As many of you know, I’ve been following through on my resolve to end my single status this year because I’m tired of complaining about being single, and so is everyone else in my life. So I’ve been going on more dates, which has ended in my being crushed over and over again.

This past week I’ve been emailing with a guy from OkCupid who messaged me expressing interest. From what we were saying we seemed to have a lot in common and similar goals in what we were looking for. He had a busy week, as did I, and this weekend he had a wedding to go so we set a date for Tuesday evening to meet. We’ve been emailing back and forth in the meantime, sharing a more but not too much in the event that.

Tonight I got an email from him saying that he’d read through my blog (I’d shared the address with him yesterday) and didn’t think that we’d be a good match. I emailed back a little while ago asking if there was any particular reason, because I’m genuinely interested in what about me doesn’t work for people, or if there’s something that I do that makes getting to know me or seeing potential in us as a couple prohibitive. You can’t fix what you’re doing wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

He emailed back just now to say that from what he read he thinks that there’s too much still to work through about Seth, that I seem angry about it, and that it’s not fair to him to be dating him while that ghost is still hanging around. Which is a valid point, which is why I really need to go through therapy (only problem being that I’m fucking broke, uninsured, and can’t afford that kind of treatment).

He also accused me of being ageist, which is probably also valid. But why am I so terrified of being single at 29? Because I’m 29 and I’ve never been in a serious relationship. Period. Because I already don’t see myself as valuable. I’m already terrified that nobody wants me as a person, that there’s nothing intrinsically worthwhile about me, that I’m an oddity that no one knows what to do with, and that I’m damaged goods. And I’m terrified of the future, because experience has taught me thus far that everyone only sees me as a friend or a fuck buddy, and nobody wants me as a partner. I’m the fucking best friend who sees everyone else married off and happy. I’m a trope.

As I was driving home, I thought a little more about it. Why am I terrified of being single at 29? Because I’ve never felt loved in my entire life, and every day that goes by the hope that I’ll ever learn to love someone gets dimmer and dimmer. I never felt loved by my parents growing up, and there was really no one else in my early life who I had close relationships with besides my family. My younger sister and I were homeschooled until the 10th grade so our world was incredibly insular.

My parents have pointed out all of the things that they did that showed their love for me: things like coming to pick me up in sub-zero weather when my car died on 35W in the middle of the night, coming to all of my shows (even the ones they didn’t like), and not rejecting me when they found out I was gay. But those things don’t communicate love for me. They’re just nice things you do for each other because that’s how we evolved as a social primate species. Otherwise the world would go to hell pretty quickly.

People say that I need to let them love me. Truth is, I don’t know what love feels like. My personality is so fractured from the different people I have to be in different settings that I don’t even know who it is that they’re trying to love. Love for me is like the affection that you feel for a pet.

In the end, I can’t deny that his assessment is valid. He’s right. I’m a toxic mess, and it’s wrong to inflict that on someone. I don’t blame him for running for the hills, and it’s my own goddamned fault for over-sharing. I shouldn’t have shown him my blog right away, not until he got to know me better. Lesson learned. And maybe I do deal with things too publicly, which isn’t fair to people who don’t know that they’re being discussed out in the open like this. It’s one thing for me to do with that with my own life: it’s another to do it with someone else’s.

And he’s right about Seth. To quote the ever-prescient Fiona Apple, “I can’t help you out while she’s still around” (I know). I just don’t know how to get him out of my system 100%. I let him in on the fool’s hope that he could love me and he couldn’t. It was so easy falling in love, but how do you fall out of love? And that’s what always happens, I guess. Did I even truly love him, or was it just me wanting the idea of him?

It’s not that I’m disappointed that I was turned down, or that I was even attached since we’d never even met. It’s more that this possibility went to sod before it even had a chance to seed; that it always goes like this; that guys get interested and then decide that I’m a mess they don’t want to clean up (Paper Bag).

So what am I looking for? Someone to rescue me, I guess, because I haven’t a fucking clue how to save myself.