Fool me once, shame on you ...

Agreed with 21. Calvin, I've dealt with those type of women before -- and I've done that to some women (who mysteriously dig me), too, though unintentionally -- and it's not worth it.

The divorces speak to the life choices. If after the second divorce you can't make a good choice the third time around ... well, where there's smoke, there's fire.

Take care of yourself, Calvin. My advice? Get wicked-ass drunk tonight and bang some random chick at a bar who is seeking some companionship.

 

Sorry to hear the crap you are going through Calvin, but everyone here seems to agree with the friends who truly care about what is best for you.

Move on. It's her loss, not yours.

 

Calvin,

The bottom line is this: women like her aren't able to be in stable, loving relationships because they don't love themselves. And you deserve better. I was in a relationship like yours once (I think almost everyone has been in one like this at some point in our lives) and I realized (eventually) that I wasn't in love with her as much as I was in love with the idea of saving her. She was a broken, sad, beautiful person who needed, desperately, to be loved, but she wasn't capable of loving me back. And while not every successful relationship has to be 50-50 in terms of how much people love one another, you can't survive on 90-10. You just can't. People always convince themselves, "If I can just get her to love me 30 percent as much as I love her, I can make up the difference." It doesn't work like that. Even if you tried the Lloyd Dobbler thing, and even if it worked, it would only be a temporary fix. In a few days, you'd wake up and the same issues would still exist for her. Trust me, I know from experience. In the movies, grand romantic gestures only have to fix things until the credits roll. And with my ex-girlfriend, I was great at them. She'd push me away, and I'd leave her alone for awhile, then I'd do something grand, and because she was lonely, she'd run back into my arms. But it was only a temporary fix. In real life, the credits don't roll when she runs out and hugs you in the rain. It's much more complicated.

You're a better person for trying to love her and trying to fix her, but now you owe it to yourself to slowly put her behind you. You don't have to forget her, or hate her, because that's not how it works. But you can miss her a little less each day, and hopefully meet someone out there who will love you for the same reasons she had to push you away. Your friends are frustrated because they can look at the situation objectively. She can't love you because she doesn't love herself.

So listen to some sad songs, go for a few long walks or long runs, read a great book (or three), and vow to miss her a little bit less each day. Tell your friends you realize you've been acting like a knucklehead, and then thank them for listening anyway. Here is the thing that seems obvious but people often forget: Your happiness counts too.

Best of luck.

 

Here's a compromise: Go to her house, hoist the boombox over your head, play "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who, then leave a steamer in her rose bushes and get the fuck on up outta there.

I'm an unloved virgin, and I approved this message.

 

That's pretty funny MM, seriously. However, I have to ask...is there any correlation between leaving a load in the bushes and you being an unloved virgin?

 

For me, no. For boots, no ... comment.

 

This thread has opened an old wound, or at least reminded me of a bad scar. Everyone here is on the money. You just described my ex-girlfrield. It only took me a few days to distinguish that she had issues. And I kick myself now for having spent almost three years in denial. She was emotionally vacant and had mental issues and self-esteem problems. She never was happy.

I recall that she always came back to me, and I always let her do it because I was insecure. Every time she left, she broke my heart and my pride. That made it easier for her to come back, because I became a pitiful soul. My friends got tired of hearing about it. My family got tired of it. I had nowhere to turn. Today, we don't even discuss it. It's like it never happened.

I remember trying to focus on work. That failed miserably. The only thing that helped was when I focused on me and my stuff. Be selfish for a little while and enjoy the things that you like.

 

It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box-office star in America, because every straight girl I know would sell her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker. For upwardly mobile women in their twenties and thirties, John Cusack is the neo-Elvis. But here's what none of these upwardly mobile women seem to realize: They don't love John Cusack. They love Lloyd Dobler. When they see Mr. Cusack, they are still seeing the optimistic, charmingly loquacious teenager he played in Say Anything, a movie that came out more than a decade ago. That's the guy they think he is; when Cusack played Eddie Thomas in America's Sweethearts or the sensitive hit man in Grosse Pointe Blank, all his female fans knew he was only acting…but they assume when the camera stopped rolling, he went back to his genuine self…which was someone like Lloyd Dobler…which was, in fact, someone who is Lloyd Dobler, and someone who continues to have a storybook romance with Diane Court (or with Ione Skye, depending on how you look at it). And these upwardly mobile women are not alone. We all convince ourselves of things like this—not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time. This is why I will never be completely satisfied by a woman, and this is why the kind of woman I tend to find attractive will never be satisfied by me. We will both measure our relationship against the prospect of fake love.

Fake love is a very powerful thing. That girl who adored John Cusack once had the opportunity to spend a weekend with me in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, but she elected to fly to Portland instead to see the first U.S. appearance by Coldplay, a British pop group whose success derives from their ability to write melodramatic alt-rock songs about fake love. It does not matter that Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band I've ever heard in my entire fucking life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead), or that their greatest fucking artistic achievement is a video where their blandly attractive frontman walks on a beach on a cloudy fucking afternoon. None of that matters. What matters is that Coldplay manufactures fake love as frenetically as the Ford fucking Motor Company manufactures Mustangs, and that's all this woman heard. "For you I bleed myself dry," sang their blockhead vocalist, brilliantly informing us that stars in the sky are, in fact, yellow. How am I going to compete with that shit? That sleepy-eyed bozo isn't even making sense. He's just pouring fabricated emotions over four gloomy guitar chords, and it ends up sounding like love. And what does that mean? It means she flies to fucking Portland to hear two hours of amateurish U.K. hyper-slop, and I sleep alone in a $270 hotel in Manhattan, and I hope Coldplay gets fucking dropped by fucking EMI and ends up like the Stone fucking Roses, who were actually a better fucking band, all things considered.

Not that I'm bitter about this.

http://www.bordersstores.com/features/feature.jsp?file=sexdrugsandcocoapuffs

 

This is what depresses me. I write for a living, I have a gift from God when it comes to putting words to computer screens and pieces of paper, but every so often I get hit with something like this and I realize that no matter how much coffee and cocaine and apple fritters I torture my soul with, I can't do THAT.