Don’t Lead Me On If You’re Not Sure About Me

There’s a reason why I hate sports fishing. I find it incredibly sadistic and selfish of a human to hook a beautiful marine fish by baiting it with a lie of food on a hook, spend hours slowly withering down its strength to resist with the constant tug-of-war between it and him, and then when he finally lands his catch the fisherman simply takes a picture of himself with it as a trophy and then leaves it to go back into the sea.

Exhausted, damaged, hurt. And putting the fish through all that ordeal not for purpose of food, but simply to satisfy a fisherman’s ego and pride.

My ex was the fisherwoman, and I was the blue marlin she hooked onto the end of her line. I was as volatile as the deep blue sea, fiercely independent and unique in spirit, and I most certainly was one to fight back against anything and anyone that crossed me.

And yet, my ex actively sought me out right from the start. Found me. Courted me. Said all the right things and made all the right moves. Got me to lower my guard for the first time in what seemed forever to believe that she actually knew what she wanted to get herself into.

She crossed all the tripwires I set out for her without a single bit of hesitation, defeated every inner self-defeating hope inside me that she would have chickened out, or shown herself to not be serious about wanting a relationship or loving me as much as she said she did. She said she chose me out of her own free will, to make herself happy, and that she was willing to bear all the responsibility thereafter that comes along with dating someone else.

And like that blue marlin that sports anglers crave to land on a hook in the deep blue sea, I got hooked right down to the line and sinker, and then the emotional rollercoaster and tug-of-war began in earnest.

It was true that my ex was severely emotionally damaged. She had her own baggage of child abuse in her past to deal with. And according to her side of the story that I heard her ex-boyfriend before me was Satan’s spawn incarnated. A guy who kept her with him on the threat of ending his own life if she left him. A guy who in her words “never gave her any security nor compassion; a guy who just used her as an emotional ego boost and constantly belittled her with passive-aggressive remarks”.

And yet I am expected to take it lying down, swallow the bitter pill that despite making her ex out to be a monster, this girl couldn’t even have the desire to untangle herself from his life and still wanted to keep him as a friend after choosing to be with me on her own free will?

Or worse still, that when she dumped him she did it on the phone; with me she did it through text and blocked me afterwards. Or the ultimate clincher, that after dumping me she skipped town to escape my wrath which she knew was sure in coming. In the car of her ex who came to pick her up, the doormat he is.

Imagine hearing the girl who relentlessly pursued you for the whole of summer tell you that she was torn between yourself who was “the best thing that happened to her” and her abusive ex simply because he was a local guy, whilst I was a foreigner due to leave in a year’s time after graduating from university. That she loved you so much that she would follow you anywhere on earth, but in the next breath she’d tell you that she couldn’t even entertain the idea of a long distance relationship and going serious with you because “it would pain her too much for you to leave at the beginning of the long distance relationship”.

Now try to comprehend the fact that this ex of mine never gave me any emotional security, security which I gave to her in spades despite having no obligations to whatsoever. Deliberate lies to both me and her ex about her mental state and about each other’s perceived misdeeds or arguments with her. She played both me and her ex like flutes, and yet I’m left the one smarting from the wounds of her breaking my trust whilst she runs off with her ex, who although is truly an emotionally abusive character, he was also truly a doormat for her by willingly running back to her on her beck and call.

I was her summer fling she didn’t want to admit nor acknowledge. I did not pursue her and I sure as hell did not beg for her love. But she saw it fit to abuse the seldom-given trust I gave her for her mind games and mood swings. It even got to a time whereby her personal baggage became insufficient to excuse her near-bipolar behavior. She told me that if she could choose polyamory and date both me and her ex she’d do it. That at the end of the day, she just wanted to cheat and have her cake to eat at the end of the day too.

Experienced sports anglers will tell you that a blue marlin is most dangerous when caught out of the water, because it would be thrashing about on the slippery decks of a boat trying to slash anyone within reach with its pointed nose.

My ex nearly drove me crazy at the end of the months of emotional roller coasters, and all I could think of, both back then and now, was revenge of some sort or another. I’m an INFJ by the Myers-Briggs personality classification, but the extent that she crossed my personal emotional defenses was enough to warrant triggering an extremely intense and irrational emotional response to her, instead of merely an emotional door slam as what INFJs are so good at doing.

But she chose the easy way out. She escaped. Said her apologies, never mind the fact that my trust in her was so irrevocably broken that it really didn’t mean anything anymore. And I’m thrown back into the volatile sea of life now. Battered. Bruised. Hurt. Tired. And angry.

There’s a reason why storms are named after people. And I hope I will always be the storm in her life for as long as she lives. Because trust in women once broken is something no man will easily heal from in future.

Not with canned words of consolation about how “he deserves better”. Not with flippant rebounds and random flings. We all take ownerships of the scars we’ve inflicted on other people. She failed, and I can’t even inflict my own scars on her in return as well.

It’s sickening.

Every day is a matter of personal survival now. A break up is never easy. Getting dumped is far harder to accept. Two years ago I shut my heart away from everybody because I got similarly dumped back then by a similarly-immature girl. Two years on history seems to love repeating itself. The only difference is back then I was the one pursuing the girl, and this time around I was the one who was made to feel wanted and then expendable in a blink of an eye.

I hate pointless sports fishing. And I hate people who destroy what good is left in others and never seem to pay the price afterwards. I’m tired of backhanded compliments about me being “the most eligible bachelor around here” from single women who would never ever date me themselves.

And I’m tired of always being the ‘one who came too late,’ the ‘one that’s never good enough,’ the ‘expendable asset,’ the ‘supporting character,’ and most of all, I’m tired of having my trust broken.

How long I’ll take to recover? I would not know and I daren’t think about it. But I hope I’ll find it in myself to survive and recover again. Although now I would think that love is just a cruel lie, said by people who wouldn’t know half the time about how significant their profusions of love are. Now I’m damaged goods, and it’s a long road of recovery that I face alone.

Well, at least I’m used to solitude.