And in other obsessions....

I am feeling very irritated that a certain one of my exes is getting married.

The announcement was in the paper this weekend, but I already knew because, about some things, I am a total Google Stalker.

This is the relationship that led me to need therapy the first time around. The relationship that initiated the first "secret blog". This was a guy (lets call him R) who was totally unsuitable for me. A guy that I kept questioning whether I should be with him- until he dumped me.

Dumped is too formal a word for what happened. R was going to Iraq. We'd been dating for less than 2 months. We were, as I mentioned, an unsuitable match. We discussed how I did not have it in me to have a long distance relationship (I'd tried)- that it was too hard on me.

So he disappeared. Except when he was drunk. Then I'd get random emails telling me how much he missed me, and that he'd call me. Then he'd get sober and wouldn't. He avoided my calls. I turned into that psycho ex girlfriend. (When we were together, I got to hear about several psycho ex girlfriends, including the one who showed up drunk at his door at 2am and the one who stole his license plate. I was not THAT psycho, but realized how those girls became psycho ex girlfriends- he probably treated them the way he treated me...)

R went away to training, still in the US, and would send me emails and IMs about how sorry he was about the way he treated me and about how much he cared about me and that he always thought that if he hadn't been going away we "would have made this work." On Labor Day weekend we had an IM conversation where I asked him if he had been seeing someone else during the time where he was disappearing from our relationship. His exact words were "No, and I'm not seeing anyone now."

Four weeks later he was engaged to a girl he had been dating long distance for six weeks while he was at training.

I called him on his phone from work, and he answered. He didn't know what to say. I was SO ANGRY.

R and this girl dated on and off for the next two years. (I know all of this because I made the mistake of dating a guy who is from the town where I work- therefore, I had cousins of his in my class and his fiance's sister was in the grade that I teach. Word gets around, even when I wasn't looking for it, and I shamefully admit, sometimes I went looking...) They broke up for a summer then got back together. They had a wedding planned for February '07. By January '07 they had broken up again.

Last Christmas ('07) he apparently got engaged to a new girl. They are getting married this summer.

Does my disgust over this mean I don't want him to be happy? Probably. Ugh, doesn't that make me a bitch? But, even knowing in hindsight that he was never the person I thought he was, and knowing that I am EXTREMELY lucky that he showed his true colors to me early on and I didn't get sucked into an engagement or worse before I found out... I'm bitter. He made me doubt myself- my judgement. The two months I spent with him took me a full year to get over. The guy from whom I contracted herpes was a rebound to my relationship with him (not that that's his fault- it's fully mine for making bad choices. But that particular bad choice wouldn't have happened if I hadn't made the bad choice of dating R). I'm also skeptical as to whether this is going to be a successful relationship for him. When we dated, he pretended to be the person he thought I wanted him to be. From all accounts I've heard, it sounds like he is doing something similar with this woman.

Reading others' blogs sometimes gives me insight into feelings I have that I, myself, have not been able to put into words. This post on Snickollet's blog is an example of that. She explains it far better than I ever could. R was "that person" for me. I don't know if I will ever shake that completely, though I am so happy I didn't end up with him and even though the course of events that led to me meeting III began with R.

I know I should stop seeking out information on him- I get enough by accident- but it is an obsession. Not constant, but periodically, often times triggered by hearing about him from someone or seeing something about him in the local papers...

It's embarrassing. This is not something I admit to many people in real life. But just because I suppress it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And when I run into R at the D&D or when I see his dad at the grocery store or when I hear his name come up in the community, my stomach still twists into a ball and I get that burning pissed off feeling I got almost every day following our break up.