Relationships Bite: Am I Doomed?

I had this freaky thought yesterday while I was driving around: What if mr horrible was my soulmate? I almost ran off the road in my moment of mental panic. If this was in fact true then I am DOOMED!… Doomed I tell you… and then I came to my senses and thought to myself that perhaps that wasn’t in fact true.

What is a more likely scenario is that in the years that either preceded the episode of my life occupied by mr horrible, or at some point during, I actually met the person who I am even more compatible with than I ever was with mr horrible, and then that person slipped away into the annals of time never to be seen again. Granted, this is a somewhat more depressing and stressful thought.

It in no way helps me to believe that I have any chance of having a meaningful relationship that won’t go down in flames the way my last relationship did. I believe I’m aware of this somewhere deep down inside, and I have always known this and despite the fact that I don’t actively spend any time ruminating on my relationship potential, who doesn’t like being in love? 

Even I, surly and bitter, as I am in my post-divorce evolution, recall the better and happier times when I was in love, even if that love was from afar.

I recall the long crush I had on one person in particular. For years in high school I loved him from afar and I was fine with that. But then I went and ruined the fantasy by having to make it real the day I asked him to the senior prom thinking to myself that I had to take matters into my own hands because it was clear that he was not going to ask me (or maybe he would have? I’ll never know now). So was it worth it? Yes. No. He broke my heart freshman year of college and I don’t think I ever really recovered.

So here I am, less than two years away from the big 4-0, I wonder if I really have ended up like my mother? It was one of those epithets that mr horrible used to throw in my face when we would fight. He would get in my face and say that if he left me, I was going to end up alone, like my mother, because who else was going to put up with my shit. My immediate reply was denial. No, I never wanted to be like my mother, divorced and a single mother to never remarry. No, of course not! And it would go back and forth like that.

What a bastard, throwing that shit in my face. Back then it never occurred to me that it was just emotional and psychological manipulation to get me to stay because even though he never acted like he wanted the marriage (this is all in hindsight of course), he was always too chickenshit to be alone. So when things got tough and it seemed like I had reached the end of my rope, he would say that shit and I would change course and “work harder to make the marriage work”. I feel like such a gullible idiot. 

But really, am I going to end up like my mother? I’m sure I’ve asked her this, but I’m thinking of asking her again when I see her at Christmas (because it’s the sort of conversation that I am going to need to see her facial reactions to get a real answer), if she still had feelings for my dad and is that why despite the two boyfriends she had over the years, she never remarried, and she stayed alone while they moved on, or moved away. If she ever did give me a response before, it must have not been good enough because I wasn’t convinced she didn’t still have feelings for him. And lord help me…

I have to ask myself (and my children often ask me) if I still have feelings for mr horrible. I don’t know what I feel. My insides feel like they’re bathing in battery acid most of the time and my heart feels empty. So empty it’s a mystery how it ever held any feelings at all. So I don’t know how to feel.

I think after the almost year of mourning I did over the death of my marriage, I somehow have forced what feelings I did have into deep dormancy because the truth is I DON’T DO FEELINGS. I don’t. I can’t. I am not going to.

It scares me that I may actually still have feelings for this monster of a man, and if so, does that make me weak? Imbecilic? Naive?

And, by having an empty heart does that mean that if I have, by some chance, not already met someone who I am truly compatible with, will I miss out on that opportunity because I am not ready for it?  Because I didn’t recognize them for who they were, will I let this person just pass me by and that’s it for me?

Should I worry? If this is a sign that I am not over mr horrible and have failed to move on, then I am in real trouble…