Amanda and I had a hell of a breakup. Sitting in a coffee shop. Holding hands at one point. "I just can't do this," she said, after 10 minutes of small talk. Eventually, as I ticked through a list of things in my head, we starred into each others' eyes. And she heaved angrily, grabbed her gear, said "fuck this," and stormed outside. As a I tried to approach her and ask what I had done, she said "leave me the fuck alone!"

She later tried through several texts, phone calls, and emails to make amends. And I gave her another chance for friendship. Then when I added her back to Facebook, she saw a post I made describing her reaction as abuse and grounds for permanently banning someone from one's life. Apparently this hurt her "more than you could know" and felt it was "junior high." I hadn't referred to her by name, and I think an FB post of that kind was appropriate, but that was the camel breaker.

I'm honestly glad. She was drama.

Last month at DR/zombie camp, I met a girl. Her name is Catherine, although the spelling is different. It was magical and amazing. We clicked instantly both in and out of game. She and Julia get along famously. Her three kids are lovely and they get along well with Garion. The major roadblock is that while she would like to date me, her and her husband have been working through his infidelity and trying to find a stable place. He also wants to open up the marriage, but is concerned about sharing her physically--doesn't care about emotional ties, just anything physically romantic. And so I wait and wonder.

We had been flirting constantly for the better part of a month, even during my 11 day trip to the Alzheimer's conference and then a nutrition one in DC. All seemed great. All seemed on the up and up.

Then J dropped a nuclear bomb on my life and that prospect. Long story short: she has felt depression, anger, and rage for the better part of 5 years, due to feeling that I am "a husband in name only...and a father in name only." She proceeded to tell me what we had discussed many times before: that I had put myself and my job before them in Baltimore, back when I worked for a tyrant at the NIA, and that things had only marginally improved when we moved to Ames. There's a laundry list of grievances, but they boiled down to: 1) feeling neglected; 2) my goofy, fun, happy side promptly dying around when we moved to Baltimore, to be replaced in my estimation by John Snow, because my life was fucking bleak and professionally it's not gotten a lot better; 3) feeling that I am too harsh on G sometimes; and 4) that I take her for granted, assuming that she do all the organizing, most of the housework, and plenty heteronormative tendencies that contribute to "mental load." There's a misogynistic, baffling comic out there that apparently struck a chord.

This was completely out of left field.

She has always had issues communicating her wants and needs, due to an upbringing largely by a very conservative, Lutheran German mother who wanted her to act like a girl and woman should act: independent and strong, but at the same time know her place and don't act out. But I had no idea any of this was manifesting.

See, on occasion, we fight like junkyard dogs. It is fucking vicious. It lasts for hours and involves her dredging every old hurt and tactic to prove her point, and when I conter-point she leverages her superior memory and gets stone-cold fucking nasty.

But then we talked about those issues and resolved them. Or at least I thought resolved them. Apparently in most cases the underlying problems were such that I put "a band-aid on a steam vent." It was hyperbolic, overly dramatic, and at times I seriously wondered if my memory was really that rose-colored or her was shit-colored, because we just had not been occupying the same reality.

We're still married now only because we're a good team and raise G decently--because the romance has apparently long since been dead for her. She wants to start from a foundation of trying to be friends, where there are no expectations on me for trying to be a good husband. Because all of the actions and small things I do to show that I care and love her are, in her words, things that any friend/parent/etc. would do.

Like. Spend 6,000 dollars out of my startup for T to get out of his job, partly to help him out because he's great, but also so would stop bitching about how miserable she was for hours on end during long car rides.

Like. Spend another 6,000 dollars for her current boyfriend T to get a job, partly because I also care about him, but I took pity because he thought a GPA of 2.9 was not going to be a gigantic red flag, regardless of what he degree is in.

Like. Taking care of a good portion of the cleaning, animal handling, and G during the day sometimes and at night for various occasions.

Like. Re-arrange my schedule so that she could pick up a part-time job, which I was happy with--but damn it was difficult to shift some morning meetings and other things.

Like. Asking after her, showing affection, telling her I love her, buying her things she wanted, talking about her thoughts, her worries, anxieties, and dreams.

But she feels #1-4, and you can't denigrate how someone feels. Granted, I have my own laundry list of why I've been upset with her for years, chief among them that we agreed to two kids. And if she felt put upon, and hated being a stay-at-home-mom, and didn't want domesticity, that she could have communicated that she was in depression and felt like she was drowning, and we could have gotten daycare. None of this attachment parenting jazz. Get them in while they're young and used to it, and still be good parents.

All of that said, yes--to varying degrees I agree with her assessment and have been trying to do better.

Looping back around to the point, however--what I'm fucking angry about is that all of this came about because she was having a conversation with Catherine while they were visiting her.

On the one hand, thank God, Catherine was like "don't panic!" and basically said that apparently Julia and I were in a similar place as to where she and her husband are--or apparently were. She said her feelings for me hadn't changed, just deepened along with the situations. And she still says she misses me, checks in once or twice a day, or the like.

But on the other hand, she wants to give me space to process the nuclear bomb she (in her words) helped drop on me, to also give space so that I don't do a rebound and try to invest all of my feelings in her...and also because, due directly to my making her husband feel like he needs to step up his game, things between her and him are "better than they have been in YEARS."

I've watched this movie before.

The relationship with Amanda died because it was too intense and chaotic for her, but ultimately the romance just kinda died. The relationship with Kathy died because I said I cared a lot about her and she saw Julia and I have a minor conflict, but ultimately the romance quickly died. Sub in Erin, Tasha, anyone I seriously have pursued since being a teenager. Things start out great, the romance is strong--and then something happens and it dies.

With Julia, it was a long, slow death and she did not ever tell me, not until it built up so much that she couldn't take it anymore. I deeply resent her for not telling me so I could try to work on things more, but moreso I'm sad.

Because there is a definite pattern. Maybe it's because I'm thoughtless. Maybe it's because I'm absent-minded. Maybe it's because, yes, I prioritize my work (until recently) above all else because trying to build up to being faculty, and then being faculty trying to get tenure is really fucking hard and takes an immense amount of time--generally even more than I had been putting in.

So my conclusion is this. If Catherine still does have romantic feelings, and our date next week goes decent, and she does get attached, and this whole space issue resolves itself with thawing of relations between J and I, and if her husband opens the marriage, and if (as we all want) our families to blend some...

If all of that does happen, I am still faced with the near certainty that the relationship I might have with someone with whom I'm amazingly compatible will also just die on the vine eventually.

So I've come to the conclusion that, regardless of whether or not J and I ultimately get a divorce, part of me is wholly incapable of fostering long-term romantic love in someone that persists and lasts. I've certainly tried. But there appears to be an ample track-record there.

So I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to die alone.

And honestly that's not a bad thing. I am generally a miserable person, and sometimes I think dying would not be half bad compared to the blow after blow, and constant social drama, and pain and anguish and constant uphill expectations and walking on eggshells, and just giant balls of stress and hurt.

I just hurt. I don't want to kill myself, but if I did suddenly die I wouldn't be terribly upset either.

Because really, I feel like a failure deep down. Not because of my job. Not because of how I relate to my family. But it's manifestly evident in the overwhelming envious feeling I had when I was at my friend Jennifer's 40th birthday party today, and she has 3 kids already and a new 1-year old. And other families with dads doing the exact same thing that I do (yelling encouragement, thumbing on phones) had families of 3, 4, 5 and in one case 7 kids.

I feel like I failed because I feel like I chose the wrong person to marry, made the wrong life choices to sustain things where I might have convinced her to have a second kid, and in general I feel like I just did things wrong.

And there's no saved game to go back to. It's either continue through all this, or be just like my father, get divorced, see my kid every once in awhile, have him grow up to resent me, and hope that at 37 I can find someone who relishes being a mother, is a major geek, and somehow is still single or is poly and wants kids with another guy, or is in a failed marriage and wants out.

Yeah. I'm not holding my breath.

So there. I feel like a failure, I'm going to die alone, and all I see out in front of me is a sea of broken glass and roses that are going to shrivel and decay to thorns.

And perhaps I'm mostly to blame, or partly to blame. I don't know. But really it doesn't hurt to confess any of this. This is Daath. This has always been what Daath has been about. Being brutally honest with myself in a space that's safe.

I wish I could start over again.

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