You know I discuss girls and relationships a lot on 'Connected.'
I'm a single, career-minded, driven 30-year-old. Episode 15 hits a specific nerve and I thought it was time to explain myself.
What happened to me?
I thought it was time that I share. I used to be in love with a girl named Joelle. And because of my dumb, indecisive ass, I broke up with her. Twice.
This has become a pattern with me.
Over time, I quit a girl. She shows me that she doesn't want to quit. And yet I decide we must. How you break your own heart, alright?
Then I find myself sitting alone for two weeks and I think, damn she's right. I don't want to be without her. Then I go try to get her back. Why? Because I broke my own heart.
And then, say I succeed at getting her back? Something will happen again. The second time you get with somebody, there's never the same zeal as the first time, so of course, we break up. The sequel is never as good as the original. You see what I'm saying
Back to Joelle.
So I do all that like a dumbass. And then I see her New Year's and she looks FANTASTIC. Somehow I get the guts to call her - and we set up a date for me to go visit her the weekend of February 12th... Valentines Day weekend. Genius.
What were we thinking?
Joelle is now at college in Massachusetts and I'm living in Jersey at the time. It was a commitment to get there, but I make it. I was still a romantic soul after all. We are doing that slow motion thing, getting the gears grinding again. We're eating together, we're sitting around, we're talking, doing what it used to mean to try to be boyfriend and girlfriend in your early 20s. You get the picture.
Over the course of the weekend, I start feeling - not great. I'll just put it out there. I get constipated. I'm feeling weird, like you know how your stomach gets tight, you're walking around full because all that food is on your lungs?
So now we're going around campus trying to find people with laxatives. She's hitting her friends up, "You got anything to make you go to the bathroom?" We are doing this as a team!! I'm hurting, but it's kind of adorable.
Then I decide l can't take it anymore and what does my dumb 22-year-old self do? I give myself an enema.
Not only do I give myself an enema, but to speed up the process, I put dishwashing liquid in there, alright? True story.
She is watching me do this and says, "I don't think this is smart idea." But whatever, right?
Guess what happens when you put dish washing liquid in an enema? Oh yes, I poison myself.
So now, I am not only shitting suds - did you ever shit bubbles? -- but I'm also throwing up outta my ears. Just sick to the very bottom of my being.
This is all going down in a college dorm. She is watching me melt. She is watching me die, right? I'm sitting in a college shower stall. And she's in the other shower stall going, "Are you okay? I got you. Anything you need?"
Needless to say, Joelle brings me back to life. Florence Nightingale-type shit. Never left my side. So when the morning I am about to leave arrives, I walk her to class.
I'll never forget this.
I say to her, "Babe, after everything that's happened, I want you to know I am in love with you. I am sorry for everything that's happened. I want to be the boyfriend I know I can be. I think we just need to get back together. I love you. You took care of me, you're beautiful and I am sorry for everything that happened. But for you to be there, I'll be there for you forever."
I am excited. I am waiting for this deep response as we stand together on her college campus. And she just looked at me and said, "I don't feel the same way. I just don't." And walked away. Just walked away and disappeared into all the kids going by on their way to class. It was fucking cinematic . She was just - poof - gone.
There it was.
I had broken my own heart.
I had a great thing.
Let it go.
Tried to bring it back together and instead of letting things be, created this crazy situation where I get about as unsexy and needy as a human could ever be.
And now, cause I am a 22-year-old dumbass, I gotta travel on a jitney, two trains and two buses - nine hours to get my sad ass, heartbroken self back to Jersey.
And I get back to Lindenwold, NJ, that night. And it's now raining cats and fucking dogs. And when I reach my car at the station? Flat tire.
So there I am, in the rain, changing a tire while thinking about how the girl of my dreams, the love of my life at the time destroyed me, from helping me when I poisoned myself visiting her at her school, trying to rekindle our flame.
And from that day on, I never loved like that again. I used to be the guy who threw rose petals on the ground. I was the dude that wrote poems and shit. That was the beginning of the end. It was the crack in the foundation.
I got into other relationships, but never with the same fervor. Girls would fall in love with me, but I had a problem falling in love with them.
So that is the ground zero, if you will, of my "reputation" with Valentine's Day and I guess on a bigger picture, with love.
Do you know why 'like' is cooler than 'love?' Because 'like' ain't insane.