If September 01 doesn't get here pretty damned fast, I think I'm going to go absolutely crazy. I will go absolutely berserk.
That doesn't have anything to do with anything, but I just thought I'd mention it.
Yesterday, D. told me that it actually made him very jealous when I teased him about his hot girlfriend. He's got it into his head that everybody he knows is trying to get her into bed. This is because everyone he knows has teased him about just exactly that. To the best of my knowledge, nobody in our circle of friends has any real interest in seducing the girlfriend away from D., but evidently, D. has taken the teasing to heart and it makes him jealous.
Jealousy is a concept I barely understand anymore. The whole idea has become very warped in my mind, and I'm not even really sure if I'm capable of feeling it anymore.
Why should I be uncomfortable with the knowledge that my boyfriend is very attractive and other women (and probably men) are constantly drooling over him? I take a certain amount of pride in that, actually. I have little to no fear that some cute girl from the bus, or the grocery store, or the street, or wherever, is going to manage to spontaneously collapse our relationship with her puddles of drool. It's just not something that bothers me.
Apparently, this isn't really all that normal. According to the opinions of my friends and acquaintances -- voiced and otherwise expressed -- it's much more common to feel kind of uneasy about other people thinking your boyfriend or girlfriend is hot. It's kind of difficult for me to comprehend that.
A long time ago, when I first met Neil, he was constantly surrounded by adorable females, most of whom were my friends. Some of them were way, way cuter than me. Some of them were just way more interesting. Almost all of them had nicer hair than me. Every single one of them was graceful enough to walk down the street without falling on her ass, an ability it's taken me years to achieve. I was quiet and shy, and regardless of whether I had any brains or not, I was terribly naive, and frequently came off sounding like a total moron. I never expected that Neil would ever, in a million years, notice me. In a way, that hurt a little bit, but it just made sense. I never bothered trying to get Neil's attention. He had his flock of cute girls, and I kept myself at a certain distance. It would have devastated me if I'd had the guts to reveal any of my feelings to him, and he hadn't responded positively. So, I kept my mouth shut. And my silence precluded any rights I might have had to be jealous of Neil's flock.
Instead of telling Neil I had a thing for him, I kinda dated his room-mate, David. I also had a thing for David. And I still kinda think David had a thing for me. But, for reasons of social circumstance, our relationship could not be made public. We could not hold hands walking down the street. We could not give away the secret. And anyway, for reasons of social circumstance, it wasn't a REAL relationship anyway. David had a bunch of date-like meetings with various other people, and he never bothered to hide that from me. Once, I was sitting in the coffeehouse having a conversation with my friends, and happened to look up just in time to see David making out with this gorgeous woman who lived in the building next to his. For reasons of social circumstance -- i.e., I had willingly submitted to the concept of being David's Secret Girlfriend -- I did not have the right to be upset about this, at least not publically. In that particular instance, I freaked out anyway. But at least I had the consideration to leave the premises beforehand.
I never really had the right to feel jealous. I signed away that right. To Neil, I was technically just a coffee-buddy, and I never made a move to change that. To David, I was a secret, and there was nothing I could do to change that. So I had no right to feel jealousy. Or, if I felt it, I had to subdue it immediately.
It trained me well. I almost never felt jealous after that. Not really. I have accustomed myself to believing it's not my right to feel envious. Even if I am jealous, at times, I always manage to logically explain to myself that I ought NOT be jealous. And typically, it works, at least to some extent.
I am not traumatized by the boyfriends I've had in the past who were cheating on me. Once, Jake told me he'd made out with this other girl who'd asked him for a ride home. I was upset, but not because I was jealous. I was upset that, first of all, he'd been really secretive about it at first. And because, shit, the girl was a gross little piece of whiny trash, and I was appalled at his taste. But I couldn't feel real jealousy. I didn't own Jake, and if he wanted to fuck around with some other girl, then it was none of my business. It WAS my business to know about it, I thought, and it was my business to disapprove of nasty little bitches like the one he'd chosen -- especially since she seemed very, very interested in breaking up the relationship between Jake and me. But it wasn't my business to be upset for any other reasons.
When I dated Jürgen and I found out that he had TWO other girlfriends, I was upset. Not because I wondered if they were somehow better than me, or if they were going to steal his heart away, or any such crap like that... I was upset because Jürgen was a big fat liar, and he'd been lying to all three of us in order to keep us from finding out about each other.
Admittedly, with Peter, I was frequently jealous. This was because Peter frequently brought dates to our apartment, effectively forcing me to pretend that we had no relationship beyond friendship. I suspect that Peter also frequently used my bed as a kind of meeting place for some of these dates while I wasn't around. I had never submitted to the rules he'd invented for our relationship. I didn't suppose I had the right to request that he not see other people, but I DID suppose I had the right to know about it. And the right to be honest, in pretty much any situation, about the relationship between us. And CERTAINLY the right to feel secure about sleeping in my own bed without worrying about gross germs.
But mostly, I've never been REALLY jealous. I've never given myself permission to feel jealous.
I don't understand how D. can honestly be upset that other people think his girlfriend is hot. In actuality, she is very attractive, but not In That Way -- to me, at least.
Sometimes I suppose that Neil has moments of envy, and I understand that even less. There's not anybody in this world who could turn my head away from Neil. Even in his absence, I spent a rather unusual amount of time thinking about him. There's no movie star, no fantasy man, no ex-boyfriend who can divert so much as my thoughts away from Neil. Neil was always the One. He was always the distraction in my heart, through all my relationships, all my crushes, everything... It makes me incredulous to think that maybe he's uncomfortable thinking about other dudes thinking I'm cute or whatever. Neil is the One. It would take one hell of a disaster to get me to so much as notice anybody else with any emotions much deeper than passing politeness and friendship. Probably I would have to get hit by a comet. In the head. Probably in a very specific region of the head.
I hope that never happens. Happily, the odds are very much against it.
Oh well. Just something I've been contemplating since D. and I were talking yesterday. I still feel like I'm missing something.
I've been feeling very pregnant lately. I'm exhausted all the time, seemingly for no reason. I get weird aches and pains that vanish as quickly as they come. My brain doesn't feel like it's working correctly. Sometimes I'm so tired, it feels like I'm dreaming while I'm awake. Sometimes I feel like I'm not really forming coherent sentences when I speak. One day, there was this really raunchy, indescribable smell that kept threatening to gag me -- a smell that apparently nobody else noticed. These things were how I knew I was pregnant to begin with, way back in the first trimester. I'm nearly in the third trimester now, and it seems that a lot of the unpleasant stuff is coming back. I can't figure out why. I hate taking naps all day and trying desperately not to fall asleep at eight o'clock every night. I hate staring off into space because I'm unable to concentrate on anything. According to books and doctors and so forth, most of this is pretty normal. Hormones or some shit. But I wish I could be pregnant without feeling half-dead all the time. I would really like to just wake the hell up.
Once, I knew a girl who wrote me to tell me she was going to have a baby. She said she liked being pregnant; it "suited" her. Those were her exact words: "I like being pregnant. It suits me." THAT makes me jealous. I like being pregnant too -- it's kind of fun most of the time -- but if it really suited me, I wouldn't feel miserably tired as often as I do. At least, I wouldn't think so. It gives me a bit of sadistic pleasure to know that the girl to whom pregnancy was "suited" is probably an awful parent.
Blah. I'm going to go scrounge for food and then lie down and do nothing.
(Is it the first yet?)
~Helena*