Right now I feel as if I want to make some changes to my daily routines for health reasons.  I will try to refrain from blogging anymore for the foreseeable future.  I feel as if my love addiction is becoming an issue again, and I want to take steps to take care of it.  I just want to give my readers a heads up,  I don't feel as if I'm in an adversarial situation with anyone I find myself thinking about, but I have a problem with love addiction that I find it best to deal with as my own chronic illness, like diabetes or high blood pressure. I find the best methods to deal with this problem involve a lot of self care and attention.  A big part of this self care in this instance probably involves healthy boundaries with those in my world and healthy boundaries in this instance involves limited contact.  I will also see if my support group is still active and look at going to meetings.

I often talk about my adopted approach to how I relate to women I have an attraction to.  I often talk about how I display a willingness to let opportunities to get with women slip through my fingers.  I say that by displaying this willingness to let opportunities slip through my fingers, I demonstrate an ability to look out for the object of my desire's best interests as well as mine.  My approach in how I relate to women comes from the many, many adversarial situations I've found myself in with many, many women since my twenties.

I count many, many adversarial situations over the years, but many, many fewer situations where someone I really, really liked had a genuine interest in getting to know me better.  So few in fact, that I really don't know what people around me expect of me.  Seriously.  Do I switch gears somehow and try to assertively approach this person for social reasons, or do I just keep on doing what  I usually do?

I think a willingness to let such an opportunity slip through my fingers could take a lot more courage, ultimately, than if I all of a sudden tried to meet such a person halfway.  My experiences coming to terms  with my love addiction teach me that if I really walk the walk; that is, if I really can live a meaningful life without a romantic love relationship, than it follows that I can let an opportunity to get with a person I really care for slip through my fingers.

Often times, throughout my adult life, I've imagined myself, in private, alone moments, really raging against friends who I felt really treated me badly over the years.  In the past week or so, I've found that an understanding that I ranked somewhere at the bottom of the pecking order in so many social groups I've been a part of helps mitigate these unfettered feelings of rage against so many of my peers of these past thirty-plus years.  I see how people in my life really regarded me as lower than other peers, and how this affected how they treated other peers with a lot more respect than they treated me.  Believe it or not, I've found this realization soothing, calming.

I've decided that I don't have to prove myself worthy of someone I really care for as much as that other party might want to think about meeting me halfway, somehow.  Now, if it's really up to me to carry the full load I sometimes feel as if many, many people expect me to carry, then I will carry that load on my own terms, with my own conditions.  I may not wind up being that person's boyfriend if everyone out there insists that I carry the burden of making sure things work out.  My methods I've adopted over the years can help build trust, but I really don't get laid a lot and I really don't have many dates with women.  But, if it's totally up to me, I will just continue to do it my way.

As I look at my past relationship with women, particularly those times I consider transcendent moments with women I desired but failed to connect with, the high degree of difficulty involved in those efforts to connect really stands out.  A post of several weeks ago talked about how hard the whole deal seemed, in hindsight, in all of those pursuits of something that wound up shaking out in much the same way as things shook out between me and that young woman at that business who I used to go on and on about on this blog.  The beginning of the end between myself and that young woman occurred about a year ago at this time, when I invited her to my comics show while she worked at her place of employment.  In the aftermath of that transcendent moment of a year ago this time, I wanted things to go differently than they usually did.

The most notable difference this time around resided in my concerted effort to refrain from trying to rebound or cash in in the wake of that transcendent moment.  I cast off a couple or three would be player types with little effort, and in so doing demonstrated a willingness to come up with a different set of expectations as to what could happen as a result of me doing the good deed I did.  The last thing I desire resides in the notion that I will just find some other lemon type to latch onto.  Right now I stand prepared to cast off any situation with any woman if I find things too difficult.  Right or wrong, I associate difficulty with failure.  

It occurs to me that I really don't know of anyone else in the entirety of my adult life who experienced anything resembling these transcendent moments that I've experienced several times in my life.  Therefore, maybe it falls upon me to write the rule book on how I proceed moving forward.  A willingness to refrain from engaging with any woman, no matter how attractive I find them or how much I care for them, who presents a lot of difficulty to me may as well serve as the clearest path forward.  Do you want to know why? Because I said so. 

Okay, there's someone in my world that I care for a great deal, and I have only four problems with the idea of caring for this person.  1) I know her through her place of employment.  She's not my coworker.  I have a choice as to whether or not I visit her place of employment, but since it's her place of employment, she has to be there, even in the event that I would approach her for social reasons, and she did not want that and felt compelled to tell me so.  I don't want to put her in a bad position.  2) The last I heard, she had a boyfriend.  3) Even if she did become newly single, she may have no interest in going out with me,  4) I used to accuse her in my mind of thinking herself too good to date me, but in the intervening days, weeks, and months since I held this belief about her, not to mention the many, many years beforehand when I commonly thought this about women I had an attraction to, I've decided that she has the right to reject me, no matter the reason.  Even if I think her reasons for rejecting me are morally wrong, she still has the right to reject me for whatever reason she deems necessary.  They abolished slavery in the 1860's in this country.  So, it's up to her to broach the subject of whether or not we see each other socially, and I can live with it if that day never comes.  This counts as one moment where I sincerely hope that people such as her in my world actually read this blog, because my desire for her remains constant, and I would at least like her to know that I will express that in some way.