I have not always been honest
Apr 16, 2009 The Story of My Life
I’m pretty sure this is the last of these posts for now.
I’ve not always been honest with myself about Joaquin. It took me a long time to get over him — well, not him so much as the relationship. I get into these funks where I’m thinking on it hard (I’m in one now, obviously) and I used to think it was about him but now I know it’s me trying to figure out me. Why did I love him? Why couldn’t I stay away? What part of me was hurting then and is it still present now? And this time around I’m also wondering, how was I complicit?
In one version of the story of our relationsip’s demise (this is the version I worked over for years), Joaquin throws me over several times. First with someone who went to high school with us, then with a woman with my exact same first name thereby obliterating me. (Even now I occasionally meet someone who can’t quite place me and then it ends up they have me mixed up with her.) In this version of events, I am the victim. Sure, I’m jealous and clingy but he’s the one ripping me apart into teensie-weenie little pieces and then using my attachment (addiction) to him to keep me in his back pocket as a just-in-case. This is all true.
But the other version of the story is also true and it’s one I hadn’t thought on much that has to do with my culpability. So I was thinking about how he used to say that I loved him but I didn’t like him and thinking about how it took me a few years (full of slammed locker doors, hysterical phone calls on either side and heady reunions) to realize he was right. I thought then that he probably didn’t care but maybe he did. It’s probably not a whole lot of fun to realize your girlfriend doesn’t like you all that much.
I disapproved of a lot of his choices and I disagreed with a lot of his values but I was so insecure and so defensive that I couldn’t own this and instead I would try to tear him down the same way he tried to tear me down. Because I saw him as invincible, I never thought that I could really hurt him even though I wanted him to hurt because he hurt me. But while I’m the type of gal whose feelings get hurt if the wind blows too hard, Joaquin was made of tougher stuff and so I had to work a lot harder and I could get pretty freakin’ mean. I’ve forgiven him for being a jerk but (I realize as I type this) I need to forgive myself for my own jerkiness so that I won’t be so desperate to pretend it was all on him.
(There was a lot of unkindness in me during the five years between 15 and 20; I took all of my essential hurt and tried to spread it around.)
I tried to control him as much as he tried to control me (again, with far less success since he had oodles more self-confidence than I did). I remember once in particular that I tried to get him to quit his band and focus more on his painting and I couched it in concern about his art but the truth was I was just tired of his groupies. I mean, if you really love someone you don’t try to make them give up something that they love.
I don’t really know when we stopped loving each other but I always think that if I’d just gotten over it when he dumped me for the girl in our class, we could have remained fond of each other. But I couldn’t let him go. And I guess he couldn’t let me go because he didn’t for a long time.
I used to feel invisible with him but what did I want him to do to prove that he saw me? I felt hemmed in by my girlhood — it was certainly easier for him to be a boy in a band than it was for me to be a girl who wrote poetry — but that wasn’t his fault. I was jealous of his autonomy and the room the world gave him to step out of bounds. I’d get mad when he’d declaim on feminism and ignore what I was going through right in front of him. I had sex with him and it freed him; I guess I can’t really hold him responsible for not seeing how it locked me down. He was 16! Then 17! (The last time we slept together I want to say that I was 19 and he was 21 but honestly I’m just not sure.) We were young and dumb and locked in a pattern that wasn’t kind to either of us.
If we’d just let each other go earlier! If only we hadn’t raked each other over hot coals and trampled over any good feelings we might have had for each other!
THAT is my big Joaquin regret — that I wouldn’t let it go and instead helped throttle my first love into a wilted broken thing.
Ahh well. Youth. Ignorance.
(sigh)
And this really is the last of these posts for now. (I got off subject anyway.)
15 probably is too young but…
Apr 15, 2009 Feminism/Politics, The Story of My Life
Bj said:
I do think that 15 and in high school is too young (though I’d probably feel differently about 15 and away in college).
And here’s the thing — technically I think 15 is too young, too. Only when I was 15, I sure didn’t feel too young even though I read The Hurried Child while I was babysitting and knew all the arguments.
I loved Joaquin and Joaquin, at that time, was not such a bad boyfriend. It was a loving, respectful relationship at that point and he took my lead when it came to how far I wanted to go. We were having a lot of fun, too, and my first sexual experiences were oodles better than many of my friends who waited. What wasn’t great was the fall-out AFTER.
Part of it was our age; we were too immature to handle the intensity of our feelings and didn’t know what to do with them so we hurt each other. Then again, I know thirty-somethings who are too immature to handle the intensity of their feelings. And there were other things playing into that intensity including the fact that we were both struggling with splintered families and school frustrations and a lot of other things that made our relationship that much more important and that much harder to handle. So I don’t think our age helped but there were other things that played into all of it.
A bigger part of it for me (I don’t know how it was for him since we haven’t talked about it since we reached adulthood) was that there seemed to be a clear delineation between Virgin and Not Virgin. Once I was a Not Virgin I was, essentially, ruined. I mean, as far as the world went. You know, Madonna or Whore. As far as I could tell, there was no in-between place for me to land while I figured things out for myself. I didn’t know how to slow things down in future relationships. I didn’t really know how to think of myself especially since I was the one who pushed our relationship sexually (Joaquin was enthusiastic but never pushy despite being two years older).
I could’ve used some support in the aftermath. I didn’t realize that having sex once didn’t mean I had to have it again with that partner or anyone else.
I also wish that Joaquin and I had been able to grow apart instead of being so dependent on each other that our relationship was a constant series of painful wrenches and insecurities. This had less to do with us having sex than it did with the rest of our lives, which were patently unhappy. (At least on my side, I didn’t have anything else worth living for — this was all going on during the worst of my unhappy school experiences. I’m sure my despserate need for him didn’t endear me to Joaquin all that much.)
So I think the sex thing, for me, gets mixed up with all this other stuff some of which has to do with being young and some of which doesn’t. Which is to say that I think back to those early days with Joaquin with fondness and without regrets but I wish I’d had some help with the rest of it. And I think likely if the rest of my life had been less scrambled that I might not have had sex quite so early and that if I had, it might not have had the fall-out that it had. In other words, I don’t think it was the having of the sex so much as it was everything else, which is why I have mixed feelings about it.
I don’t necessarily want my kids to have sex that young but I won’t kill myself (or them) if it happens either.
But I’ve been looking at the old pics of Joaquin more fondly than in years past; I’m not sure why. I think I’m able to separate the boyfriend he started out being from the numbnuts he eventually became. And I hope he can look back at the girl he first fell in love with and see her separately from the enraged jealous harpy that *I* became. (I am tempted to email him but that never goes well so probably I’ll skip it!!!)
Tags: boyfriend, joaquin, relationships
The obligatory new year meme
Dec 31, 2008 The Story of My Life
I like reading these in years to come so I’m going to go ahead and add it below the cut. Feel free to swipe if you want your own meme-age record!
Tags: boyfriend, Madison, meme, Music, Noah, Portland, working out
