I Believed

My friend and I were out to dinner on Wednesday talking about our lives, and she was telling me how she always finds some tragic flaw in her boyfriends. There's always SOMETHING that you find out about your boyfriend, husband, lover that you don't like. For instance, she's totally crazy about her beau, who she's been dating for about a year, but he is horrible with money. She fears that he's never going to step it up and support the family if they have one, and it'll be her job to be the breadwinner. She's motivated, educated and on the track to get a great job (she's graduating college after next semester), but she still wants the man to be the man, so to speak. Before this guy, her ex was great in every way except that he was too mushy and romantic and let her walk all over him. Before that guy, her boyfriend was smart and funny and attractive, but he couldn't keep a job. See a trend? Her point is that it is impossible to find the perfect guy - we'll always be haunted by at least one downfall. And until recently, I believed that. But I've come into this new way of thinking, brought on in part by that silly book He's Just Not That Into You. I really have faith that there's a guy out there who is going to be all I want. He'll be smart and funny and good looking and he'll smell nice and he'll be successful and he'll be romantic and attentive and thoughtful, but he'll put me in my place, too. He'll have a nice family and a nice car and he'll make me feel beautiful and loved and he'll take care of me...He won't be emotionally unavailable or addicted to bachelorhood or currently married or bad with money or abusive or an alcoholic or forgetful. He won't make me feel worse about myself when I'm with him, and he won't make me wonder if he's cheating. We will fight, of course, but we'll fight fair - No dragging his history or mine into the mix of here and now. I won't feel like it's an admittance of defeat to apologize to him, because he won't give me the triumphant look that says "You said sorry first..." when I say it. I won't be the only one working to make sure we last. There will be ups and downs, but when I look back over our times together, the Good will outweigh the Bad exponentially. I think I deserve that kind of guy; All the women I know do...And it's just a matter of finding him.

I was cleaning out my computer here at work, trying to weed out all of the personal documents I've hidden in files and folders. I usually write emails in Word first, then copy and paste them into Hotmail. Same with posts. But I tried to title them so that they weren't obviously my own personal documents; Titles like "Analysis Letter 2002" and "Checks and Balances." They were fairly easy to locate, but I found it not only helpful, but also interesting, to open each one and read it.

The paragraph at the top was a portion of a larger email I wrote to Tumbleweed in late 2004. It was written somewhere after Thanksgiving, and before the New Year. It was before I started the blog, and while I was finding myself as a single woman.

When I read it today, it made me want to cry. Because I found that guy. And she found that guy.

I was fucking right.