how do you react?

Dear Soulmate,

Whenever I come across a relationship roadblock, I try to voice my opinions as maturely and rationally as possible. I’ve never been one to break dishes, raise my voice, or slap someone for their indiscretions.

What I haven’t learned yet, is how to find the middle ground. I’m the quiet extreme. If something bothers me in a relationship, I have no problem confronting it and telling my partner exactly how I feel, yet I do so in a passive way that might make someone feel as though it wasn’t that big of deal, when in reality, it is to me.

How do you react? If someone does something that breaks your trust or makes you feel betrayed, what’s the best way to get vindication?

I suppose what I’m really asking is how you get what you want from someone in a way that’s neither vengeful, or on the other extreme, passive.

When you’ve been seeing someone for five months, you develop a kind of trust and comfortability with them. So naturally when they do something that steps themselves out of bounds and into the “dealbreaker” arena, it’s normal to feel upset.

He called today to see how I was. He said he missed me. I was fine this morning until I heard his voice. I told him to have a good rest of the day and it wasn’t until after I hung up that I realized I was crying.

Why do I always feel like I have to suppress my feelings?

Love Love, R

“i hope he’s a really good guy”

Dear Soulmate,

“I hope he’s a really good guy.”

That’s what he wrote to me last week after learning over e-mail that I found someone new. That’s what he wrote from New Zealand to New York.

I sat at my computer, watched the rain fall outside my apartment window, hoping that he would say more than that.

And is he a good guy?

Yes. But this morning he lied about something and the trust between us wavered. I turned over in bed, putting my back to him. He tried to kiss me. He tried to make up for his mistake. He tried to apologize.

Somehow though, his apologies went unanswered, echoing down the long hallway of regret.

We had a cup of coffee and walked to the subway.

I didn’t have much to say this morning. I’m tired and disappointed. I want more than ever to send an e-mail to New Zealand from New York, saying you are the one who has me so completely. You are the one who has me thinking of you on this cold, rainy sidewalk on 7th Avenue, looking into the eyes of someone I do not feel as strongly for.

But I won’t send an e-mail, maybe just this post out into the void, hoping that someone somewhere will believe in love amidst all this noise.

I walked back to my apartment, climbed the stairs to my door. I feel alone again, halfway around the world from love.

Love Love, R

on love’s rollercoaster

Dear Soulmate,

No one knows why love doesn’t work out. You only know why it does because these are the stories you hear from the people who’ve made it happen.

I’ve been writing this blog for the past three years now. In it I’ve disclosed moments of heartbreak, excitement and doubt that have only confirmed what I’ve always known about love: it’s a rollercoaster.

I went to bed laughing last night beside someone who, ironically, was talking about his fear of rollercoasters. He’s terribly afraid of heights. I laughed as he told me that when he boards a rollercoaster, he insists on sitting in the very first car.

“Is that your way of psyching yourself out and convincing yourself that you’re suddenly unafraid of heights?” I asked.

He nodded and said that he’d rather just confront his fears head on.

I’m not one for rollercoasters, nor amusement parks. But, like most people, I’ve been on a rollercoaster or two. The experience was 80% terrifying and perhaps 20% thrilling in that I remember being overwhelmed with the fluttering sensation of nervous butterflies.

This is perhaps the only way I can describe my experiences in love, as cliche as it might sound.

It’s terrifying to believe that it will work out. To believe that all your work on the uphill climb will lead to a fun, easy, thrilling ride.

I don’t know where I’m going with the guy I’m currently seeing. I’m not in the same kind of passionately consuming love that I’ve been in before. There are different degrees of love. But so far, I’m just enjoying the ride with all its ups and downs.

I just hope though that when you meet me, you take the first car. And don’t forget to smile and throw your hands up in excitement on the way down.

You have to be brave in love.

Love Love, R

a new love

Dear Soulmate,

Where do I begin? So much time has passed since I last wrote you in January to inform you that I would be moving to New York. As it turns out, three months later, I’ve arrived.

I love New York. I love it for its energy, its passion, its conviction and its pulse. I’ve fallen in love with my Village apartment with its tall windows that lend a view of the backsides of neighboring low-rise buildings. I’ve fallen in love with the sounds from the avenues–streams of traffic humming along at all hours, quieting only in the early morning. I love the rumble of the trains, the frenzy of pedestrian traffic, and most of all, I love the stories that have been created here.

I’ve found a love here in New York too, although I know it is fleeting. He’s smart and funny, handsome and charming, but my heart is sold to the city.

I don’t belong to anyone right now, only to the rhythmn of my footsteps on the avenue that lead me someplace new and wonderful with every step I take, every corner I turn.

Love Love, R

the truth about men.

Dear Soulmate,

Maybe it takes a new relationship to make you realize how much you’ve changed in your beliefs about love and all its entanglements. Maybe it’s just growing up and maturing, understanding that it’s not all about the happy ever after but rather just taking each moment as it comes.

Somehow though, I have adopted the worst possible attitude that I always despised in former loves–the out-of-sight-out-of-mind view.

Love knows no distance. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. We’ve all heard those expressions time and time again. Still, it does not necessarily make them true.

Past experiences in heartbreak have taught me not to hold onto anything and to simply let things go.

When I was asked by my grandmother today whether I still had feelings for someone who left to go travel a few months back, I simply said, “not anymore.” It was the first time I acknowledged this out loud. Then I slumped in my chair in disappointment–both about what I had just said and because I felt like I was turning into someone I never wanted to become.

My grandmother finally said, “Well I guess you are finally learning you cannot control men.”

The truth is that I never intended to… I only hung my hopes on the stars that I would be enough to make someone stay.

Love Love, R

p.s. my grandparents celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary tomorrow… my grandmother told me that my grandfather is still very much the love of her life.

i need a guy’s perspective

Dear Soulmate,

I should be concentrating my energy elsewhere but I cannot seem to escape the events that trangressed this past weekend that left me feeling dazed and confused.

Do all guys behave this way? Can some intelligent man please explain to me why guys can act so distant and cold?

I am ready to move on and forgive him for everything. I have taken the high road and accepted his change of heart. He is even in a relationship now with someone else. But still, he didn’t even have the nerve to acknowledge me when I saw him for the first time on Friday night after a year.

Why does he go out of his way to make me feel invisible? Honestly, is this just immaturity?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Love, R

a few good men?

Dear Soulmate,

I am going to be honest when I say that it is sometimes difficult to believe that there are good men out there.

As I walked out of North Station today some guy approached me asking for a dollar for the T. When I told him I only had a credit card he added, “you’re really pretty, do you have a boyfriend?”

And had he not looked like the kind of guy who would say that to anyone walking down the street, I may have been more inclined to consider it remotely if not slightly flattering.

But as I walked home I could not help but be convinced that all men are only after one thing. And if there are any women out there like me, I keep that under lock and key.

Needless to say Boston’s dreary and drizzly overcast today did anything but help elevate my mood to some level of normalcy.

I cannot help but feel like Carrie Bradshaw today in Sex and the City when she states that she is like a fly strip for dysfunctional men.

Perhaps I should have never left my house today.

Missing you, R

chivalry is dead

Dear Soulmate,

This morning at Dunkin’ Donuts I was surprised to see a man walk through the door and cut in front of me to place his order. Needless to say the women behind the counter were not impressed, and he did not get served. Instead they drew their attention to me, who stood there patiently waiting with a dripping umbrella and an unethused look upon my face.

This episode may not have been such a problem had I not encountered a similar situation just the night before. I was standing on the sidewalk after midnight on Saturday, my arm raised trying to hail a cab. Seeing as the meteorologist held its promise and the temperature was in fact above freezing for perhaps the first time in months, the city was bustling with people. Nearly every cab was taken and by the time a vacant one finally came into view I stepped out onto the street only to find a group of rowdy guys drunkenly yelling for the same one.

“Excuse me, gentlemen, I’ve been waiting here for awhile now, and this cab is mine,” I said with my arm fully extended to grab the driver’s attention.

“Well excuse me,” one of the guys replied with an air of unnecessary sarcasm that was accompanied with an uproar of laughter from his seemingly less intelligent friends.

“Ladies first,” I said as I looked back at them, clearly unimpressed with their response.

Then upon realizing that the quizzical expressions on the faces of these juvenile guys were not ones of rudeness but rather ignorance, I sighed and said the same thing I said this morning at the Dunkin’ Donuts counter; “Chivalry is dead.”

I read once in a magazine that Boston men are among the country’s rowdiest and most arrogant. But please, gentlemen, do us all a favor and do not take pride in these qualities. They are anything but flattering.

R

playing the wrong cards

Dear Soulmate,

“If relationships were restaurants, I’d like the check please,” I said to my friend the other day after agonizing over the complexity of love. I began to think about my generation- gen-y. The one that has unknowingly cast love as the white elephant in the room.

Immersed in the fast-paced hook-up culture, experts have blamed our generation for being commitment phobic; putting off marriage until later years and instead settling for flings absent of the relationship title. But why?

Are we scared to be loved? Or have both men and women’s pride been equalized, leaving both sexes defensive and guarded of their hearts and feelings.

As I look back on my past relationship’s- hook-up’s essentially, but call them what you will, I realize that I never told the other person how I really felt about them.

Instead, I played by my generation’s rules of love: I rarely ever called him, I gave him space, I never complained, I rarely initiated kisses and there were nights I chose not to hold him simply because I felt it would classify me as ‘clingy’ or ‘needy.’

And even still, when I have rarely ever verbally expressed my emotions or pursued someone who I have been so blindly in love with, I have gotten hurt.

Sometimes I think about how things would be different if I addressed the white elephant in the room- if I had just admitted to being helplessly and so defenselessly in love. Would that have made a difference?

Common knowlege has me believing that, yes, it would have. At least to some degree.

When all is said and done, or in my case unsaid and undone, I cannot help but believe my generation’s perspective of love is skewed. Women are expected to believe that ‘he’s just not that into you’ while men try to conceal their emotions to protect themselves from being hurt.

It’s a terribly painful double edged sword.

And at the end of the day I wonder, should love be this difficult? My friend responded to me and said, “relationships are a seven course meal, and you are just beginning your appetizers.”

The answer though is really for you to decide.

But I promise you, dear soulmate, that I love you. And I always will. And maybe that is enough to make me believe why it never worked out with anyone else.

Love, R

i’m just not that into it

Dear Soulmate,

There are so many magazines and articles that are devoted to convincing you against what you try so hard to believe in.

Take articles published in women’s magazines for example that explain why men withdraw from perfectly good relationships. And the reasoning they give? Because men are too into you.

If that’s not confusing enough there are a myriad of publications that exceed the realm of magazines that convince you that “He’s just not that into you” and everything else that comes with that territory.

launches into theatres 2009

But why can’t it just be simple? Why can’t you fall and love and it fits? The more I read about failed relationships and faded love, the easier it becomes to believe it.

Am I the only one who sometimes feels jaded by what people are buying?

I suppose the easiest solution would be to simply ignore reading these books and magazines altogether. But it’s more than just publications. It’s movies, too. It’s an entire culture devoted to relationship how-tos.

But at the end of the day, enough is enough. There are no guidebooks that will tell you if it’s really meant to be. There are no movies that will convince you enough to wait in the pouring rain for that pivotal kiss from your potential soulmate.

No, there’s only right now. There’s only the reality that life is much more unpredictable and complicated than any magazine or movie could attempt to explain. But that’s what makes this crazy journey so spectacular.

I encourage you to live your own life- stay positive and optimistic.  This year belongs to us.

All my love, R