Morning revelations

As I stated in my last post, I’ve apparently been “…looking for a girl who is a locked box. [I] want to be the one to open it up and be privy to everything inside.” Every relationship I’ve been in I’ve pushed the person I’ve been with to open up. Not that they’ve been particularly closed off, but I’ve wanted to be in their head so badly that I push them to say things they don’t want to say, things that don’t really help anything, and in the end I just make things harder for them. I don’t know if they’ve ever realized it, I only just realized it myself, but looking back it’s clear that it has been the major cause of problems in a number of my past relationships.

This is most relevant in my most recent relationship. I have been bemoaning the way things went since it ended, and I wrote a number of private posts trying to figure things out for myself. She was going through a really rough time and asked that we go back to being just friends. It was the mature thing for her to do; it wouldn’t have been fair to me to keep me in a relationship that she couldn’t handle. I was too busy trying to understand what she was going through and trying to make her tell me everything she was feeling to look with my own eyes and see the way things were.

At first I tried really hard to honor her request to just be friends. I wanted her in my life, and so I didn’t have a choice but to soldier on and be just her friend. I immediately felt like a second-rate friend. She had other friends that she told more things to than me, I felt like I wasn’t getting all the details of her life. I didn’t know how to reconcile this, and I got angry. I became a really shitty friend. I felt that I deserved some of her time as her friend. When I didn’t get it, when I wasn’t privy to what was going on, when I wasn’t the person that she told stuff to I felt really hurt. That was what hurt the most, and I couldn’t find a way to come to terms with it.

She gave me a lot of chances to be her friend, but I wasn’t ready to be her friend. I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong, or how my naive view of the relationship had placed a wall between us. This went on for a couple months as I followed her on LiveJournal and tried to talk to her from time to time. The more things I saw her doing without me, the more hurt I was and the more angry I got until I couldn’t follow her anymore. I stopped following her a little over a month ago. I don’t think it has made me think about her any less, but I’ve been less angry.

Over the last week or so I started talking to people about how things went, how angry I felt at her, and how I couldn’t figure out went wrong. The more I talked to people, the better I felt about things and the more I felt that things would be okay in the end. This morning I woke up and it was as if someone had climbed into my head in the night and placed this little nugget of knowledge at the forefront of my thought. Since I’ve been thinking it through and talking to my friends, and in the process of writing this post, I’ve come to see how this misconception about all of my interpersonal relationships has adversely affected things.

I don’t need to go into details here, but I’m going to wait for things to settle in my mind before I contact her and say I’m sorry. I really want finals to be over before I start talking to her because I don’t want to be a distraction from school. I want to know that I’m ready to be her friend before I try to do it. I don’t know that things will ever go back to the way they were, but I don’t want things to end the way they did. More updates will follow.