If Things Start Happening, Don’t Worry, Don’t Stew, Just Go Right Along And You’ll Start Happening Too….If Only It Was That Simple

It looks as though we survived the weekend apart.  I am not sure exactly what that means exactly.  She was acting a little off when I got home and even though I asked a few times she tried to reassure me that everything was good.  I know something is not and I don’t have it figured out yet.  This is a little unsettling.

She is planning a trip before one of her friends moves away.  They want to do a 5 hours kayak trip to some island.  I am happy she wants to go, but she is worried about leaving me alone.

I cannot believe how wound up since getting home.  The level of tension and nervousness is a little overwhelming.  I am not sure why.  When I was gone this weekend I was stressed but nothing like what is going on now.  Well I guess it is not anything I can actually control so I need to focus on something else.  I wish I could get a break for the world, from all of this mess, if only for a few hours.  Unfortunately, wishes are about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

I would like to pose a question to everyone who reads this post.  It is a question I keep coming back to and I never know the answer.  I like things nice and neat and tangible.  However feeling are not like that.  So here are my questions:

What is love and can you describe it?

How many types of love are there?

How do you know you are in love?

It will be interesting to see the responses because a lot of posts that I read all reference love in a lot of different ways.  While you all answer those questions I will continue with my story.

When I last left off  had to start commuting an hour away twice a week.  I am now on my fifth year of doing that drive.  The drive is long and boring.  The first couple of years it was too bad but then it started to drag on me.  So during the drive I would try different games on my phone (I know real safe) just to pass the time.  One day, I was talking with someone in the office and they told me that this young attractive lady was extremely infatuated in me.  This was a baffling to me because she was about 15 years younger than myself and quite attractive.  This definitely made me feel good about myself.  I have never considered myself as very attractive, but then again I had never really cared.  But at this point my marriage was not going real well.  She was napping all the time and avoiding me and the family.  I held everything together for our family but it was extremely frustrating that I did all this and she was still in the same dark place.

Anyway this person finding me attractive was a slight wake-up call.  I felt good about myself in a way I hadn’t for years.  It is hard to describe.  My wife who I always have been attracted to and always found beautiful constantly rejected me.  I felt like she hid from me and was probably regretting ever marrying me.  I tried to talk to her about it and she would tell me she found me attractive but her actions were what I was believing.  Why would she find me attractive and not want to spend time with me or even be intimate with?  It made no sense in my head.  Now I had the young attractive lady who found me attractive and I liked the feeling.  I was nice to be wanted.  Now I never did anything about this infatuation.  I never talked to her or approached her but I would now catch her looking at me and I liked how it made me feel.

As I mentioned before, I have had a rough childhood and until my wife came around I really did not know (or think I knew) what love was.  Now I have found out that other people might be attracted to me.  It seemed impossible, plus a young attractive woman.  It really made me feel great and when she left later that year I wanted something, anything to fill that void.  My wife still seemed to take no interest in me.  I continued to try but I felt like it only made things worse.  So I thought of another way to get that attention.  I decided to download a location based app for finding friends.  I believe it was called meet me.  I put down some catchy phrase in my profile and then just started to mess around it.  I quickly started getting matches or friends, I don’t really remember what they were called.  But it helped fill that void and I felt like it was harmless.  I felt attractive and wanted.  It was a game to me and one without any worry about anyone finding out who I really was.  This went on for about 3 or 4 months.  I am not exactly sure, but it was awhile.  I chatted with a few people but they quickly realized I was not in it to meet anyone except on a friendship level.  So most would move on.  I was okay with this because I didn’t actually want to meet any of them.

There there popped up a woman who contacted me.  We chatted for a few months but she never pushed to meet me.  It was fun to sit and chat with her and we only chatted while I was driving home.  It was very convenient and nonthreatening.  Then one day out of the blue she sends me a message that says she is deleting the app off her phone because she is sick of all the other weirdo’s on the app.  She then said she usually never does this but she gave me her phone number.  She sent the text in the morning which was odd to begin with.  I remember staring at the message and trying to decide what to do.  It felt like if I took her number then she would have mine and that was opening up a whole can of worms that I wasn’t sure I wanted to even deal with.  I decided to think about it and make a decision after work.

When I got done with work I started my drive home as usual and open the app.  I looked through my messages and her message was gone.  I looked through them and could not find it.  Well after a little googling I found out that when you delete the app the messages you sent to other people also disappear.  So the message with her number was gone.  I was a little bummed but also glad because I did not need the constant enticement dangling out there.  It made what I was doing a little okay in my mind.  It is not like I was cheating (or so I thought), I was just making new friends.  Although I would never meet these friends and they really did not know anything about me because I hid my identity.  I would give them a false back story because I am a private person.  I did not want anyone to find or contact me out side of the app.

So I made a couple of fake friends but they never lasted long because they either wanted to meet or became so weird I had to move on.  Eventually the only people I was matching with were fake profiles of  women soliciting themselves.  So I finally deleted the app.   I believed I was only doing it to make myself feel attractive and wanted and that had provided on a short-term basis.

After the meet me app I downloaded other apps that were games and puzzles but everything still left me with that hole, that feeling of being wanted.  I could not shake it.  I tried different things to see if my wife noticed.  I changed my hair style a little, started wearing different clothes and I started to look around at people and see if they noticed me.  What I got in return was that for the most part I was not invisible.  I was someone people noticed, not everyone and not all the time, but enough to give me that little boost each day.

One day I was watching the winter Olympics on TV and they were talking about an app the all the athletes were using to meet up with other athletes in Olympic village.  The described the app as one that you just swiped yes or no on a person’s picture and if you both liked each other, then it would match you together.  I thought that this was really cool, very shallow, but a better version of meet me.  After thinking about it for a few weeks I decided to download the app.  This was the app that really caused me problems.  Tinder…

If things start happening, don’t worry, don’t stew, just go right along and you’ll start happening too – Dr. Seuss