Girl and City

I was looking through old emails and chat logs between MFL and I (despite knowing better than to wallow in the past – or rather, our past – because I am a glutton for punishment obviously), and I noticed that I rarely told him how I felt about him. In our entire three-year relationship, I probably said things along the lines of “I missed you,” “I thought about you,” etc. a total of four times. And I never, ever said “I love you.”
Similarly, I never discussed my relationship in my blog entries from that time, to the point that when I mentioned “my boyfriend” in one entry, one of my long-standing blog friends actually left a comment asking, “What?? You have a boyfriend? Since when??”

I was reflecting on this over coffee with BI yesterday, using it as an example of how I’ve changed since high school.
“I was so ignorant about what it meant to be in a relationship. I had no idea what was considered normal behaviour as far as showing one’s feelings. Sure, I showed him I cared in my own way, but maybe by missing out on all the cliched things, I made him feel more unsure about our relationship.”
Like a horse being whipped, words started tumbling out of my mouth at lightning speed. “I was so clueless! I didn’t know what it meant to be someone girlfriend. I didn’t know what to expect of anything. And I never talked about my feelings – not to him or to my friends.”
I took a breath.
“But now, now I know it’s ok to talk about my feelings. In fact, it’s expected that you tell your partner how you feel about them – they want to hear it! I also know it’s ok to talk to your friends about your relationship, I mean I’ve seen Sex and The City, which taught me all I need to know about commiserating. Since then, it seems like all I can talk about on my blog, with my friends, is boys! Boys, boys, boys!”
BI nodded with comprehension.
“Given that I’ve come such a long way in terms of understanding relationships between men and women, you’d think that I’d be better at it. But guess what? In the last four years, my longest relationship lasted two months.
That is the greatest irony of all. When I was in high school, I didn’t plan to have a relationship at all. I didn’t take high school relationships seriously and would have been just fine if I had graduated without ever having a boyfriend. Instead, I ended up in a three-year relationship.
But when I went to university, I was totally ready for a relationship, and guess what? In the last four years, I haven’t had a single relationship where I would actually call the boy ‘my boyfriend.’”

BI chuckled and shook her head. “Maybe ignorance is bliss after all. Once you knew what to expect, those expectations may have actually been a barrier to you falling for someone.”

Maybe she’s right. Maybe that’s why first loves seem so perfect – because they’re easy. We’re all clueless with our first love, and it’s a clean slate. Our expectations only grow from there.

But my own statistics still left me baffled. “Four years. Hundreds of boys on campus. I mean, you’d think I could find one genuine love interest, right? Even if my expectations have changed, what are the odds that I would not like a single person in four years of university?”

For that, BI had no answer.

MFL and I are like Carrie and Mr. Big¹, Rachel and Ross², Sydney and Vaughan³.
Except in all those cases, the two end up together. So maybe not such great examples.

The point is, it feels like the time we’ve known and spent with each other could be a lifetime in itself. Sometimes I think about the time when we were together and I am almost surprised that it’s my past. It feels like it happened in a past-life, or in a vivid dream, or in a story I read in a book somewhere.

Everything has changed now. But some things never change.

And therein lies the problem.

Putting aside the question of whether we might still love each other, we certainly care about each other. And when a man cares about a woman, or vice versa, things are no longer cut and dry.
Which begs the question, can men and women truly just be friends? In fact, a better question is, can exes truly just be friends?
(more…)

1. Sex and the City. [↩]
2. Friends. [↩]
3. Alias. [↩]

“He played me! He completely played me!” were the first words out of WAF‘s mouth. It was just before midnight and I had been getting ready for bed when she called. I could tell she was not okay.
“What happened?” I had a sinking feeling I already knew what this was about. Did she catch him with another girl? Did he tell her he wanted to go back to his girlfriend?
“SG, I feel like such a fool!”
“Don’t be silly, you’re not a fool at all. Don’t blame yourself. Now tell me everything that happened,” I said, in what I hoped to be a reassuring voice. I settled into a rocking chair and stroked my dog’s ears while I listened.

She began from the beginning. “My coworkers are all older than me, and, you know, they have a lot more experience with sex and relationships and stuff. So we were chatting it up Sex-and-the-City style during our lunch break, and I mentioned my relationship with BAD. All I said was, ‘He’s very confused and won’t commit. He has a girlfriend but won’t break it off with her.’ Just that. Then my BAD-ASS coworker started describing the rest of his behaviour. BAD-ASS‘s description fit BAD to a T. And he was a perfect stranger! I hadn’t told him anything.”
She took a breath.
“Apparently BAD-ASS used to do the same thing with girls. I was being played textbook-style. And I fell for it! I completely fell for it!”
I didn’t know what to say. BAD was playing her and she had fallen for it. And I had known it from the moment she started describing him – them – to me (which, to be honest, was only a few weeks ago, and they’ve been at this for a while), but I had said nothing. Now too, I said nothing. I hoped the silence would be a receptive audience to her venting. I hoped letting it out would calm her down.

In the absence of conversation, I could hear her crying and sniffling and trying to blow her nose all at the same time. She continued to describe all the signs, his little tricks and manipulative schemes that she could now pick out.
“I feel like such a fool! I am so stupid!”
“You are not stupid. This was his game. You were his target, and you believed what he said because he only said things he knew you were going to believe. That’s the name of the game. It is not your fault. That’s like saying the bank is to blame for a robbery because their security wasn’t good enough. But the robbers are the ones who picked the bank, who mapped out the specs, who knew how to get what they wanted. You are not a fool.”
“But I fell in love with him! Almost!” She paused to blow her nose. “He even said stuff about this other girl friend of ours, how she was just being played for sex, but I was too smart for that. He must have been laughing inside the whole time!”
My heart ached for her.
“I was so willing to believe everything, I just ate it up! I should’ve known better.”
(more…)

“Do you talk to your exes?” I asked him nonchalantly.
“Well… you,” MFL answered with a chuckle.
“Besides me.”
“No, god no. My last ex was terrible. A terrible mistake.”
I swallowed the xiao long bao in one gulp and my ears perked up. He had never talked about his relationships before. At some point in the last three years, we had formed an unspoken rule not to talk about our love lives.
“Oh? Why?” I asked, as offhandedly as I could.
“She was just horrible. Really unreasonable. I have no idea why I went out with her.”
I took a bite of a steaming shao mai and thought before I spoke again. “I don’t really know her but she has always been cold to me.”
He paused. “To tell you the truth… she hates you.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re my ex.”
“Just because of that?”
“Yes, just because of that. Which I find absurd. It actually really bothered me. She just hates you. And she creeped you on Facebook.”
“She did?”
“And she interrogated me about you, about all my relationships.”
“Interrogated?”
“Yes, actually interrogated. Like ‘Do you miss her?’ and whatnot.”
“She sounds like a –”
“Bitch. Yes, she was a huge bitch.”
“– bitch.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t see it,” MFL looked down at the table, “it was so obvious that she was a bitch. But we were just together constantly, I couldn’t see it, I was blinded. But when I went away for the summer, I realized immediately. So I broke it off.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke. We sipped the xue cai and tofu soup in silence. My head was swirling with a million thoughts but one came clearest: my intuition was bang on. When I met BE in first year, I immediately thought she was a bitch, namely because she completely ignored me when I tried to talk to her. I wasn’t sure at the time if she knew I was MFL‘s ex, but I should have guessed. And the few times that I talked to MFL that year, I could tell their relationship did nothing for him. Maybe that was why I had gotten the boyfriend-vibe from him, because he did miss me. Because as inadequate as I might be at playing The Girlfriend, I was still light years better than BE.

(more…)