After what happened with Rich, I decided to wrap my heart in barbed wire, and be VERY selective about who I would let come near it.
I had, as I have mentioned before, truly loved him, and had opened my heart to him utterly, only to have him trash it like it was nothing.
In retrospect, I know that during my processes of losing lovers, over and over and over, I developed a pretty sad set of assumptions about myself.
First to loosen the barbed wire was Canada Dave. I think I really loved him, but his circumstances were such that, right when we were first involved, he moved home to Ontario. It was just bad timing. (he still has a place in my heart...he never actually did anything to hurt me!) We never had the TIME to find out what might have been...so I re-wrapped the barbed wire about my heart, and moved on.
After that, I had let the barbed wire fall away with Teece, only to have him abandon me, too.
So, over time, I figured that, since my ex husband had abandoned me in favor of drugs and alcohol, and then my ex fiance had abandoned me for one of my best friends (who was married), and then, one after the other, the guys I actually tried to develop relationships with were dropping like flies....mostly without any explanation....
there must be something fundamentally wrong with me.
That was how it was. What else could it be?
That, and I also decided that love didn't really exist. It was a fallacy. A fantasy.
So, I built walls around my heart, and put the barbed wire back around it, and became so closely guarded and shielded that I would not, COULD not, let myself "fall" again.
If love was a made up fairy tale, anyway, what would it matter?
I'd simply learn to accept being single, and I'd look forward to the day when I could be the crazy cat lady in the old old house, with 47 cats, and people coming to me to cast spells for them.
This is what D had to deal with when we first were involved. My fear was so thick, so insurmountable, that I was unable to match his affections for quite some time.
Despite all of this, he somehow managed to fall for me, head over heels, hook line and sinker, pretty quickly.
This, in itself, was very scary for me. I think, at one point, I told him to "Cut it out!"
He had warned me of his tendency to "focus" on things, and that he had suspected that he would "focus" on me pretty easily. He did.
When we were first in touch, he was instantly smitten, so he tells me, and it just cascaded from there.
Yet, the poor guy was persistent in dealing with my hesitation to jump in with him.
He kept saying "I'm not going anywhere. You're it."
He assured me that there wasn't anything wrong with ME. He said that the character flaws all belonged to the men who had mis-treated me, and who had broken or mis-used my heart.
He said he recognized the jewel that I had kept hidden behind the walls and barbed wire, and he would wait for me to accept that.
He started telling me he loved me.
He meant it.
All I could say was ... "I know." Because I DID know he loved me. I could hear it in his words. See it in his eyes (when we had the chance to be on webcam), and just feel it as something that was literally TRUE.
It really didn't take that long for the holes in the mortar to begin. Several weeks into this process, while D was on vacation visiting the Universe and hobbitt, I finally said "I love you too" to him at the end of a conversation.
I thought he was going to burst with joy!
But the process of actually tearing down the walls, and cutting away the barbed wire, took several months.
There are still remnants of it there, I think, in my insecurities and uncertainties.
But he asked me to marry him anyway, despite my reserve. Last year, on July 22nd, during a visit here (only his third). He proposed in the most beautiful, and perfect, of ways.
We had only been together three times in person, but we had spent so many countless hours talking, and getting to really know one another, that it seemed like we had spent FAR more time together than three long weekends.
The walls came down, leaving only a few bricks, and some mortar. The barbed wire was cut away, and I allowed myself, finally, to fall in love.
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