Sickly and Single

[I've received incredible traffic today from people looking for "'arrival [preposition removed] hell' walkthrough" and have absolutely no idea what this means. But I'm curious. Will anyone help me out here?]

OK, on to my whining.

“Let me know if I can help.” Jill wrote this morning after she reminded me of her cell number. “I can come out anytime you need me. I know it’s terrible being sick when you’re alone.”

Friend said the same thing when I was so depressed. “It’s important for single people to have support networks. Friends. Because there’s nobody legally obligated to help you when you need it.”

I don’t mind being alone. It’s not like I come home every single day or lie awake once every 24 hours to bemoan my lack of relationship. It happens – there are times when I get morose and irritated and lonely – but for the most part, life is pretty good.

I’m more likely to seek solitude when I’m unwell – be it headache, mood swing or other ailment. I like having complete control over my environment. The noise from a television show can be fine one moment and the biggest of irritants at others. I’ve messed with the thermostat more times than I can count today – I’m hot, then cold. Then burning up. Then freezing. There is no happy medium.

So there shouldn’t be a problem. I would rather be alone right now, and – oh, look at that! – I am. It should be lovely. I’d like to be grateful for the way things worked out. It’s not a huge problem that I have no idea what I’m doing professionally – it only affects me. I can take a whole week to spend with my parents over Thanksgiving without negotiating. I can order pizza and eat nothing else all week. Then I can decide – upon looking despondently through take-out menus, then through my freezer – I want to cook. (I was dying for broccoli. I must be lacking in nutrients because it was beyond delicious.)

Yet I keep dwelling on an email exchange, which should surprise no one though I’ve been trying mightily not to talk about it all the time.

Me: Migraine. Bad. Need drugs and sleep.
Him: Ah, I’m sorry to hear that. Wish I were there to tend to you.

Simple. Effective. Easy to remember.

That headache was a long time ago, but I woke up feeling completely better and comforted by the fact that someone – a cute, male someone – knew I had been hurting and wished he could help (let’s say for the sake of argument that it was sincere, a fact we cannot confirm without independent hypothesis testing but will assume for the sake of clarity). I love the thought of someone checking on me – peeking in a dark room to make sure I don’t need anything. Making soothing sounds and smoothing my hair when I whimper. Feeding the cat because the smell of that kibble makes me gag.

The irritating part is that there are people who would do that. Friend would come check on me and has offered multiple times to fetch anything I need from the outside world. Jill treats me as one of her children anyway, so she could easily offer comfort – straighten my blanket as I nap, make sure I’m drinking enough water. Cousin could come over and feed that cat – would likely take both animals to her house for a couple days if I asked her. But that’s different. I want a partner – someone who knows when I want company and when to stay away. Someone I can cuddle one moment and order around the next. (I’ll be sick. I think it’s OK to behave a bit badly when I’m ill.)

So today – a day that was unexpectedly painful (because I should be feeling better now!) – found me pouncing on eHarmony’s free communication weekend like Sprout on a bug. (Which is gross, by the way. I’m deeply disturbed by the joy he finds in torturing the poor bugs. Then eating parts of them. Goodness, that’s quite disgusting regardless of my level of health.) So as I’ve been responding to requests for communication between finishing my paper revisions and curling up in a ball to decide why the pain continued, I’ve wondered why I can’t get excited about any of these men.

I have – in all honesty – walked into seminars over the past month, and demanded that I find someone attractive. Anyone. But, nope. Can’t do it.

I have – in moments where I continue to obsess about what went wrong and wonder whether I feel hatred, disdain, sympathy or gentle understanding – asked myself why I care at all. He was the wrong guy. Apart from good or bad, forgiven or not, fair or cruel – he was very, very wrong for me.

“So you’ve stopped hoping things will work out?” Friend asked me several weeks ago.

“Absolutely.” I confirmed. “Once a dynamic is established in a relationship, I think it’d be a struggle to overcome it. So my feeling is that I’d always be trying to get his attention and he’d always be controlling and cold because I’d let him. So, no. I don’t want him. No, no, no.”

But.

I hate that I still care. That the whole situation still takes up space in my head. That I recall certain lines or conversations. Then wonder why I blindly trusted someone so easily. Why I gave so much of myself and expected so little of him. Was I selected because I was so gullible? Our association certainly lasted so long because I was too weak to stop it. It occurred to me last weekend that it wasn’t like I turned men away because I was emailing some guy who lived far away. Even now – if I’m screwed up about relationships and find it difficult to trust, have confidence that’s severely damaged, can’t muster any real desire to get to know someone better – what’s the big loss? I hardly think there’s a cute, smart, funny someone out there who’s sighing because he just can’t find me. The very thought strikes me as ridiculous.

So instead of trying to list my good qualities – bolster my self-image a bit – or viewing profiles of men I’m sure are lovely – I’m faced with a single fact.

I choose men very poorly.

Even Ryan – my shining example of someone who wanted to marry me! – let me walk away. When asked if there was a reason I needed to stay, he couldn’t give a solid answer. Didn’t ever ask if I’d more seriously consider staying rather than going. So while it’s pleasant to pretend that it could have worked if I made different decisions, I don’t know that to be true. And even if he would have proposed had I not moved 10 hours away, I don’t think I would have accepted.

Then I was over-the-top excited about someone who was wrong. Even when it was so over-the-top obvious to everyone that it was making me over-the-top unhappy. I mean, really. For crying out loud. It's just so embarrassing. And I'm still not over it, which is just annoying. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I don’t want to be that unhappy again. So the whole dating thing seems dangerous if I care. But it’s really difficult to muster the energy when I’m so eh about the whole process.

But it would be good to have someone to feed the cat when I have a headache. Or tug the blanket from if I get cold when sleeping. Someone who could talk and laugh with me. I could take him home for Thanksgiving. Buy him Christmas presents (which might take away from the funds I’m giving to charity or spending on Little One for all these super-cool toys). Plan trips together.

So I think it would be really good to stop caring about what went wrong in the past (on any number of occasions) and focus on how to make things go well in the future.

I just don’t know how to make that happen.