Saturday 5 February 2011

Relationships (or lack thereof...) Part 1

Today I realised that most of my relationship stories (bar a few notable exceptions) end with… “and then she dumped me”…

For example –
“I was supposed to move up to Scotland… and then she dumped me”
“We’d moved in together and got a dog… and then she dumped me”
And most recently
“We’d got back together… and then she dumped me”

I have been wracking my brains for some reason why this is the case and I’ve come to the conclusion that the overriding factor, the golden thread through these failed relationships is… ME. The blogs over the next few days are going to be a mini memoire about these failed relationships as I try to understand what went wrong and how I can improve, call it a personal development review (and maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get a one to one!)

I am NOT after sympathy, so don’t give it to me, this is just an empirical study of the relationships of one Lydia C. Rullow.

The first girl I ever dated was a girl called Laura from school. We were both in sixth form together and she was butch. Today I’d never have let her go, but at the time, I knew it was over the moment my Dad mistook her for a boy. Not his fault, it was dark and she was very butch, but I thought “I LIKE GIRLS” and dumped her. I think karma’s been paying me back for this ever since. We were only together for a couple of weeks, and I was madly in love with one of my pals so it was never going to work out. I kissed a few boys and called myself bisexual and this lasted until university.

When I got to Edge Hill (the gayest university in the UK – yes, even gayer than Brighton), I settled into my halls of residence (John Dalton 2002-03) I met my first out lesbian. She was called Jo and she was very very butch. My heart fluttered as I made my first ridiculous attempts at flirting, asking her where she got her GAY tee-shirt from. She replied “GAP”. I said, “really?!” naïve as I was at that age and she rolled her eyes and said with more than a hint of sarcasm “no,” which in my mind sounded like “no, you idiot!” how could I not know? I was gay right? I was always falling for my pals, inappropriate girls who were either straight or taken (or both), and I often missed out on girls who showed me genuine attention as I was blind to this thing called flirting. One girl was sat in my room telling me all about her intimate piercing and staring me dead in the eye and my response? “Yawn, I’ve got to be up early for a lecture!” I’m still kicking myself about that one!

My first “relationship” a year later was unusual to say the least, that is the first person I referred to as “partner”. She was actually transitioning to become a He. (How strange after I’d dumped the butch girl?) The hormones she injected daily made her mean and one night she tried to bring somebody else home. I made the mistake of saying “the L word” after not very long, and I thought the sex was really good! And then she dumped me!

It was a few months after this disaster, I met the first love of my life Katy – I’m going to use some real names here so get used to it! It was the week that my lovely friend from my drama class James had died and I was broken hearted and very sad. My best friend in the world (at the time), Marcia invited me on a night out to Liverpool. I was desperate to get out of Ormskirk as the heavy shadow of grief seemed to cloud every corner, and I wanted to get blotto and stop thinking about the previous few days.

As I walked into the Lisbon I saw her with Marcia and some other pals. I was immediately drawn to her, and she to me, but we were both very shy. It took until the end of the night for us to even speak to each other, but when we finally kissed, I knew it was something special. We were together for a little over six months and when Marcia left the area for good, I referred to Katy as “the best going away present a girl could ask for!” I was in love. But it was all too quick and I wanted everything now. By the time I was unceremoniously dumped (I’m over it now so I can say that without bitterness), we had plans to move to Scotland together so she could study wolves in Aviemore for a year. And then she dumped me!

A mere two days after I’d been to visit her in Kent, she called me up and ended it. I can’t blame her, I was often stifling. I didn’t purposely seek control, but I did like to make the decisions and I probably pushed her into moving in together, but she was easily pushed. I cried for two weeks and listened to “dry your eyes” by The Streets on repeat for about the same amount of time. Unfortunately, I’d already surrendered my room in my old house, put all my things in storage and deferred my third year.

Luckily I managed to get back to Edge Hill that September. I completed my third year, had the best time yet and spent the next six years trying unsuccessfully to get over her. I didn’t speak to her for eighteen months, then somehow found her on MSN or Facebook and we’d chat about this and that. It was only much later that I realised that she’d never given me a reason. She’d never told me why she didn’t want to be with me anymore and she never once said that the breakup was forever. Somewhere in my mind, I believed that if we could just see each other, things would slip back into place. The moment she told me otherwise, the feelings stopped then and there, and I was so pleased I’d had the guts to just ask and regretful that it had taken six years…

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