Wanting to erase the past

It turns out, for all my feminism, I am a wuss. Or, in 2004, I WAS a wuss. As a young “independent” woman who left home at 16 for college and dated boys on and off, had “boyfriends” on and off, you’d think that by 23, I’d have learnt when a situation was getting a bit ugly and would know when to leave. Turns out these situations are harder to exit than you’d think.

I met this guy who used to go to college with me, after many years. Knew him vaguely in college, remember him as kinda cute and pretty smart, fun to be with. The kind you can have a decent conversation with and who also knows how to have a good time. God knows that combination is getting harder to find

So we start hanging out, soon we are dating. He drinks a fair amount, I am thinking, as I get to know him. Friends from college laugh about his “alcohol” problem. I’m a bit shaky as we start spending more time alone at his flat – I’ve just got out of a two-year relationship and am feeling fragile. Soon after we start dating, one afternoon, I find my eyes welling up with tears when I am with him… it’s a terrible thing to do, to be remembering an Ex when you’re with someone else, but it’s not like I’m doing it to annoy him. This makes him impatient though – he clicks in impatience and tells me to, “come on”. I am interrupting his sense of what we “should” be doing by my silly emotions. It feels weird: I have been used to gentleness when I cried, not this brusque impatience.

As we hang out more, I notice he is more demanding than I would like. When he drinks, this happens more than otherwise. He pins me to the wall and starts treating me like a doll. No, he isn’t hitting me, but he is forcing me into situations that I am not ready for, and I feel guilty to be saying no.

When I drop him off at home and go up to hang out for a bit, I always have my car keys within reach. I tell him, I have to go, my mum wants me home.

Even when he isn’t drunk, I feel meek and subservient around him. He knows exactly what he wants me to ‘do’ to him, and I don’t feel like doing it. It never came to a confrontation: I never said, hey, I hate you pushing my head around like this to do something I am not ready to or feeling like doing. This many years later, I wish I HAD made it an issue instead of feeling guilty for not behaving like a “good girlfriend”.

I often thought of the Ex, and how much fun it was being with him, doing things because I wanted him to be happy and how ironic that there, I would have stretched myself to give all I could, and just a few months later, here, I was feeling phobic and repulsed by the thought of sex or too much time spent together. I was scared a bit, of someone so much bigger than me, and someone who didn’t seem to care what I was thinking as long as I “serviced”.

And yet, it took me six whole months to realise ‘this is rubbish, I should leave’. I don’t think I’ll ever figure why that long. Or what stopped me from telling him that you can’t force someone to make you happy.