Transmuting Negative Situations Into Learning Experiences

Today’s more of a serious post, and the closest I can get to a “dating disaster” post, because the time I showed up to a date covered in mud-and-possibly-dog-poop was actually really fun. If you’d like to know how I came up with my rather extensive list of dealbreakers, read on!

If you’ve been here long enough, you may have inferred from the beginning-ish of this post and confession #5 that my first relationship probably shouldn’t ever have happened.

It was a combination of being young and stupid (yay high school), coupled with the fact that I really shouldn’t have thought that I could “grow to like someone.”

Translation: Don’t date someone just because they’re really nice to you and you think there’s a chance that you could maybe start liking them.

(I was rebounding at the time, and I didn’t know it. I learned that term later.)

I’ve since become a great fan of turning negative experiences into “learning experiences.”

Things I now keep in mind to put things into perspective:

• What do you know now that you didn’t know then?
• If you’re ever in a situation like that again, how are you going to respond?

I learned a lot. (More specifically, it’s how I figured out my entire “do-not-want” list for a relationship.) It sounds really harsh, but sometimes, the truth hurts. We’ve since made peace with each other and he’ll never read this, so we are good to go!

(For the record, I’m obviously talking about this guy as I knew him back then–it’s definitely possible that he’s changed, but this is [unfortunately] how he came across back then, once we’d started dating.)

Aside from the obvious (don’t be a serial killer, a psychopath, and/or a controlling, possessive, misogynistic and/or inconsiderate selfish prick)…

There is little in this world that is less attractive to me than a person with no passion in/for life.

I’m attracted to people with ambition and passion. He had none. He’d also get annoyed but would pretend not to be upset when I wanted to talk to and/or hang out with my friends without him. This is precisely the type of nonsense that I refuse to ever have to put up with again.
I know in movies, dudes often say things like, “I can’t live without you,” and it’s supposed to be romantic, but I kid you not, hearing that sends chills down my spine. If you have zero drive to accomplish anything and I am your entire life, I have no capacity to deal with that.

You are not responsible for the decisions that someone else makes.

When I realized early on that we were better off as friends/I shouldn’t be in a relationship (because I felt like I was still hung up on someone else), he told me he would kill himself if I left him.

How’s that for a red flag? I don’t think I need to state that that’s a horrible way to make someone stay.

What’s sad is that it actually worked.

I still cared about him as a friend and a person, and I didn’t want to be responsible for a possible suicide. (What if he wasn’t bluffing?)

When your “relationship” is held together by guilt and fear, it’s pretty safe to say that there is nothing left (if there ever was anything to begin with). Moreover, why would you even want them to stay if you know they don’t actually want to be there?

At the time, I had no idea what to do. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on because I’m a champion bottler/secret-keeper (I don’t think anyone even realized we’d been having problems until long after we’d finally broken up).

So my solution was to dead-fish my personality to the point that he’d get so, so bored of my lackluster behavior that he’d have no choice but to break up with me instead.

Genius plan, am I right?!

…It took 6 months.

I literally cried tears of relief when I was finally set free.

Arguments and disagreements may be inevitable, but make sure you fight fair.

(I say “may be” because in my second relationship, there was never anything to fight about and that was awesome. The only “argument” we ever had was over the fact that I was super grumpy because I reallyyy didn’t feel like playing a certain video game one evening.)

I’m sure this is at least somewhat just the way I am, but I think part of why I have such a hard time talking about how I feel stems from the fact that every time I tried to bring something up, my words would get twisted to mean something completely different. That “pretending not to be upset” when he was actually upset would always come and rear its ugly head during said arguments.

I felt like I was walking on eggshells, worried that anything I said would get twisted and used against me later, so after a while, I just gave up and stopped trying to communicate. (Part of the dead fish persona I adopted.)

Do. Not. Want. – Druggies/Alcoholics/Smokers

These have always been on my do-not-want list, so he wasn’t responsible for these being on my list…but super-fun times included receiving a drunk phone call at 3 a.m. from him telling me to meet with him (which I ignored), followed by a subsequent call from not one, but two of our closest friends (…hooray for having mutual friends) asking if I could please come help cart him back to his house because said ex was completely wasted, and they couldn’t get him to move.

(Would I take this, or being a cat lady? How is that even a question?)

Twas a riveting experience–one that people who knew both of us found almost implausible because that type of behavior seemed so uncharacteristic of him. (The “almost” is because they knew that I am honest to a fault, and all the seemingly random unexplained behavior finally started piecing together.) I guess we were both very talented at hiding.

I was completely on strike from relationships for a couple years after that, but at least I have a lot of takeaway points! When you’re already certain of all the things you don’t want in a relationship, it makes recognizing what you do want a whole lot easier. :]

• Do you have a tendency to hide your problems?
• What have you learned from a bad relationship/experience?