(I love these entries.)

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First: lis­ten to this. Some days I feel exactly like this song. Those days are pretty good.

I remem­ber read­ing the blog once of the guy who said that his aunt was Nancy. She was a Canadian woman who suf­fered from men­tal insta­bil­ity and killed her­self (“It seems so long ago/Nancy was alone/a forty five beside her head/an open tele­phone”), and Cohen read about the story in the news­pa­per, and penned this song about her.

Anyway.

I like him. He’s very unbi­ased. He doesn’t try to cod­dle me or side with or against me or force me into think­ing any­thing. He offers per­spec­tives that no one else can give me.

I wasn’t sure where to start, so I just tried to bring him up to speed on my life in the time that passed between us. It began briefly with how well I was main­tain­ing the progress we had made but quickly drifted to the rela­tion­ship, and that pretty much took the rest of the session.

(From here on out, I’m going to refer to it as the rela­tion­ship. Just cause I’m tired of writ­ing “half-relationship” or “rela­tion­ship” in quotes like that. I’d say that two peo­ple as involved as we were would cer­tainly be con­sid­ered to be in a relationship.)

He tried link­ing cer­tain things back to past issues. Like whether or not my being enam­ored with this per­son, who had ini­tially expressed no attrac­tion to me, was just a way of pro­tect­ing myself in the long run (some peo­ple who suf­fer from trau­matic emo­tional expe­ri­ences will be attracted to the peo­ple they can’t have as a way of avoid­ing inti­macy and any kind of chance of being hurt, and I used to be one of these peo­ple). He fol­lowed this by ask­ing if I had hope that it would work out, and I told him that in my head I didn’t, but in my heart I did. To him, that was a sign it prob­a­bly wasn’t me sub­con­sciously pro­tect­ing myself again.

He asked me what I liked about her. I told him as much as I could remem­ber: that she under­stood my art (which is very impor­tant to me in a rela­tion­ship), that she was cre­ative, intel­li­gent, nice, com­pat­i­ble (inter­ested in the same things, like watch­ing movies and lis­ten­ing to music), enjoys walks in nice weather, and food. (Looking back, it seems like such a sim­ple list, but at the risk of sound­ing cliché, what more is there to life but spend­ing these moments with a per­son you love?). I fin­ished off by say­ing the most impor­tant thing I shared with her was that our first pri­or­ity was the other person’s hap­pi­ness, and that sort of blos­somed into every­thing else.

Then some­what clin­i­cally, as if he was check­ing off a list, he asked whether there was attrac­tion, inti­macy, and pas­sion too. I said yes. From my end, at least. She would only express the first one in a round­about way by say­ing, “I have a weak­ness for you”. The last two she could never deny.

I told him how she didn’t like the con­flicts we’d have, which she saw as a sign that we were incom­pat­i­ble, and he asked me how I felt about it. I told him I saw con­flict as com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and there­fore a way to resolve things. He said that was a dif­fer­ent answer from one I would have given him a year ago, when I would clam up so that other peo­ple couldn’t dis­ap­point me, and that was good.

He also asked me about the rea­sons she gave me for why it wouldn’t work. I told him, but he dwelt on the one that went some­thing like, “We’re too dif­fer­ent beyond the pos­si­bil­ity of change” because I said that was the one I believed the most. “Was that clear to you?”, he asked, and I could tell he was try­ing to remain neu­tral to gauge my opin­ion. “I guess. Sometimes we would argue about silly things, so I fig­ured it was those instances she was refer­ring to.” He said, “That sounds pretty ambigu­ous to me. I think she should have the respon­si­bil­ity of explain­ing to you why, and the con­stant ambiva­lence by her was a sign that she had to fig­ure things out on her end first.” I told him I didn’t think she knew her­self, how every­thing lined up for her but didn’t feel right, how she wanted to give me a rea­son but couldn’t, and how I believed her about that. But while explain­ing this, I was think­ing, “I love this guy”.

I explained that when it was over, I told her I couldn’t see her again. He said that was prob­a­bly a good idea, that it made per­fect sense because humans feel pain and need to heal, and that it’s wise to start pro­tect­ing myself beyond a cer­tain point, which she def­i­nitely crossed.

The only time I got a lit­tle misty-eyed was when he said my behav­iour of giv­ing her every­thing she wanted (so she could fig­ure things out and I could live with­out regrets) prob­a­bly didn’t enable it, but rein­forced her behav­iour of con­stantly tak­ing and hav­ing no respon­si­bil­ity. He stopped short of telling me I should have acted dif­fer­ently, but did say that some­times peo­ple need to be jolted out of that1, and while my approach made sense, the oppo­site may have had a bet­ter effect. I said, “In try­ing not to screw up, I really screwed up, didn’t I?”, and we had a hearty laugh about it, cause it’s the only thing you can do sometimes.

We left off ambigu­ously. I told him I didn’t know where to go from here, but we were out of time. I’m going to absorb a few of his obser­va­tions first to see which ones apply and how they affect my perspective.

Wow, writ­ing that was eas­ier than I expected. Maybe I’ve learned to let things go again.

  1. He related one of his high school expe­ri­ences to me, which I won’t repeat, due to doctor-patient con­fi­den­tial­ity. Ironic that I’m being open about myself, but pro­tect­ing him, isn’t it? I will say that it was a great story though, and when quot­ing the girl, he actu­ally swore, which is out of char­ac­ter for him, but fit per­fectly with the quote. [↑]