feeling feelings

there are times when, no matter what one does, one is dragged into unnecessarily messy situations entirely outside her own control. this happened to me the night before last. i desperately wish i could relay this story in the active tense, but unfortunately i had no agency in almost any of it. the whole mess blew up in my face; i happened to be holding the grenade when it exploded, but i certainly didn't pull the pin.
i know who did pull the pin, though, and i must admit my deep, deep disappointment in him. but let's set the scene before we walk through its combustion.

i was very proud of the arrangement i found when i moved to ohio. open, casual, liberated - i'd never been able to apply those words to my sex life before, but here, i could. i had no reason to worry about boys at all - i had one when i wanted one, but without any of the thinking or feeling usually attendant to official relationships. it was ideal. we honestly had no expectation of each other - i could and often did leave town, he could and often did keep other girls here. the only requirement was that we do everything openly. we knew what we were getting from each other. that, my friends, is the dream; to be able to say "you do you" without any hesitation, to be genuinely unbothered by where he goes in his spare time, to be free from any of the responsibility and emotional burden of a relationship - i never met his parents, i didn't have to throw his birthday party, i didn't have to know his darkest secrets or fuck him when i was tired. our time together was strictly fun: all PDAs at bars, running jokes, lazy mornings...  we could share all these things completely securely knowing that no one had to get hurt AND i got to brag about being liberated from the social pressure to couple up, while getting laid without sleeping around.

however, we must all learn at some point that utopia is never real, no matter how desperately we wish it to be. my paradise was not founded in the honesty i require. turns out, my anti-relationship wasn't the picture of modernity i believed it to be, for my man hadn't found a string of girls willing to participate in our experiment. instead, from the perspective of the poor child who texted me in the middle of the night on friday, i was the girl helping her boyfriend cheat on her.

i do not like to be lied to, i do not like to be manipulated, i do not like to talk about feelings, and i do NOT like to be blamed for another person's mess. therefore, i was, as you can imagine, slightly less than thrilled to wake up to a phone vibrating with hateful messages from an incredibly upset girl who somehow knew all the worst parts of my history and blamed me for stealing her man. luckily for me, this girl is a decent and reasonable human being, who quickly understood that had i known she'd been lied to i never would have participated. we spoke throughout much of the next day, and though i promised her that i would wait until she'd had a chance to yell at the boy in question before venting my anger with him, talking to her longer just made me angrier. since he's no longer answering his phone, i've taken to the internet to bitch, following in the footsteps of millions.

how can a man just lie to the people he's so sweet toward - the people he purports to care about? if this is something he's capable of, doesn't that make him less a man than a boy? if he continues this behavior into his thirties will he be a little boy throughout his life? is there hope for a person who exhibits this behavior, who values the people around him so little? i can't stand that he misrepresented himself to me, but it's something i'm relatively used to. the part of this story that absolutely makes me want to stab him right in the balls with a rusty flathead screwdriver is how he treated the girl who thought she was his girlfriend. this is a person with whom he's been sleeping for MONTHS - i know, because she asked me if he and i were together on NEW YEARS. her emotional investment in their relationship was pretty high, which he must have known (probably also why he decided against honesty) and consciously decided to take advantage of. i can't imagine any other way for this to have gone on for, again, MONTHS with her imagining monogamy. and then to drag me into his mess? the whole point of sleeping with him was to avoid emotional messes!

i'm very upset, which isn't a state i enjoy. because of this dbag's irresponsibility, i can no longer hang out with any of the people i've taken to spending my time with here. what was about to be a kick-ass country summer will now be a drawn-out battle with the university of michigan and a lonely wait for my return to new york. great.