My Reality (6 page)

Yes, I was a complete mess.

At the same time, I still couldn’t completely let go of him.
While I definitely wasn’t stalking him, I looked for any excuse to have contact with him. I must have been a glutton for punishment. His birthday was in early April, and so I sent him a text wishing him a happy birthday. And then I waited. And waited. And waited.

A
bout another month passed. I had survived not hearing from Tye. I had survived seeing Tye. I was just starting to get to the point where, although I wasn’t feeling good, I could at least dress myself, comb my hair, and form complete sentences again. But I swear, it’s like guys are born with some kind of radar, and they can sense just when they’re starting to lose their hold on us and need to reel us back in.

And I felt the full force of that gravitational pull one evening when I was out with my good friend Robin. We were having a great girls’ night out. We went to dinner and had lots of girl talk (that didn’t include boys . . . well, not one
particular
boy, at least). And we went dancing. At one point in the night, we went into the bathroom together (as girls always do), and while we were primping, I got a text message.

Oh my gosh, it’s from Tye!

It said: “I miss you.”

Short. Sweet. To the point.

I literally collapsed on the floor in the bathroom. I was in
complete shock. Robin laughed and took a picture to show me how dumb I looked, lying on the floor with my phone in my hand. We still laugh over that picture today.

But, back to the text message!

Okay, to be completely honest, this wasn’t the FIRST time I had heard from Tye since we broke up. After I texted him to wish him a happy birthday, he had written me back. But all he had said was: “Thanks for remembering.” Romantic, right?

Yeah buddy, that’s not QUITE what I was hoping for, but you’re welcome. I GUESS.

But this note was different. HE MISSED ME! And it was completely unprompted on my part! This was what I had been hoping and praying for! But to be honest, by this point (three months since the breakup), I was actually doing semi-okay. I wasn’t completely consumed by my heartbreak anymore, and I had stopped expecting to hear from him.

Needless to say, I was beyond happy! Of course, after what Tye had put me through, I should have known better than to get sucked back in. But, immediately, I was a goner. AGAIN. I sent him a text back telling him that I missed him, too. And he wrote me back and asked me to stop by his house. How could I not?

He actually WANTS to see me? And HE’S initiating it? Of course I will!

So . . . I went over. It was the first time I’d seen him since St. Patty’s Day. When I got to his house, we played music from his iPod and sang and danced with each other all night. It was as if we’d picked up right where we had left off. No awkwardness. No mention of a breakup. Just good old-fashioned fun. I left his house with a huge smile on my face. And that still remains one of the best nights that he and I have ever shared.

After that initial text from him, we were in contact pretty regularly. Tye knew I really wanted to see the first
Sex and the City
movie, which had just been released. He asked me if I wanted to go see it with him that Friday night. I knew we weren’t together at this point, but CLEARLY this was HUGE progress!!

It was his idea.

He had actually planned a real date. IN ADVANCE.

We NEVER went on dates, even when we were together. This was a new development, and I immediately thought:
See, he DOES want me back. He totally missed me! He IS really trying. He is a good guy.

Now, I had already seen the movie with my girlfriends, but, of course, I didn’t tell him that. I did not want anything to get in the way of this date. And nothing was going to keep me from being happy while we were on it. I made sure to make a big deal about how excited I was and how much I appreciated everything he was doing.

Not that it was all perfect. While we were out that night, we saw one of the girls I had cheered with the year before. We went over to talk with her, and when I introduced her to Tye, I didn’t know what to call him. I wanted to introduce him as my boyfriend, but I didn’t want to scare him off. So I decided to play it cool. Cool and very casual.

“This is my friend Tye,” I said.

Neither of them noticed that anything was out of the ordinary, and we got through the awkward moment. But, internally, I was overanalyzing the situation, wondering if Tye had noticed that I had just used the word
friend
, and if so, what he’d thought about it, if anything.

Other than that, it was just so great being with Tye again. We
laughed and talked and did what we did best: pretended as if the last few months had never happened. He didn’t want to bring it up, and I didn’t want to bring it up, and so we avoided talking about anything emotional or real. Just like before, communication was a big problem for us. During that whole time, we lived our lives with so many important issues on the back burner. But, as we learned, back burner or front burner, it still burns.

Neither of us was ready to deal with anything even remotely serious or upsetting. So we acted as though everything was fine. We acted like a couple, even. Tye drove me home and kissed me good night. I was in heaven.

I made sure to let him know how happy I was, and that I really liked being out with him, and really appreciated that he had asked me out and taken me on this great date. In my heart, everything was falling back into place, and I believed we were going to get back together and be really happy. And we were happy.

For a day or two—maybe even a week.

We fell into a pattern. We would have a great first date, maybe even a second date, and then engage in a flurry of texts—some silly and pointless, and others that made me believe that things were going to be okay between us. For instance, one text that I received from him while I was at work made me think that we had a future. We had been flirting via email and text all day long. He was teasing me about how much dinner I had eaten the night before (I’ve always been a big eater). And then, BAM! I got a text that took me aback: “Can you imagine how much you’re going to eat when you’re pregnant?”

Well, it’s no secret how a girl’s mind works. As far as I was concerned, he was thinking about me being pregnant, which meant he was thinking about me being pregnant with his baby!! Right?!? I was beyond happy. I was ecstatic!

And then, after a few days of fun flirting, the texts from him always stopped . . . just like that. After a weekend of great dates, on Monday, I’d get nothing . . . again. My heart would break all over again. On Tuesday, I knew I wasn’t going to hear from him. It was the same thing on Wednesday and Thursday. Time lengths varied, but it was always between a week and three weeks of silence from him.

Then I’d get a text—“What’s going on?”—which would lead to another amazing date.

And so it went. I see the cycle now, but I was just living in the moment and hanging on to any little source of hope he gave me.

I quickly learned:
This is our reality. This is how we work. I don’t have a boyfriend. He doesn’t have a girlfriend. We just hang out sometimes.

It wasn’t at all what I wanted. But I never said anything about how frustrated I was for fear of running him off again. If I had been stronger at that time, I would have said, “Tye, you need to make up your mind. You either want to be with me, or you don’t want to be with me, but you can’t keep doing this push and pull. It’s not fair.”

The worst part was, not only did I not stand up for myself, but I also let him get my hopes up every time. Just when I got used to having him back in my life, he would disappear again. For the next six months, our relationship followed this destructive pattern, and I never stopped it or even tried to learn from it. That’s not 100 percent true, actually. If I were to be completely honest with myself, I’d have to admit that, deep down, a part of me knew what was going on. But I lied to myself and pretended that I was just playing it cool, and that we were both fine with keeping it light. Right . . .

I just did not have it in me to walk away. At the same time, Tye wasn’t making it easy, either, because he wouldn’t let me go. He
didn’t want to give me the deep relationship I craved, but he clearly wasn’t ready to lose me completely. Maybe he was keeping me at arm’s length because he had a fear of commitment. Or maybe he was just that naïve about relationships and didn’t realize what was required or what I deserved. Or maybe I was just that girl he called when he got bored. Who knows?

It may have just been more denial on my part, but I became convinced that he would come back eventually and want me to be his girlfriend again. I just knew, somehow, that he wasn’t going to find somebody else and leave me for good. But I also started to understand that, in the times when we weren’t seeing each other, I was free to do whatever I wanted, just like I guessed he was doing at the time.

It took a while, but that realization finally gave me a little bit of the independence I hadn’t had before. And, honestly, every time we’d get back together and then not talk again, it did make me slightly stronger. I was regaining some of my power, but it definitely came in baby steps. I was still very much in love with Tye, and so dating anyone else was out of the question. But I was at least functioning on my own during the times when we were not talking. I went out with my friends. I was slowly getting my life back together.

But I definitely broke one of the
Cardinal Rules of Girlfriends.
If I had plans with my friends on a Saturday night, and Tye just happened to call me out of the blue, I immediately dumped my friends and went out with him. I know, I know: That’s like Rule Number One. But I couldn’t help myself.

Finally, my friends had had enough. “Why do you let him do that?” they asked.

I always had an excuse, and I always defended him.

“Well, you know, he’s young,” I said. “He doesn’t mean to hurt
me. I don’t even think he knows he’s hurting me; he’s just very wrapped up in what’s going on in his life right now. He’s only twenty-seven and not really ready to settle down . . . yet.”

Of course, this argument didn’t fly with Reagan or Stefani. Both their husbands were twenty-five—younger than Tye—and these guys not only were married but were
happy
to be married. Well, that blew my theory.

I had to admit to myself that guys who weren’t afraid of commitment and who wanted to settle down did exist. It wasn’t even that I wanted to be married right then, but I did want to be in a committed relationship, and I wanted the person who
I
wanted to be with to want to be with
me.
But, for right now, I was caught in a cycle. A bad cycle. And it didn’t show any sign of getting much better anytime soon. I was in breakup purgatory.

I might not have been done with Tye yet, but my friends were. In a big way. They had seen me crying for the three months that Tye and I were apart, and they had seen me upset during the last few months when he kept coming in and out of my life. It also didn’t help matters that they didn’t even really know Tye, because he had never taken the time to meet them when we were dating. Maybe if he had, it would have been different. But as it was, although I was constantly saying what a great guy Tye was, they sure didn’t see it. They didn’t trust him. They didn’t like him. They didn’t want us to get back together again, because they were convinced I could do MUCH better.

They finally tried to do something about it.

That summer, we spent a lot of time out on Lake Dallas. My friend Stefani would always invite this guy along for me. So every weekend, it would be Stefani and Joe, Reagan and Sean, and then me and this random guy from Stefani’s church. Talk about
awkward! He was attractive. He was great. I wanted to like him. I really did. But my heart just wasn’t in it. I knew I had already met the guy I wanted to be with. He just didn’t want to be with me as much as I wanted to be with him.

They were good friends, though, and they were determined and willing to try anything to make me happy. They just wanted to see me smile again. More than once, when I was out to dinner with the four of them, and our waiter happened to be young and attractive, Stefani or Reagan would egg him on.

“Don’t you think she’s pretty?” they’d ask him, pointing at me.

Oh my gosh!! Mortified!

On the one hand, I was sitting there feeling totally embarrassed and pathetic. On the other hand, their positive reinforcement gave me the kind of attention I needed right then; that little something from a guy that said maybe I was worth wanting. My self-esteem was so low that it really helped to realize that if a guy could think I was pretty in a tank top with my hair in a ponytail, then maybe there was still hope for me. My friends might have been trying to embarrass me into another relationship; maybe they figured if they humiliated me enough, I’d give up and give in. But I guess I proved to be too stubborn for that strategy!

Despite the machinations of my friends, I didn’t go on even one date that whole summer. I was still caught up in Tye, and I’ve always HATED dating. The idea of dating had never seemed fun to me, even when I wasn’t a complete emotional wreck. I could never stand how awkward first dates were. And now, all I did was compare all other guys to Tye. In my mind and heart, Tye had everything that I wanted in a partner and no one else could measure up. He talked about his nephews and niece all the time, so I knew he was family oriented. He had always wanted to open his own insurance agency, and was doing
all he could to make that happen, so I knew he was ambitious. He was funny and always made me laugh. He was a lot of fun to be around because he didn’t take things too seriously (me being one of those things, unfortunately), and we always had a great time together. And of course I thought he was gorgeous—that helped!

Stefani and Reagan knew me well enough to understand that they shouldn’t push me too hard to date other guys. But they were getting fed up with me. The two of them would roll their eyes whenever I talked about whatever latest thing Tye had done, bad or good. Just hearing his name was enough to make them crazy.