So…
— after all my hardened bitterness from too many lonely, manless years and
— after all the advice I’ve received that suggested that I’d find a man if I weren’t so bitter and
— after all my dating jadedness and anger because it felt like the world had cheated me out of my happiness and
— after all the people who suggested I wouldn’t attract anyone while I was so jaded and angry
…it turns out that I was able to find and fall in love with this funny, generous, charismatic, successful, fun, affectionate, openly adoring man who knows just how to cherish me and I didn’t have to give up a single drop of anger or bitterness to do it. The whole relationship has finally materialized for me with all of my resentment and pettiness totally in place!
Over the years I’ve also received feedback that suggested that my delusions and fairy tale expectations of romance were getting in the way of finding love. But that turned out to be wrong, too, because those delusions and false expectations are solidly in place, but here I am — in love!
Through gritted teeth I would say to all the relationship workshop facilitators I paid and love experts I listened to and People Who Think They Know, I would say, “Me falling in love had nothing to do with releasing anger or changing expectations or trying to perfectly become the perfect person I was seeking. I now know that any bitterness-hardened, resentment-wielding and romance-deluded Desperate Dater can find a great person and fall in love BECAUSE I DID. And I didn’t have to let go of one note of anger to do it. And even right at this moment I’m still angry and bitter but I’m also in love. So there: these things aren’t incompatible!”
I knew finding a man wasn’t about being perfectly beautiful and perfectly wise and perfectly thin and perfectly sane and perfectly financially solvent and perfectly free of all ex-boyfriend bullshit, etc. etc. ET CETERA. Because if it were, how would you explain all those unpleasant married people?
But for way too long I believed falling in love was about being perfect, so I spent way too much money (thousands) and too much time and too much energy trying to fix myself, fix myself, fix myself. Oh, my god what a waste.
And now I know from talking to my new boyfriend that he’s spent even more energy than I have over the past 15 years feeling resentful of his lonely state and believing he’d been cheated out of his happiness. We’re the same! We’re both hardened and embittered by way too much time failing at relationships and dating miserably and looking sadly at couples and being alone on Christmas Day, year after year after year after year.
And now here we are: two jaded, angry, resentful, never-married, way-too-old-to-be-single (I’m 39 and he’s 43), middle-aged people, finally happy together and we didn’t have to give up one shred of our anger and bitterness. So there.
(Some express happiness by being happy. Others express it by ranting some more.)
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