Dating Disasters: Every Rose Has a Thorn, Part II

I wanted to share this experience with him. I wanted to look back on this trip and say I survived almost two weeks across the world with the man I love. The flights there, despite its length, were a breeze. We slept, watched movies, ate food, and read. I brought two travel guides and a journal. My goal was to create a travel journal, experience everything Thailand had to offer and each night write about it. For Christmas, he had given me a leather bound journal, knowing I loved to write, it meant a lot to me. He listens.

We started out in Bangkok at a beautiful residence that would cost a resident of Thailand a lot of money, but fairly cheap for us. We rode in a tuk tuk to our residence which was thrilling. It's a fast two wheel motorized car that's open in the back. As we sped to our destination, I kept thinking about how lucky I was to be here. A chance of lifetime to experience a place like this and to do it with him. I had begun to let my guard down. It took awhile. When we had first met, I knew he was going to cause me pain. He was only a few years younger than me, but knowing how I was at his age and what pain I caused my ex, I knew this was a bad idea, but I had fallen hard. Throughout our days in Bangkok, we visited museums and the Grand Palace. Grand doesn't describe how amazing this place was. We watched a Muay Thai match which I can only describe in terrible fashion as Boxing meets Martial Arts, took a beautiful night river tour at the floating markets, shopped, ate delicious food, and drank on top of expensive hotels over looking the grandeur of Bangkok that is breathtaking. Things were going splendid, except for the occasional upset stomach, I couldn't have been happier. floating market/river tour was my favorite leg of that part of the trip. It's just a long market on a river with small shops along both sides. The people are friendly and despite having little, they are happy. Their happiness comes from things that matter not material things us Americans have to have. It's grounding.

By the second leg of our trip, Phuket, things started to change. My fears of being with him began once again with no cause but my own. Five of us were relaxing at the pool with a swim up bar when my friend and I noticed two beautiful Australian guys close by. We began making sexual comments about them to each other which caused my bf to get angry. My heart dropped. I was buzzed and feeling good, but I was wrong and I apologized profusely. I thought he would just chime in with us, but he made me feel like a god awful bf. It was one of the first times I had seen him angry so I was taken back. We let it go.

Thai New Year (Songkran) was upon us. I didn't know much about the festivities, but part of the celebration involves a water festival. It's a time where people roam the streets with anything they can carry water in, buckets, water guns, cups, whatever and everyone gets soaked. SOOOO much fun. With it being as hot and humid as it was, I didn't mind. We couldn't leave the resort without getting wet. How much fun to carry a super soaker around and be able to go up to random people and just spray them down. The best were just the random groups of beautiful Thai women trying to coax men inside for massages, meanwhile holding pales of water, sneaking up behind you, and dumping it over your head. One night we found a gay bar and the Thai boys that worked there went to great lengths to get you to buy drinks. They were feminine and friendly, sitting on your lap, flirting, all the while just trying to obviously get you to buy more. As it got darker, the streets became more crowded. My friends seemed less enthusiastic to join in on the fun as they had been here multiple times, but for me I felt like I was back in Yonkers playing Manhunt with my super soaker, hunting down my friends in the neighborhood. My bf and I met a few very hot and very friendly foreigners, some from Britain, Australia, Brazil, all over the world and we all just drank, made friends, and acted like kids.

"I have to use the bathroom," my boyfriend said to me as I was hiding behind a wall about to sneak up on someone and get them wet. By now we were drenched anyway, my t-shirt and shorts sticking to me. All I said to him was, "Ok" and get playing. Soon, I started to worry. He hadn't comeback. My friends didn't know where he was, at least they didn't seem to know where he was. I began to panic. I went into the bathroom, he wasn't there. I looked all over the bar, the street, he was nowhere. I walked a few blocks down to our resort thinking maybe the bathrooms were so gross he went back to our room. He wasn't there. I started to get visions of me having to talk to police, calling his mom, and telling her he's gone. I was buzzed and maybe was over-reacting, but I was legitimately scared. On my way back to the bar, he was walking towards me with a look of concern and frustration. At me? I don't know. I hugged him and began to cry. "Where the hell were you?" I asked him. "I told you I was in the bathroom, " he said. "I was sick, was in a stall."

My friends were acting strange as if they knew something I didn't. I had that awful feeling you get when you know everyone is not telling you something. I let it pass. People were dancing and I joined in and then I turned my head to this Brazilian guy and he was grinning at me. Not a "You're cute" grin, it was as if he had done something behind my back, like he was an enemy of mine and he had one up on me. When we got back to our room, things felt different between us. I knew something had happened. I have very good intuitions when I'm in a relationship with someone. I know when things are wrong. Then it hit me and I didn't want ask him for fear I was wrong, but I didn't think I was. Was that grin saying, "Ha ha, I just hooked up with your bf?" "Did you mess around with that Brazilian guy?" I blurted out. He looked at me with anger and concern, but behind his "How dare you think I would do that" face, was guilt. I apologized for even thinking it, because I wanted it out of my mind. I was in Thailand and despite the despair I started to feel, I didn't want my accusation to ruin our trip whether I was right or not. By the last leg of our trip in Koh Phi Phi, I felt more and more distant from him. I put on a façade of being happy but inside I knew that when we got home something was going to change. He was trying to hard and that's how I knew he had done something with that guy even if he denied it. He even kept singing that Kelly Clarkson song, "I Don't Hook Up," all the time, which the psychology minor in me was a sign right there he felt guilty FOR hooking up.

On our plane ride home, I replayed that guy's grin over and over in my head. maybe he did think I was cute and maybe I was being that overprotective jealous guy I vowed I'd never be. He went to great lengths to prove his innocence. Even telling his parents. "Craig, tell them how you thought I cheated on you while we were there?" I was mortified. But as spring was leaving the weather got warmer things got worse and we began to fight. We were at the beach with his friends and he got hammered and began spouting how I had more experience with men and he didn't. Made me feel like a terrible guy because all I got him was a card for his birthday, even though I had just spent thousands on our trip. Each time, that night or the next morning he would sob and apologize and I would forgive him because I loved him so much. But he stopped telling me he loved me when I would drive him home and I knew it was only time. Then one night after having dinner with friends, gushing over how wonderful my bf was, I invited him over and he declined. He never did before. I did what any paranoid, love sick, crazy bf would do and I went through great lengths to catch him trying to hook up with someone on Manhunt. The same site he messaged me on to say hello. The site he had blocked me from seeing his profile to make me believe he had deleted his.

My world was over. We spoke that night and he broke up with me. I was stupidly trying to fix us, but he no longer seemed to want or need me. A day or two after, we had remained friends on Facebook and I saw his number of friends had increased greatly. All men. All men, including the Brazilian and finally he had come clean about hooking up with him that night. Not just hooking up but actually exchanging information to keep in touch.

Love makes you do crazy things and I learned a lot about myself and the man I wanted to be. I had never been more hurt. I became depressed. Left work early because I couldn't function, stopped eating, cried all the time, and became to him, a crazy ex who he had no use for. Looking back I laugh at how stupid I was. Using every excuse to see him again only to beg my cheating bf to take me back. I went from sad to angry in an instant. One minute wanting him to be mine again and the next plotting devious things to do to him like taking naked pics he had sent me and printing them and placing them where he worked...to contacting his mother and telling her own manipulative her precious son was and letting her know all the shocked things he had done to me. I went CRAZY.

It was on my trip to DC to visit a friend, attempting to recover from this heartbreak that I found out that within two weeks of him breaking up with me, he had a new bf. I sobbed in the street, dumbfounded. What?! I felt useless, unworthy of being loved, and alone. I never had experienced heartbreak before and that is how I knew I really had loved him and yet now I hated him and didn't think it was fair he was happy and I was devastated. I told my ex, who I had still lived with at the time, just how sorry I was for all the terrible things I had done to him, because if he had felt anything like I was feeling at that time, I deserved so much more shame and punishment. To add insult to injury, everywhere I went, even in Yonkers to escape my life in Boston, I ran into people who knew him and thought he was such a wonderful adorable guy. It was comical in a way, like WTF.

All those friends I had made. All the men I thought I was so close to, I began to hear little from anymore. It was to the point that they were just acquaintances to me. Nothing more. I was dying inside. I started seeing a therapist, as I began sleeping with men just to feel something. It didn't matter whether I thought they were attractive, they thought I was attractive and so just to feel wanted I slept with them only to hate the person I was after. It was one of the darkest times in my life and yet now when I put it in prospective, I realized all it was, was giving too much power to another individual. I let another person dictate my happiness. It took while to trust again, but it happened. Years have past and although there has still been more heartbreak I've learned to make wiser decisions and the payoff has been amazing. It was an experience I needed to have to make me learn about trusting others, patience, and above all knowing what it means to be a friend and that I am capable of loving someone completely, but within that love learning to not lose myself in the process.