Yeah, it’s who you think it is. She’s always a bit elusive and evasive about past relationships to everyone except the person(s) with whom she is dating in the present tense. It is during that window when you get to hear all the awful things past partners did. Knowing this, I’m aware that I was probably turned into a demon (not daemon) before those people she saw after leaving me on the road.

The strangest thing, though, came of that dumping. The following night, I was in bed with someone I’d known all of 48 hours, who soon became my next girlfriend. It just kind of happened. After nine months, I ended the romantic part because it is, for me at least, impossible to manage a relationship and a full-course load at university. We remain good friends, however, even if she chose to live in a backwater nearby nowhere civilised (whose Bay after which the municipality is named, rhymes with “chunder”). Actually, 4 credits that year seems like child’s play compared to the 6.5 credits I just hammered through.

But yeah, you’re right: the greater risk comes with it the greater return, but also the greatest risk for loss. Incidentally, university didn’t feel like a risk so much as knuckling under and throwing myself into it, provided I was allowed to. I was in the end, and am continuing so. I think it comes down to whether it’s something you want, and specifically speaking, something in particular you want from it. I knew what I was going to the UofT for, though I’d say about 6 or 7 out of every 10 undergrads I met have no clue what they want, why they’re there, and what they hope to get from the experience. I guess, to the UofT, they are the cash cows or something. Meanwhile 1 or 2 of every 10 end up what has been referred to as “scholars” and “academics” (I’ve been branded with both, and I’m not yet cosy with that distinction, as I don’t think I did anything terribly special).

I do hope you arrive to completion soon. It’s a sense of faint satisfaction, as in, “Yeah, I got through this. Most people don’t even make it to uni, and fewer still get through it.” Keep at it and know what you want, even if it’s in the least likely place you might look.

If this is who it sounds like, I’m sorry things didn’t work out, as, I’m sure, are you (at least on some level). I wish I could offer any meaningful insight, whether on this relationship or relationships in general.

Although I’ve known her at least several years longer than I’ve known you, I can’t recall her ever being one to talk much about her past relationships. So I actually don’t know a lot about that side of her.

As for myself, the only actual relationship I’ve had ended over 11 years ago now. While the aftermath became amicable with she and I being on perfectly friendly terms, we talk less than once a year if that, and we just don’t interact with each other at all. Although I kinda knew what happened, I still don’t really understand why things died between me and her either. I knew the relationship wasn’t able to continue as it was, but that’s not quite the same. And I think this is at least one of the reasons why I’ve met with such little success in attempting to start or build relationships, both ever since and even before my relationship.

The only realization I have made is one I think I told you before a long while back: those people who get the closest to us, who get the deepest within us, are the ones whose words and actions can do us the most damage. I think of it as the higher price we pay for enjoying the warmth and depth of such relationships.

P.S. I’m glad and impressed that you’re doing so well in school and in life now. Since deciding over a year ago to go back and finish my undergrad degree once and for all, I’ve gained a tiny bit of appreciation at least for what people give of themselves to do this. I try to learn a little and gain some inspiration from friends, both old and new, especially when it comes to completing college. And, while you and I’ve not really talked at all since you left to start a few years back, I include you amongst those. The fact that, with each post of yours (which I admit I don’t always find time to read, like a great many of my friends’ writings), you are still in school working at it helps me that much to not quit in disgust with each successively obnoxious obstacle that rises up to stand in my way. So, for what it’s worth, take it as a vote that you are doing something quite right with your life. =)

as , let rest stet.

But then, with really no warning beyond a vague sense of distancing herself a bit (and blaming in on her own stress of being in another relationship — she was polyamorous, as I was I then), I came to Toronto to set up for university, looking for a place of my own, etc., when she took me out for brunch to say that she had “withheld” herself for the previous nine months, followed a week later with what is now known as the “dumping dinner”. I didn’t see the dumping coming. That night, I asked about the status of our friendship, and she was adamant that it was very much intact. Incidentally, the last time I saw her face was when I left her house that night.

So things were left unresolved, and I still don’t know entirely why things just died. Died they did, though. It’s taken all this time to get to a place where I can look on to life with or without anyone for the rest of my life, and I look at that relationship as one that could have worked out well had she not bailed. But maybe it’s good she did that before I started university, rather than during. Maybe her issues were ticking timebombs the whole time and they detonated gratefully sooner than later. So by being in the third group, she’s in this vague place of contempt and disappointment, even a little regret, because she was the closest analogue/other half to myself as anyone I’ve come to know. Just knowing what that feels like, the simpatico, is irreplaceable, because I know it’s actually possible, even if hopelessly elusive.

Short story long, she was (all apologies for ganking The Style Council) “the one who got away”. What a damn mess.

My exes tend to fall in one of three groupings, I think. The first are those relationships that converted into lasting friendships. I don’t think any of them would mind if I mentioned them by name, in ascending chronological order: , , , and . There’s another lot where everything ended all rotten beyond repair, where long afterwards I wonder what I was thinking. Incidentally, the two I have in mind in this group shared trivial qualities with one another that shouldn’t really matter, but evidently, they both ‘sploded: both five years my elder, both Aries (as am I), both blonde (as I’m not), and both fairly antisocial homebodies with deliberately limited contact with the outside world. Both were also persistent smokers, but again, trivial. What wasn’t trivial was their shared life baggage preceding my meeting them. Some things you just can’t undo (and yeah, that was an oblique commentary on the way they lived their lives for the roughly three decades before I met them (both online). With these, the endings were pretty ugly and painful, and I avoided contact with both of them from pretty much once the breakup was done.

The third category is a tough one, because it is solely occupied by the person I just removed from LJ. It’s tough because the nature of our relationship started out as surprisingly good friends. We spent a year or so cultivating a strong friendship with what I still think was outstanding and surprisingly easy communication. Had we kept it there and not morphed it into a romantic, committed relationship, I would have been just fine to have someone like her in my life. She was the only woman with whom I seriously entertained marriage. While she had been engaged before, she felt very strongly about marriage, too, and even tried to get me to come to Canada as a partner, rather than independently (but seeing as I’m stubborn and had already spent eight years trying to make it here on my own, I wasn’t about to give up on self-will — which chagrined her). She gave me what amounted to a new chapter on life, spiritually, emotionally, and even corporeally speaking. But then, after she knew that my lifelong clinical depression is really — say it loud — a lifetime thing I can’t just cure, but can manage, and because I had made it to university with no help from her whatsoever, she did an about-face on me. She believed I was moving here because of her (her ego was feeding that one), ignoring one of the first things she’d learnt about me: I made the decision to move to Canada in May 1996; she arrived in Canada in October 2002, and I met her online in November 2002. If my major in Canadian studies, thesis on Canadian music policy, and recipient of what amounts to a “student of the year” award in Canadian studies isn’t all for serious, then nothing is. Further, her ego prevented her from giving music or film from the 1980s a chance because doing so, in her words, was too “trendy”, and she claimed to hate following trends (never mind her obsession with the latest and greatest information technology as an electrical engineering graduate). She’d rather have listened to The Yellowjackets (!?) and Waltendy Carlos (uhm) ad nauseam than listen to anything I introduced to her. The more I glowed about something musical, the more she hated it. Yet she had all the expensive, nice synthy toys, like a Yamaha CS-80, an Alesis Andromeda A6, a Voyetra, a Moog, and all those things that made music penned in the 1980s such a rapid evolution of sound. Go figure.

anyway, got your email!