And The Clouds Came Tumbling Down (this is a long one!)

Today should have been awesome, except that Mike completely fucked things up.
That sounds harsh, but it's true. Here's the thing...

You all know that he pretty much crushed me. I was devastated when he started dating his girlfriend. Did he ruin my "spirit", or whatever the hell you want to call it, beyond repair? Of course not, no strong woman would ever let a guy do that to her, and I consider myself a pretty strong woman. But...well, there's no denying the past few months have fundamentally changed me. I don't think I'll ever be as trusting of my instincts about love again. Part of that depresses me, to have really lost that innocence once and for all. Then again, I'm 23. It's about time to let that go and get a little more cynical, a little more careful, hopefully a little more able to make good choices for myself.
To put it all in some kind of perspective, let me say that as stupid as it sounds, deep down I always thought I'd marry Mike. Even when we were both casually dating other people, even during the periods when we were just talking online once or twice a week and only sending one text message a day, I still always had this feeling that we'd eventually end up in the same place, start dating again for real, and get married. Sometimes that was a very clear thought. Other times it was a more vague feeling that I was trying to talk myself out of. But that feeling was always there.
In January I thought we were getting close to that actually happening. He told me he loved me. He said he couldn't see himself ever loving anyone else the way he loved me. I told him I felt the same way about him. He asked me if what we were doing was sort of a promise for the future, and we agreed that it was. It was a scary step, but it made me SO HAPPY. It wasn't an engagement, we weren't even in an official committed relationship at the time, but we were certainly heading in that direction, or so I mistakenly thought. We talked vaguely about planning to end up in the same place as soon as we finished school. We weren't making definite plans, but we were talking about making definite plans in the near future. He often said that he never wanted to get married, but one day in December he said to me very matter-of-factly "You know we'll get married," as if it was a given. In spite of everything we'd been through over the course of our friendship and relationship, deep down I thought it really was a given, too.

And then came Valentine's Day and the fateful blind date where he met the girl who became his girlfriend three days later. And then for me came two weeks of tears and mourning (it sounds so melodramatic but, well, that's what I was doing. I was mourning). Go back and read some of the entries from late February if you really need a refresher on that, they're far too depressing to link here. And then came the Padre trip, which you got the synopsis of already, too.
And then came almost two entire months of me trying to get over all this. Begging him to come back to me wasn't accomplishing anything. It was really just hurting both of us.
I hated how he acted towards me when I was upset, and I hated how pathetic I was being in some vain attempt to win him back. Look how much I love you. Look how much I'm hurting. How can you hurt someone you claimed to love so much? How can you just throw away something that was so good? I thought you were the love of my fucking life, how can I have been so wrong about that? Surely you can't possibly love this new girl in that perfect, special way you loved me. Surely something that amazing can only exist between you and me. Do you feel when you hold her in your arms at night that forever isn't such a scary concept after all if forever can be just like this? Do you feel that way? So that feeling can happen with more than one person? Or did you never feel that way about me at all? All those times I was so sure we were on the exact same wavelength and it was the best possible connection, did I make all that up?
He tells me now that he was never what I thought he was. He told me on the phone just tonight "You and I are too different. I don't know what you think I am, but I'm not what you need." Is it possible that I could have been so wrong about all of that? The answer, apparently, is yes. I realize that the love he has with his new girlfriend is obviously something completely different than what we have (had). The fact of the matter is and always has been: If he can love someone else so much that he would give me up for her, he and I were never really meant to be together forever in the first place.
So instead of trying to convince him that he was stupid for leaving me, I began to try to convince myself that I was stupid for wanting to stay with him. When you love someone, it's becomes easy to overlook their faults. To play the opposite game, picking a person apart and attempting to find their every flaw so that you can convince yourself you can do better? Well, that's not a fun game. But I began to do it. It even began to work. When I ignore my heart it's easy to think of dozens of logical reasons why Mike and I might have potential issues as a couple. In some ways I'm years older than him: I've lived on my own for five years now, I'm pretty sure he has never done his own grocery shopping. I'm more "worldly" (ugh, how ridiculous and elitist, but I can't think of a better way to describe it), and I come from a family that has more money and at this moment I am more highly educated. None of these things bother me in the least. In fact, I consider them positives: some of the many ways in which we balance each other out with our different experiences and philosophies. But I realize these facts bother him. I think that to this day the fact that I went away to college and he didn't bothers him. He might not admit that if pressed, but the fact that he still brings it up as a negative, often, leads me to believe that there's still some jealousy there that never quite got worked out. We have different philosophies about money (I'm a saver and he's a spender), lifestyle (I like to more-or-less have a plan at all times, he's content to more-or-less drift), and family (if I could actually plan an ideal future for myself it would include a husband and a child, and Mike is more or less anti-marriage and VERY anti-child. I always thought that this was just because he's 23 and he'll come around and want to settle down as he gets older, but you know, do I necessarily want to have to be the one to convince him he wants those things? Why knock myself out trying to convince him when there are plenty of guys in the world who want those things anyway without my convincing?). There's also the fact that even though I long ago accepted the fact that Mike casually dated and slept with other girls, he never quite got beyond the fact that I had done the same with a (very small) number of guys. So, fundamentally, I realize Mike somewhat has a point when he tells me we would never work out in the long run. We are very different, and while the majority of those differences are the good sort of differences, the type that balance couples out, some of them (particularly the lack of cohesion on whether or not to take the marriage-and-kids route and the unresolved jealousy issues) are problems that all the love in the world might not be able to conquer.
But therein lies the problem. All the love in the world? It was there. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully express just how much in love I am with Mike. I say love in the present-tense, because that love will never go anywhere. That's the thing about loving someone that much: no matter what their faults are, you can always forgive them and that love never goes away. It morphs into different sorts of love at different times, maybe, but if at any point during the past 6ish years you had asked me to make a list of people I really, truly love and would sacrifice for...well, for me that is always a very short list, but Mike would be on it. In spite of everything, he's still on that list now.
Because that's the thing about me and Mike. Although whether we'd always be together as a couple has at many times been somewhat questionable, whether or not we'd always be friends was never a doubt in my mind. There have been times in the past where that feeling that Mike was the elusive One For Me faded to just a vague "it could definitely still happen" idea. In the past couple of months the thought of us ultimately ending up together has been obliterated pretty much entirely. A combination of things has led me to the belief that we've probably permanently broken things between us now. Although sometimes my emotions still tell me "don't give up on this!", every bit of logic in my body (and I'm much more logical than emotional) has convinced me that we have now done things that really, REALLY can't be overcome. He has seen the absolute, the absolute fucking worst side of me. A side I didn't even know I had and wish I'd never had to find out about, honestly. I mean, it's good to know it's there, I guess, but I wish I'd never had to experience myself like that. I have seen the worst side of him. I always bragged about how incredibly loyal Mike was, but he has been cheating on his girlfriend to some extent with me ever since their relationship began and right up until last night. Could I date him again, knowing that he's capable of cheating? Sure, but my trust in him has been severely shaken. Even posting this entry is a form of breaking things between us entirely, because now if I ever do decide to date him again, every single person I know that reads this is going to wonder what I'm doing getting back with him when I know all the potential pitfalls. Maybe that's why I'm doing this. Maybe I need people stronger than I am to continue to remind me to listen to my own logic.
So could we date again? Yes, someday, in spite of EVERY SINGLE THING THAT HAS HAPPENED, I really believe we could. With certain changes on his part and mine, we could get together again someday and once again have an awesome, joking, loving, friendly, spontaneous, incredibly special relationship. Would it be worth the work to make it happen? Maybe, if the love ended up being enough. But nowadays it makes much more sense for me to truly believe that there's another guy out there for me. Isn't the convenient new theory that everyone gets two true loves in their life? Okay then. Mike was number one, maybe now it's really time to get out there and find number two. Maybe if I get really lucky I can find an even better match, I can start fresh with someone and build an even stronger foundation. Or if I honestly never find a guy better than Mike (because trust me, in spite of his flaws the idea of finding a guy fundamentally better than Mike seems almost impossible), I know deep down that I can honestly live a fairly content life on my own. Would it be the ideal life I like to envision for myself? No, of course not, but who the hell actually gets to live their ideal life, anyway?

So, okay, tonight on the phone Mike finally told me what I've been wanting to hear for weeks, that he's in love with this girl and doesn't see himself ever getting back together with me any time in the future. And honest to God, that's what I needed to hear. I wish he'd told me that a month ago, because then I could have gotten through this entire process so much quicker. I've been pressing him about this question pretty much weekly ever since he began dating her. "Just tell me you and I are over. If we're really over and you really know it, just tell me. Tell me so I can stop wondering if we still have a chance," I kept telling him. And he kept refusing to flat out tell me that he was done with me. Maybe it's because he wasn't completely, because right up until last night we were still having conversations platonic friends shouldn't have been having. I'm not totally innocent in this situation. He would start things, and I would allow them to continue. I shouldn't have done that. But why was I the one who should have been exerting self-control? I wasn't the one in love with someone else, I was just making a pitiful attempt to reinsert myself into the relationship that I viewed as mine to begin with. So half of the time he was telling me that he was very much with his new girlfriend and was very serious about it and I should just give up on him, but the other half of the time his actions were still implying that we weren't completely over.

Well, now we are completely, one hundred percent over. He finally told me tonight that he sees no future for us and he's going to do everything in his power to stay with his girlfriend (presumably forever, although he won't admit that...but come on, why the hell does anyone start a committed relationship unless it's with the hope that it will last forever? We go into casual relationships without much caring, but no one jumps into commitment with the thought process 'This could very well end at any minute, so I should keep my options open"...or if that IS your attitude going into a committed relationship, you have serious issues and sure as hell shouldn't attempt to be committing to ANYTHING).
Now that I know he really loves her, now that he has finally made up his mind and completely committed to a relationship, I finally feel like my best bet is to quit fighting for him and step out of the way. If he's happy, my job as a friend is to be supportive of his relationship. If he really doesn't want me anymore, I really don't want him, either. I finally, finally got the closure I've been begging for since March. Now that I know where he really stands, it's easy to evaluate where I need to stand. If he's over me, I'm over him. You may not think it can possibly be that simple, but you know what? In my world, it is. I asked him why the hell it took him so long to finally tell me that, and his reason? "I didn't want to hurt you." But he'd already hurt me so irreparably that tonight was something of a relief. He has let go of the idea of us in a relationship utterly and completely, I can do the same.
I realize nothing is definite. I realize that someday in a far, far, FAR distant future he and I could see each other in an ideal situation, feel that old spark, and start something all over again. But for all intents and purposes, I can finally start letting go.

But goddamn it, I didn't want to have to let go of our friendship, too. The relationship, yes. But not the friendship. As I said about a million paragraphs ago, even though I never really knew for certain that we'd ultimately end up a couple (although I certainly thought we would), I knew for certain that we'd always be friends. And not just acquaintances, but real friends. So much of what we've always had has been based on this simple, easy, talking-about-nonsense friendship, and I thought that no matter what happened to us we'd never lose that.
That's why I've been fighting through all these emotions for the past few months. If he was any other guy I would have just let it go, stopped talking to him entirely, and tried to get over him in all the traditional ways. But because he is one of the few very close friends I've ever had in my life, I didn't want to lose that. Other than my family, he's the biggest connection I have to my past, and I really, really don't want to lose that link, either. He's the only person in the world who really knew me in high school who also really knows me now. That's an incredibly special bond, and one that I didn't want to lose, ever. So I've been putting myself through the emotional hell of working out all the feelings I have concerning him so that I could eventually get to a good point, a point where we could have a happy platonic friendship. And we were getting there. In my mind, after the conversation we had tonight, we're there. Now that I know how seriously he's committed to her and making things work, I'm seriously committed to being just his friend and never hoping for more. Like I said, now that I know for a fact that he doesn't want anything more, ever, I don't ever want anything more ever, either.

But here's where Mike completely fucked everything up: Last night, he got drunk. And he started stuff that I shouldn't have encouraged, but how the hell was I to know that he was being stupid enough to send me text messages from his girlfriend's house?! Well, she found out. And she's hurt. And I don't blame her, she has every right to be. She has agreed to stay with Mike, and they're going to work everything out and live happily ever after I'm sure.

But me? Well, I once again get to be the total loser in the situation. Because...oh lord, the irony...the exact event that made me realize that he really is committed to his girlfriend and I'm really, truly ready to be committed to just being his good friend Ashley? That same event put me in a position where his girlfriend can never trust me around him again. And how can I blame her for that? Of course I wouldn't want my boyfriend continuing to talk daily to the girl he had cheated on me with. But it just sucks that Mike and I have both reached the point where we can just have the casual friendship I've been working towards, but now I can't talk to him at all because it will screw up his relationship with his girlfriend.

I'm not supposed to text him, call him, or e-mail him until things with them get more stable. Which, honestly, could be never. Why rock the boat? Is our friendship worth possibly jeopardizing their relationship if he really can't get her to trust him as far as I'm concerned again? For me, of course, our friendship is worth anything. But for him I know it's not. I'm not worth it. Nobody ever chooses friendship over the giddiness of the first year and a half of love.

So from now on if we're going to have a friendship at all, I'm afraid it won't be that one I was working towards, where we can still send a few daily text messages and talk online. I doubt we'll ever talk on the phone again. We sure as hell won't get to see each other in person, not without a whole entourage of people around us so that she doesn't feel threatened, and that's not exactly conducive to catching up.

It just sucks so much, because I know that she has absolutely nothing to worry about. Now that I know where Mike really stands, I'd never dream of getting in the way of that. But there will be no way to convince her not to be worried. Even if she says she's not, she will be. A betrayal like that never fades away entirely, unfortunately, no matter how much we want it to.

Ever since February, I've known I was going to ultimately lose the relationship. I never thought I'd lose my best friend in the process.

Why is it that Mike is the one that fucked up, but I am the only one really being punished? He says he's being punished, too, but at least he has his girlfriend to love and enjoy.

Me? I've not only lost the relationship, I've lost six years of amazing friendship as well.

Even in my worst nightmares I never imagined it was all going to end this badly.

I'm hopeful that she'll come around, and he'll come around, and I won't be written out of his life entirely. After all, the best thing he can do for his relationship is to get her to trust him completely, even where I'm involved. That would be the best thing for all three of us. But do I think that's likely?

Not really. He may prove me wrong. I hope he does. But what are the odds that I would get that lucky?

(Sorry for the long, incredibly depressing rant. Thank you for letting me rant. If anyone actually read this far, I'm shocked. And I promise that I'll be back with happier posts very soon. It's summertime now, and that should mean at least a few good adventures)