, it’s terrifying. And now that so many of my friends are tying the knot, when I try to envision myself getting engaged (again) at some point in the future, it’s enough to make me break out in a cold sweat and start hyperventilating.

I’m always fine in a relationship up to a certain point. With the two guys I dated for a few months each after my engagement broke off, a certain rhythm developed. I would spend the night at the guy’s apartment but he would almost never come over to mine. We would spend a few evenings a week together but almost never make plans during the day on weekends. They only saw so much of me and my life, and even though I’d complain that I wanted them more in my life, there was something easy about it. For example, I’m one of the messiest people I know, and I always figured the less people see of my mess, the better. The physical mess is what I’m referring to… but also the emotional stuff.

And maybe that’s what it is — maybe I’m just not ready to let someone see me for who I really am.

And that’s probably the root of the biggest problem I have in relationships: loneliness. I know it’s counterintuitive. Right now, though I’m single and spend a fair amount of time alone, I’m not lonely. But in every relationship I’ve ever been in, there has come a point where I’ve begin to feel overwhelmingly, consumingly lonely. To me, there’s nothing worse than being with someone, that someone who’s supposed to be an important someone, and feel alone. I’ve always felt that the person I’m with never quite “gets” me. In the month before I broke up with my ex-fiance, I recall many sleepless nights, staring at the ceiling while he slept peacefully next to me, sometimes crying, feeling like he didn’t understand me at all.

I’m not sure what to make of all this, or what I need to do to get myself in the place where I can be with someone else in a real way. In the meantime, as I said, I’m out there doing the dating thing. But I still stop and wonder, what’s the point?

Don’t be concerned, dear readers: overall, my life is a lot better and happier than this post makes it sound. But it’s good to get these thoughts out of my head…