Self Inflicted Damage is the Worst Kind

I unlike many people fully understand my role in the disasters that befall me or at least better than those people who regularly appear on daytime talk shows such as Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer. If anything I wish I could obliviously ignore the fact that my own worst enemy at the end of the day is me. Perhaps my major failing is that I don't see the train wreck coming until I am already in the middle of it or perhaps it is the fact that I still try to give people the benefit of the doubt even though I clearly often know better than to do so. I also tend to be prone to crushes. Crushes are in many ways the most dangerous of all love adventures because you the crusher already have your mind made up about the crushee before you even go out on the first date. I suffered most of the summer with two crushes one I pursued and one I have to date mostly left alone.

The pursued crush is the reason I believe I am my own worst enemy and the reason my blog has been relatively quiet since I started it in September is that I sorta kinda fell for someone against my own best advice. The whole thing developed as a crush which I attempted to resist telling myself that it would pass and I should focus on the other parts of my life right now like my career. I afterall am about to graduate for the last time and take my first real grown up job and more than likely move across the country. This is a decidedly bad time to start a relationship or complicate my life, but perhaps I craved complexity and drama something my single life on the average day tends to be missing.

On the surface the guy was perfect but something just didn't quite add up. I knew in my gut that he was a bad idea but just couldn't quite put my finger on why he was a bad idea. Something in my gut told me there was something wrong and that there just had to be something to the reason I was holding back.

I thought maybe I was just being cynical and picky so I talked myself into ignoring the obvious flaws. For his part he was doing one hell of a sales job, but in dating as with almost all other transactions the harder someone is trying to sell you something the more certain you can be that there is something wrong with it. I know this was a bad idea. Afterall if you can't take your own best advice then who will you listen too? My mother? No. My friends? No. What is even worse in this case even they were duped. My cynical and hard to please friends instead of being the voice of reason in this debate helped to usher me to my latest fall.

And fall I did. I got so caught up in who he presented himself to be that I didn't stop to think that the image that many people project hides the things that are the most wrong with them. Then the fatal flaw became so unbelievably obvious it might as well been written in big flashing letters across the sky by Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz. So I had to go through the whole painful process of yet another break up. . .yet another set of explanations as to why this one is wrong.

Now I don't actually beat myself up for falling. . .since at least this shows I still have some faith that there is someone out there. . .but what I do beat myself up for is the manner in which I fell and the fact that post fall I will now be more afraid. I should know better than to rush in. . .I should know better than to get carried away. . .I should know better than to complicate my life when there are already a dozen too many things happening right now. I also worry that by passing up on other things I just might just have cheated myself out of the falling for the right guy or doing something extraordinary in some other area in my life. I guess this is what the economists mean by opportunity costs.

Hope and/or stupidity springs eternally. . .so I am sure in a couple of weeks or a couple of months I will be ready to make the same mistake all over again. Perhaps if the right signs are made by the other crush I would even be willing to take another sucker punch even sooner. I just hope this time cupid is kinder and I am a little smarter. Or perhaps it might be better to wish I were a little dumber since all those people on daytime TV seem so much more certain about the directions of their lives and the correctness of their actions than I do even about picking out my wardrobe for the day. Maybe success in this regard is really about being certain in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is a bad idea . . .or maybe that is what the half of all people who fall in love, get married and get divorced tell themselves. I wish there were some class or text to clear this whole thing up for me.