A Nightmare

*Disclaimer: There was one more recent B3 incident (Yes, I’m aware I said I could never see him again at the beginning of January. Yes, I’m aware that I’m an idiot) that ended with my heart being rammed into a paper shredder (way too overdramatic but I don’t care), and no, I’m not going into details because they ultimately do not matter. The one detail that matters is that I blocked him in my phone and on Facebook so that he cannot suck me back in.*

I’m running down what I can only assume is Rue de Rivoli, after B3 and I just left The Lovre. It’s Thanksgiving Day, and I am ready to bring him home. I chase after him as we go to find his car. We somehow got to Paris from Concord, NH, and now it is time to go back so I can bring him home, so he doesn’t have to spend Thanksgiving alone. I’m texting my mom as we run, to tell her he’s coming home with me. I look down for one second. Then I look up. And he’s gone.

So I stop running and wait. But I realize he can’t call me, because I’ve blocked him on my phone. As soon as I remove him from my block list, a barrage of texts come through. The only one I see is, “OK, I don’t feel as much rage today as I did before.” He’s been texting me for over two weeks. I start to cry. I try to call him and it goes straight to voicemail. I don’t know how we got to Paris, but I know I don’t have my passport. I’m stranded. A random stranger approaches. Tells me he won’t leave me until I figure out a way home, and that I shouldn’t worry.

In a flash, I am jolted out of this nightmare. My alarm clock is going off and I realize it’s over – the dream, the nightmare, everything. I get up, go to work, it’s business as usual. But when I see that Princeton Mom has returned, I go to a bad place. Princeton Mom, as you may or may not recall, got ASOVBD Bitch Pleased last March for writing a letter to the Daily Princetonian saying any girl who doesn’t snag a husband in college is screwed for life – not literally, of course, because if you’re not married by 22, no one will ever want you.

Well, on Valentine’s Day, she reared her ugly and unhelpful head, again, by writing a gem of a column for the Wall Street Journal. The paragraph that really jumps out for me, is this one:

An extraordinary education is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But if you are a young woman who has had that blessing, the task of finding a life partner who shares your intellectual curiosity and potential for success is difficult. Those men who are as well-educated as you are often interested in younger, less challenging women.

Pause for reaction:

Is she reading this shit? She’s completely contradicting herself here in saying education is important but smart guys will want to marry someone else who is younger and dumber? I can’t with this woman. I am not going to get in to her points about how we should spend less time focusing on work and more time focusing on husband hunting and oh but once you hit 25 it’s too late, sorry, whoops. Her whole column is just depressing. There is no way I would have married anyone I met in college. And you can’t road map a timeline for falling in love. It’s not something that you can check off your To-Do list for Saturday.  Sometimes you walk into a fucking Chili’s to watch a baseball game and fall in love without even realizing it.

This is not about women’s lib or feminism, or anything like that. This is life. And you cannot plan it. And you cannot make some wild generalization that if you don’t meet and marry someone by your mid 20’s, that it will never happen for you. It might never happen for me, but if my options are to settle and be miserable, or just be alone, I’ll take alone every damn day.

I like that I can support myself, but I also like having doors held open for me and being walked to my car at the end of a date. You know, chivalry, and all that. Patton makes me feel like it has to be one or the other, and you can’t have both. Would some dude really want me relying on him financially and emotionally? I doubt it.

My nightmare was on Thursday night. Last night, I had a dream B3 showed up at my door to apologize. I hate that cliche “time heals all wounds,” but I know/hope that one day I will wake up and not be in this much pain, watching Armageddon at 6am on a Sunday, crying at every point.