Dating and the Future - Part 2

** Trigger warning: This post contains a photo that may be hard to look at, specifically if you knew and loved Jamie. It is a photo from the mortuary, from the last time I saw him before he was cremated. The photo is from a distance but I still wanted to put the warning so you could continue to read at your own risk.

I've been sitting on this post for a little while, letting it ruminate in my head for a bit, unsure what direction I even want to go in while writing it. Also... How much sharing is over sharing? Ya know, who cares. I'm an open book.

I signed up for online dating a couple weeks ago. For the first couple hours it was exciting and exhilirating. But that shine wore off awful fast and turned into being both over and underwhelming at the same time. Overwhelmed with the quantity of messages and "likes" and underwhelmed with the quality of them. But what I found myself doing, was reading these profiles and looking at these men and trying to look past my first impressions of them. So this guy isn't someone I'd normally be attracted to, what if his personality is spectacular and I just overlooked him because he doesn't take good pictures? This other guy's profile reads like he's got a TON of baggage... I don't know if I'm up for that.... but, look at me an all my baggage? Do I want people to do a snap judgement like that on me? I should give him a chance. And these things are all just to initially match with someone, let alone once you started actually talking to them. Which went something like this: Boring, Boring, Not funny, This guy's a moron, Not funny, Super incompatible, Probably a narcissist, I'd like this guy as a friends but not anything more, another guy literally messaged me telling me that he was on shrooms. And the conversation all felt like you were in a job interview rather than natural conversation. It wasn't good times. But I kind of just went with it. I mean, I already had my great love. As some of my friends had told me in the past, don't even bother trying to date because you can't win the lottery twice. So why not just find someone who can help with some companionship? Someone who is okay enough, even if they aren't great. It felt sad, but realistic.

Fast forward a few days, a week or so? I don't know, my sense of time has gone all cattywampus. (That's not a real word, yet I still think I misspelled it.) I came across some memes on Facebook (as shown below) that I saved so I could share them with one of my girlfriends. She's in a relationship where she's unhappy and mistreated and I hate that for her. I wanted to send them to her to remind her that she deserves better.

And at some point, after reading these things (specifically the first two, though the third... While less eloquent, is also very important....) I had a moment of clarity, that I still deserve those things as well. All of the things I want for my beautiful friend, there's no reason I shouldn't expect that for myself too. Who says you can only have one great love? Oh, it's unlikely? Well maybe that's because everyone is out there settling for less than they deserve, because what they should be waiting for feels out of reach. I don't just want companionship, I want to fall in love again. I want to feel that excitement at seeing someones name pop up on my screen like you did when you were in high school, like I did when I first met Jamie. I want to laugh, I want to feel passion, I want to have a smile that I can't wipe off my face, I want someone who I think about as soon as I wake up in the mornings, I want to be in sync and properly matched to my new person. I deserve to have a person, not just a someone. That probably didn't even make sense, but if ya know, ya know. So I decided, no settling. No making excuses or trying to force something out of nothing. And beyond that, I don't want anyone to settle for ME. I want someone to want me the same way I want them. If someone looked at me and saw all of the things I'm self conscious about in terms of getting back out into the dating world and they had to try to look past them and saw them as faults... Well he can go kick rocks for all I care. Nobody's perfect, but I'm a catch, damnit. Baggage be damned! They don't have to write it on a poster board and show up at my doorstep, but I won't settle for anyone who doesn't feel the Love Actually feelings: "To me, you are perfect." and I want to feel that way about them too. I want a partner, an equal on an emotional level. That being said, I'm already taking a break from online dating and I've turned off my profile for the time being. 

Fast forward another week or so (or more, or less, again, my sense of time is REALLY off...) and I'm sitting pretty on my newfound resolve... And I'm going through my mom's phone... And thinking "wow, she sure took a lot of pictures and screenshot from video calls of me crying..." and then I stumbled into photos from the mortuary, from when I went to say goodbye to Jamie for the last time before he was cremated. Those photos were a gut punch. They took me right back to the moment. Super pregnant and knowing that that was going to be the last time I would touch him. The last time I could stroke his face. The last time I'd ever look at his face in the flesh. His beautiful face, perfect still, even in death. Of wishing I could crawl onto that gurney with him and lay with him and never leave. It sucked the air out of the room. 

I had ANOTHER little moment of clarity that my desire to fall in love again, also opens up the possibility of utter devastation. And that is scary. That is terrifying. Y'all, I don't know if I could handle any more heartbreak. I've had my fill. When you think about relationship heartbreak you generally think of relationships falling apart or breakups, etc... but beyond that, there is the ever present possibility of the sudden and irrevocable loss that I've already had the displeasure of going through once. Maybe settling for someone who can't hurt me SHOULD be the way to go huh? Someone who's sudden departure wouldn't bring me to my knees. Opening your heart is one of the most vulnerable things you can do, as a human being... Could I do that? And then you know what happened? Yes, that's right. Another Facebook meme. I'm starting to think the algorithm reads my mind. Because sometimes they are so specific it's almost scary. 

Maybe they're messages from Jamie. Or from my mom. Or just purely coincidental. Either way it was the metaphorical kick in the pants that I needed to remind myself that all love comes with the risk of unfathomable pain. Knowing what I know now and all of the pain that I went through, if given the choice, I'd still do it all again. I would never erase Jamie from my life in order to not have felt the pain of his loss. The love is so beautiful that it's worth the pain to have been able to experience the joy. And one day, when I open myself up to that kind of vulnerability, when I fall in love again, it will be worth the risk as well.