How Relationships Have Shaped Me

Copied from one of my forum posts elsewhere on the intertubes (feel free to track down the original if you like):

I haven’t exactly had great role models growing up, at least not real live ones. My dad was physically abusive to me and my mom, my mom was emotionally abusive. The other adults around me were, at best, mediocre. Most of what I understand of ethics and morality I learned from television. Thankfully, my parents had an eye for good TV, which mainly included Star Trek. I’ve been an avid follower of the sci-fi cultural drama ever since, because it always questioned and was never quite settled with an easy answer.

So I learned to always question, and was never settled with an easy answer. This did me well in school and has done me well in my career. I engaged with the sciences, the humanities, with politics, eventually settling in to an amazing role that blends many of my passions and interests into one. I’m fortunate to have a career I love, built from my sweat, blood, work, and tears. Something I can truly say is my own, through and through. In the ‘practical’ matters of life, I have succeeded far beyond what anyone could have expected from me when I was growing up. I moved from an isolated little kid from a broken family (parents divorced messily when I was 13) to one who stands on his own two feet, doing some amazing things, helping lots of people, and with a great future laid out.

Yet, as with most things it seems, my price for this has been in my relationships. I have suffered bitterly with poor relationships. Over a decade of dating (I’m 31) and I have more broken hearts strewn in my past than I would wish on anyone. I’ve been gutted, through and through, with constant lies, abuse, manipulation, and even outright theft, by multitudes of women over the past several years. One broke up with me during her family’s new years eve party, another bailed on me because she wanted to ‘try things out with another guy’ and then came running back (unsuccessfully) when that didn’t work, another chewed me out extremely harshly for being too tired to spend more time with her after coming back from a cross-country interview. Countless others have just flat out lied about who they are, what they wanted, etc. and put the blame for that on me.

And then there’s my ex-wife… *shudder* What she did is the stuff of nightmares, literally. The trauma she caused gives me sleepless nights, makes my mind wander, distracts me through the day, and that was over four years ago.

Time and time again I try, looking for the problem. I’ve looked at the women I date, which covers a very wide range, and I can’t find the problem. I look at myself, but can find no problem there, even after cross-checking with friends, family, and otherwise. I don’t understand the problem, and I keep running into it, again and again and again.

I *may* be just a very difficult person to match, I’m a phenomenally deep thinker, I regularly engage with philosophy, religion, politics, the ‘big question’ fields. I have my own personal sense of morality that I’ve constructed over the years. I lack a lot of the social conditioning that most people have (one of the quirks of homeschool), so I’m not susceptible to the same persuasions that most are. My interests are diverse, including theater, needlework, programming, law, astronomy, and dance, just to name a few. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and I recognize that I’m but a blip in the cosmos. I sometimes wonder if that uniqueness, which has so benefitted me in every other area of my life, is why my relationships suffer as they do.

I’ve tried so many different things, raising and lowering my standards, different venues, different kinds of women, passive and active approaches, the results are basically the same all-around: I get heartbroken in some fashion, and often completely unexpectedly.

I have a good life, a very good one in fact. This part of it, though, has suffered greatly, and I have many, many many many, scars from it. Nothing seems to work, and nothing seems to help. I’m, simply put, lonely. It’s hard to shake the feeling that the best I can hope to achieve is to bounce from heartbreak to heartbreak, or to just give up on it altogether and resign myself to loneliness. I bounce between both ends, determination and despair, far more often than I would like.

I may be ‘only 31’, and really just facing a problem in one part of what is otherwise a rather idyllic life, yet it’s a part that drags all the other ones down. The worst thing about it, my happiest relationship memories are from my marriage, yet because of the character of my ex, I can’t say those were honest memories, given how I was lied to and manipulated in that relationship.

What’s harder is being surrounded by people in happy relationships all the time. I often feel like Tantalus must have felt: eternally hungry, with food just out of reach at all times. Oh I understand surface impressions aren’t everything, and many ‘happy couples’ aren’t as happy as they seem. I still argue that they’re better off in this area than I am, and it’s torturesome for me to see that.

I think these challenges are why I’m so drawn to Fredrick Nietzsche’s philosophies, the abridged version being ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, and there’s no doubt that I’m a stronger person for the suffering I’ve endured. I’ve overcome the kinds of emotional stress that would completely cripple many people; I’ve endured countless sleepless nights due to the emotional trauma of my relationships; I’ve tested my character by not being vindictive on those who did me harm. Yet when is enough, enough?

I don’t really know whom this is directed at, the universe maybe? As a plea for compassion? I’m tough enough to take this, probably tougher still, yet when I tell friends of the depth of my suffering, the only explanation any of them can come up with is that I must have dome some truly horrendous things in a past life.

I’ve made some remarkable things out of this life, why am I not allowed to share it with someone? *sigh*. I’m not really looking for advice, I’ve gotten so much, and found it all rather worthless in my situation (not that its worthless advice, it’s just worthless because nothing seems to work). Compassion is appreciated, but fleeting. I guess I’m asking for prayer, that something will change for me, and somehow I’ll find myself with someone to share what I’ve built with.

- Jason