Loving unavailable men

A few things I’ve done for men who didn’t love me.

• Buy a Le Creuset casserole dish for him.

• Leave lasagne and parmigiana on his doorstep. 

• Deep clean his house (twice, once to find the mouldy parmigiana in a tupperware at the back of the fridge). 

• Travel across the country, book a hotel in an unknown Yorkshire town for two nights in the hope he’d pop in for half an hour.

• Write a four-page letter.

• Made fish pie, again, again and again. 

• Fill his fridge with smoked salmon and the good yogurt (as I was leaving).

• Wait at my window for 15 minutes every morning in the hope to catch a glimpse of him walking to work. 

• Record myself singing dream baby dream and send it.

• Record myself performing avant-garde strip art to a song called You Tore Out My Heart (and send it).

• Give him my body (again).

I could keep going and I love lists, but there are enough hard hitters there for us to take a few steps back, cover our eyes and squint into the blinding light of it all. 

I probably have 8-10 A4 size refill pads full of biro scrawls about the series of unavailable men I centred my life around for 5-10 years (depending on how you see that 5 year relationship I stayed in). Patterns formed in that relationship that I took forward into five years of being sort of single - but always in love or occupied with someone. So it’s safe to say that even though it was often unbearable, it was also a deeply known and comfortable place for me to live. The summary could be: don’t worry I’ll keep loving you more. I thought love could conquer all, specifically I thought my love could conquer all, I thought it was golden, I thought it was a matter of time. 

The last in the line of impossible men to get my love described himself to me on an early date as ‘a mystery wrapped in a riddle’ and he also told me he ‘didn’t believe in love’, but this was no big deal for me. I’ll crack the puzzle and you’ll believe in love for me. So yeah it’s safe to say there were always red flags and it’s safer to say I always believed ‘the connection’ was so undeniably strong that the flags mattered not. An obsession with the connection is usually what kept me imprisoned in the situation for much longer than I should have. Connection for a time felt similar to anxiety, but again, that mattered not to me.

Beth once told me on a walk that a study found that the longest lasting couples were the ones were both parties felt their nervous system was calm in the presence of the other. Ohh interesting I thought, exact opposite of how I feel around him. Were there a few case studies where feeling extremely anxious and not speaking in case you say the wrong thing were in fact the greatest examples of love of them all? Yes or no?

One of the things I found the hardest to let go of was my idea of someone, who they were to me once and how deeply that had settled into my bones. For example one sentence was enough to keep me trapped in a situationship with an Irish musician for three months after he took back the initial sentence. And two months of ease and availability with another was enough to keep me on hold for two years, despite the fact that everything that came next out-weighed the early promise by a million tonnes. Funny that isn’t it? You can’t fall in love with potential would go round and round my head as I built a life on it. 

You can spend a lot of time goggling twin flames and convincing yourself that absence of a person is proof of the intensity of the connection. I did. One day as a parting gift from life, I’d love to be given the stats, like from a football match, but instead of one team’s possession it would be the ratio of time spent thinking about the other, mine compared to theirs. I have a horrifying feeling it’d be 92% - 8% or something like that. I have a horrifying feeling that there aren’t pages upon pages scrawled in biro about me. 

Now I’m no longer in a dynamic like this, and I’m in a relationship where I feel he loves me as much as I love him, even though I don’t believe any pages were written about me, and he doesn’t seem to need to put his nose in my ear as much as I put mine in his, but now I am here, it’s easy to look back at myself in the various traps I found myself in and feel on a good day embarrassed and on a bad day mortified (Le Creuset anyone?). But there are a few things it’s important to note. 1) Even though I was very much the girl who cried love, it was all for me, things to be played out between me and me until I got off the merry-go-round. 2) It’s so easy to see it unless you are in it and that is just facts. 3) Some people are slow learners. 4) It was heady fun. 5) Wasn’t it nice in the end for them to be loved for a while?

I used to really cling onto number five. Caught in a particularly thorny situation, thistles if you like, a hissing cat you simply did not want to be stroked, at least I stayed. Melting butter into more potatoes for him I thought, during this difficult time in his life, isn’t it better he’s had love. Like it was my duty and my service. And of course it was for me, but it also didn’t serve me. Not in the end, at the very tether of my self respect, there was a moment, there always had to be a moment - mine just came a year later than exasperated bystanders hoped it would. But it came. Like Issy always said, he will never leave you, you will have to leave. And I did. Although it’s also true I never had him. But still, once I was gone he wanted me then, boy oh boy did he. Equation proven. 

So I’d wonder why I was so compelled to love the thistles. Like it was my life’s work to pour into other people until they felt better. Issy always said it’s because I had too much to give. And a therapist I saw for a while suggested I get a pet because the overflow needs to go somewhere. I think about that all the time when I’m diving my face into Spud’s fur. No one else would tolerate it and he loves me in the most perfect endless way possible. So Jerilee was right. But that didn’t mean I didn’t need it back. 

Not long after I started dating Tom I noticed he was making a list of the things I like. The list because he can’t remember anything but he knew that was worth noting down. I almost called the police I couldn’t make sense of such an act. When he told me off for breaking the chest of drawers by throwing it down the stairs rather than asking for help I realised something else. When he responded cheerfully and gladly to my tentative requests for him to make me tea or go to the shops or do something for me, another piece fell into place. When he hugged me everytime I cried and never made me feel too much, the same goes for his tolerance of my incessant questions about other girls, until he showed up with some self respect and told me when to leave something alone. But there was no punishment, no lingering distance or sulks, we were onto the next thing and he was still there. It has never been a riddle with Tom. And even though he doesn’t have the words to explain things very often, it’s not a mystery either. 

What does it mean to make yourself available to someone? And why is the opposite such an addiction? 

One of the ultimate unavailable men in my history held mystical power over me for a decade. The gap between us created a tension so wild it made me make poor choices and feel nothing afterwards. I once read that desire is a hungry ghost and that summed it up for me. Three months before I met Tom I sent a dramatic photograph of a letter to aforementioned man to declare that we weren’t friends, never would be and would he please leave me alone forever. His only response was to say that the message was characteristically dramatic of me. And that was all I needed to standby my message. Once I met Tom, our ‘connection’ felt flimsy and superficial and at last uninteresting to me, compared to what was growing, I saw the vase was always empty. 

I spent a lot of time projecting depth onto people and situations that didn’t deserve or require it. This was in many ways the root of my problems. Absence and avoidance became an intensity. He MUST be feeling this too. The gaps were gasoline for my fantasy. I never ever in a million years got any answers or closure from any of them. The words I wanted to try to understand it, crack the code, validate my feelings, were void because perhaps there was little to say. You want to or you don’t, you are or you are not. The longing for the conversation, the moment, honestly my standards were so low, a text would have been ok, keep me strung along forever. So did the other law of physics, even if they don’t want to be with you, they will never tell you straight. So a tiny corner of your mind (whole of you mind) stays trapped and wondering and in pursuit of the fantasy. So if in a weak willed moment they call (obviously they never call, it’s a text always a text), it’s easy to go running because this is what you were waiting for. But it’s not, it’s still not. 

I was on a run once in the aftermath of the Irish musician when Bob Dylan’s words came into my head. I was standing with my hands against a tree because, frankly desperate times, and suddenly I heard the lyrics of It Aint Me Babe. Honestly if you’re caught in one of those traps, look up the words. I went home with shivers and a million tonnes more closure than the man in question was ever able to give me. And yes it would have been nice if that was me learning the lesson for the last time, but the merrygoround wasn’t done with me just yet ;)