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I’m always in a desperate search when I land myself in these situations. If I’m tired of the same results, perhaps I should stop performing the same experiment.

If this doesn’t pan out, I ought stop looking for someone, altogether. I think it’s finally clear to me that I should just let life place Her in my life exactly as is necessary. And if I’m still single in 10 years, I’ll re-evaluate things at that time.

For now, we’ll see where this goes. And if it doesn’t, I’m just going to focus on myself, my work, my creative outlets, and above all things my friends.

Ugh. This happens every time.

I can never just fall for someone in a slow and healthy fashion. Anytime I come close to that, I’m like an asteroid just grazing past a planet through a hyperbolic orbit; I come close for a while, and for a brief moment even look like I’ll stick around, but then I just fly away into space.

If that doesn’t happen, I shoot into a collision course like a doomsday asteroid.

Lo and behold, I’m in the second situation again. I just met her two days ago, but it was the most amazing first date of my life. There was art (Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts), there was frozen yogurt (the kind you pay for by the pound, and we both had ALL of the frozen yogurt), there were the South St shops (I even bought her a hat because it looked too friggin’ cute on her, and she claimed she never looks good in hats), there was (mindblowing) sex and netflix, she even stayed the night. She’s a creature of the internet, like me, and maybe that sounds silly but internet culture is kind of deeply ingrained in me and sharing that with someone is actually important to me at this point.

To quote my other tumblr,

In every possible way, our chemistry is faster than acid base, stronger than a nitrogen triple bond, and more natural than protein synthesis in a eukaryote.

And this is how it happens. This is how I fall for a girl, but only girls like this. It terrifies me because it means the end is already in sight. Not that the end would come tomorrow, or in a month, or even in a year. Maybe more, maybe less, maybe by a lot. The point is that it’s all too consistent with my typical fucking pattern. And you know something? I’m goddamn TIRED of my typical pattern. I don’t want to fall for someone, wake up one day, and realize “Huh. Well, this was a mistake on my part,” and walk away. I do not want to break anymore hearts and to be perfectly honest I’m tired of finding the wrong person.

I’m about to enter grad school. I hoped I would find my wife-to-be in college. I was convinced I had found her, for about a year and a half, but I was clearly wrong about that. I have since resigned to waiting until grad school to find the love of my life, the real deal, The One. And damnit, I just don’t think she’s going to come to me in the same way all the wrong people have come to me. She’s gotta come to me differently… she’s just got to…

So of course, the question remains - now what? It’s paranoid to assume that things won’t work out just, and it’s illogical to assume they won’t work out because I’m so head-over-fucking-heels for her, but it’s unscientific to assume that my thus far reproducible patterns will suddenly stop happening.

*sigh*

I’m not sure what I need to do. I guess I’ll just breathe, for now.

Ah, her name, by the way, is Sarah.

This post is not for bookkeeping, though. It is to speak. I know the details now. Maybe I’ll remember the details if and when I look back on this.

It’s like everything I touch dies. This is an exact repeat of Rachael.

Just put her (Shannon) on the friends list I use to block people from seeing me online. She doesn’t post much, so that shouldn’t bother me. I just clearly need to leave her alone potentially forever, so this is a step in the right direction. I may get defriended. She does that when she feels she needs to disconnect with someone. Ah, well.

So that’s cool. I need to just stop liking girls I’ve had so long to get to know. Clearly it only ends in disaster. And trying to make amends does less than nothing. It’s actually what invariably pushes them over the edge.

So whatever, fine, fuck it. I will take this lesson and infuse it. The cynic in me grim reaps the joyful in me, but it’s a lesson that needs to stick to preserve future joyful. And that’s all there is to it. The crying shame is that it changes me for the worse, again.

(Unnaturally whiny right now because I should literally know zero people IRL who read this).

I’m not quite sure what I’m doing wrong. There’s no sense in continuing to make mistakes that I don’t learn from. It’s just a part of life I clearly can’t have, then. I’m doomed to have a shitty, if at all existent love-life, but the rest of my life tends to be pretty stellar. I guess I’m a closed system, entropically speaking.

The part that sucks the most about all of it, though, is without a doubt losing a friend. A close friend… If we grow as far apart as Rachael and I did, well… I’ll miss you, Shannon. I really will.

A facebook message sent to Samantha:

Yeah, been having kind of a break down…

I woke up thinking about the breakup today (if you haven’t seen in on facebook, I broke up with Michelle, this girl I dated super-seriously for about 6 months, two Mondays ago). I was really shaken but after like 30 or 45 minutes got up and got my day going. I was alright in my first class but it was all I could do to hold myself together for the rest of the day.

I’ve been bad before now, but definitely not *this* bad. And whenever I’m intellectually or socially engaging in something, I’m distracted enough that I’m pretty much completely ok. I got back home from classes and was supposed to just eat dinner and then go for chem research, but I got worse and worse. Setting up my new speakers helped a bit, but only for a bit. 

When I say I was really “bad” today, I mean that I was keeping down twitches and was oversensitive to sudden changes in environment (I practically jumped out of my seat both times something fell off of my desk, today, which is really abnormal for me). I figured what I needed was a depressant to calm my nervous system down, so I had a couple of drinks (1, really, but it was a double-to-2.5 shot of irish cream in a mug of chocolate milk… delicious stuff, btw). 

Didn’t really do much for me except, surprise surprise I got kinda sleepy. I lied down to try and calm down, leaving the lights and monitor off while Pandora ran. I fell asleep for I think an hour or two, but the wakeness border was fuzzy at best. 

Anyway, I just kept trying to figure out what the hell was killing me so badly today. I mean I knew it was rooted in the recentness of the breakup, but I wanted to figure out exactly what it was. For the entire day before that, I figured it was just the vague matter of “well I just broke up with Michelle, of *course* I feel like shit”, but it was bad enough at this point (like 6 or 7pm) that my mind couldn’t settle on that.

I basically just attacked every thought I had as analytically and logically as possible, to the end of finding out something problematic in my mind related to the breakup in some way that could be resolved with some kind of awareness or action beyond letting time heal the wound. 

I eventually figured that it boiled down to the need I’ve had for as long as I can remember to be around someone, physically (not necessarily sexually). That need, over the course of my latter years, grew to be associated with a significant other. This, I believe, is because I’ve spent more time in school or doing schoolwork and less time with family or interacting with family as I’ve gotten older, especially since college and my abroad-summers began. 

Then I began wondering why I had that need at all. It always made sense that I had the need to be with someone romantically, and at that point I had figured out why I’ve always felt the need to be in a relationship with someone. Why, though, was that kind of relationship really necessary for me? We saw the significance of contact comfort in psych the other week, so I thought maybe that could be a legitimate reason, but I downright refused to believe that  I was weak-minded enough to be so thoroughly broken down by so primitive a desire. If you were to ask me about that specifically right now, I’d furthermore argue that I’d like to think my intelligence lends me to being complex enough that I wouldn’t break down over so primitive an issue. Regardless, I was able to bore past that and into something much deeper.

I think my need to be in a romantic class of relationship stems from an attribute really just characteristic of me, axiomatically. I was simply born with this attribute, and unfortunately it conflicts quite wildly with my instinctive social philosophy. The attribute is that sort of complex, but not very - I work harder, or at least try to achieve more than I think should be socially acceptable as “average”, and by a long shot. Go above and beyond - that’s something I basically grew up thinking I should do. To achieve that, though, I’ve learned through the years (recent years, particularly), that you have to rely on yourself above all others in order to really succeed so grandly. Reliance on other people is never something you can count on for certain, but you can always rely on yourself to do what you know you will do (it’s a little tautological, that last bit, but I think you get what I mean so I’ll leave that as it is). You really can’t *trust* people like that.

I went off on an important tangent at that stage. I thought to myself “but you *have* to trust people… at least to some degree, right?” I realized then that trust is the infinite limit of hope. It’s perfectly acceptable and even desirable to place hope in people. While we aren’t 100% reliable, neither are we 0% reliable. So it becomes a probabilistic problem. So the amount of hope you place in a person is directly related to the probability of you trusting them about something. Thus, the infinite limit of hope is the transformation of hope into trust - true personal certainty that something will occur, that someone will do something or be some way.

So if the entire affair boiled down to my turst in people, it boiled down to my hope in them, but more importantly I needed to define trust better. The whole reason I came to that definition of hope was because it was so airy and lofty a term that it was useless to me to think about it without precipitating a concrete definition out of its idea. For whatever reason, I quickly came to the conclusion that by “trust,” I simply meant “reliance.” If I place hope in a person, I am always specifically hoping that they will be reliable for something. I can hope a classmate will fulfill their end of a project, that a friend can drive me to the supermarket, that a professor will grade me fairly or a research advisor will be available to assist me for the day, etc etc blah blah blah. 

The same goes for trust, except that I only ever truly trust people in two groups: My family and my significant other. My trust in my family has been wavering over the past year or two, simply because I haven’t been around them a whole lot. One straight month in the winter, a cumulative week during the year, an additional straight week during spring break, and the two or three weeks enclosing summer. I basically see them between 10%-20% of my life, as of fall 2008. Anyway, this has caused me to put increasing amount of trust in my significant other, whoever she is at the time.

Back to that attribute of chronically trying too hard at life. It’s naturally an enormous stressor, to think I need to do so much (and none of this changes my opinion that I do need to do so much in/with my life), to rely on myself so constantly for something so heavy. It’s not something I can really stand, actually. And THIS, Samantha, THIS is why I am so prone to entering romantic relationships, and now that I think about it, it is EXACTLY why I am always so 110% in every romantic relationship I enter. I, being only human, and finding it to be acceptable to need to remove some of this self-reliance, ergo some of this feels-infinite stress, by finding someone to rely on. The deep, subconscious reason I ever enter a relationship is that I get to rely on someone. I don’t think anyone will argue that we enter relationships at least for partly selfish reasons, and hopefully also selfless reasons. My selfish reason is to find someone to rely on so that I may continue my work without going insane.

But I have my selfless reasons, too. It’s very simple: in return for reliance, I offer reliance. *My unconcious definition of a relationship is an exchange of mutual reliances*. And that’s really the bulk of what there is to my core self. I seek exchanges of reliances, preferably mutual in magnitudes, so that I can carry on with my work. But I do find intrinsic value in making people happy, even at the cost of personal convenience/necessities. Recently I’ve been trying to find a better balance in this because I’ve been behind in my work for the past half year. So yeah, that’s me - work, get help, fairly exchange help for help. Help being the reliance on someone to comfort, mostly, but it does generalize to mostly whatever other people need for themselves, too.

I could go off an irrelevant tangents here, but I won’t. I have thoroughly divided my overall problem into what I think to be very managable pieces, but there is a remainder that I cannot seem to break down. My problem is ultimately that I seek someone else to rely on, but this is in huge conflict with my social philosophy of relying only on myself. I cannot, for the life of me, determine which way is the “correct” way to go. It is far more logical to be 100% self-reliant, but this means only ever truly trusting in yourself, never trusting others. At best, just hoping in others with conscious reservations. However small those reservations may be, they would be non-zero. Am I then to go through life never trusting anyone? What’s the alternative? Well, I could go about relying on everyone, trusting everyone, but I would find myself sorely disappointed in life if I were to do that. People routinely fail, and I have long since accepted that fact. I judge no one for this with the possible exception of myself, and even then it is rare. But the fact remains that I’d be unhappy if I decided to trust people as routinely as the prove themselves untrustworthy.

It is cynical, this problem of mine, I fully admit that and am somewhat ashamed of it. I hate cynicism… and my own life has treated me to much more goodness than badness, so one would think I have no reason to think this way. It’s just that I’ve seen how jaded much of the world is, often enough justifiably… How do I trust a world that does not trust itself as a matter of how often it betrays itself?

Cynicism aside, maybe I should be seeking a middle-ground. It would be a cold, lonely life never trusting anyone. It would be a sad, heartbreakign life setting myself up for disappointment all the time. These are the extremes, and I only ever set up extremes when I seek a spectrum. But which side is *better*? *Is* one side better? Is it even okay to want to rely on people? Isn’t that a sign of my own weakness? Maybe I should hope in people but always be prepared in case they fail - but how is this any different from never trusting, at least the way I’ve set up the definitions? This returns me to the issue of never truly trusting in anyone. Mentally, I am driven to trust only in myself. Emotionally, I am driven to select some people and rely on them to the point of unfairness to all involved parties. Surely I must learn to support myself, stand on my own two feet. But I invariably fall sometimes.

And I guess that’s okay… to trust in only a select few, but mostly try to stand on your own. I feel in my heart that this is what is most right, and my mind is reluctantly growing towards agreement in this. But I then have two very real, very difficult problems. I have no one in South Jersey that I actually can hope in enough to call it trust. I’ve seen over the past couple of years that true trust is perhaps something that *could* have been fostered between myself and someone here, and I’m very close to it with a perhaps a couple of close friends, but my trust lies most greatly with those I’ve known far longer than these four years in college. With only a couple of months left before my closest friends graduate and a year left before I leave this town for bigger and better things, it seems impossible to forge anything real at this point.

The one solution would be to find a new significant other. But I routinely destroy my girlfriends. I rush into my relationships 110%, but when I find that she isn’t right for me after all, that I’m under too much duress from her, that I’m not getting what I need out of it, whatever - I drop the relationship cold. I rarely ever see a point in dragging things out (though I admit that despite my intellectual opinions, I can drag things out in executing the breakup - those things are fucking *painful*). I throw my trust not quite to whoever will take it, but once I find someone I feel extremely comfortable and compatible with, I latch and inject trust and evoke reciprocal passion and trust out of her. 

I am a piecewise exponential function. I skyrocket and plummet. It is difficult to ask me to go slowly. I either move with the greatest haste or the greatest sloth. I do now know how to take things slow with a girl. Perhaps this is something I am still in time to learn, but it doesn’t help me fulfill my needs, then. I need to trust in someone and be trusted, and I need it now. I need it later, too, but I also need it now. But doesn’t this mean I’m just not ready to be in a relationship? Probably… and I’ll probably be ready for a relationship once I learn the art of taking things slowly… But what do I do in the meanwhile?

I can lie here, an internally shaking mess with nothing sturdier than my cracking spine to lean on, or I can jump to another relationship that is destined to fail because I demand too much trust too quickly. I am too wont to seek huge quantities of trust without checking for the temporal integrity of it, both from my end and hers. I am two-fold doomed: I will be internally unstable until I srenghten up (but honestly I can’t see my internal strength growing much more than it already has over the past few years…) or find someone to exchange reliance, trust, with. I am an inherently bad (potential) boyfriend to anyone until I learn to stand on my own. My problems will not resolve until I simultaneously learn to stand on my own while leaning on someone to help me stand on my own so that that someone can lean on me. The very sentence is logically invalid. So I am stuck in this miserable state until some miracle happens.

And that is the state of my affairs, at present. My only solace is that I am aware of my problem inside-out, and at least know what sort of miracle I need. But it is indeed a miracle that I need…

Sorry for the super-grandoise tone. It helps me get my thoughts out better when I write like that, though.

At this particular point in my life, I’d say that maturity is all about playing it cool and actually believing what you play. When you can get over anything instantly - not by being cold or spiteful about it, but by having the most supreme understanding and acceptance of how life in the world works - you’re a mature person. When you not only can, but do take the advice you give, you’re mature. Thinking about the consequences of actions you’re about to make without dwelling in paranoia or agonizing indecisiveness - those are the thoughts of a mature person.

Really, when you realize that nothing is nearly as big of a deal as it seems, you’ve reached a new level of maturity. We love to make a big deal about things, purely as a matter of feeling alive and/or seeking attention. Some things are genuinely worth a large amount of attention, of course, but people will only agree on what the extreme cases are, usually. The dividing line, or even where and how quickly the spectrum events’ significance changes with respect to the events in question, is something we all tend to determine for ourselves. 

Note: I don’t really know how clear that last line was. As a math major, it’s really much more natural for me to say it this way (the preceding was a poor translation from math to English, for the record): The locus of the dividing line, or even the shape of the derivative of the significance vs event function, is something we all tend to determine for ourselves.

I know my description and even idea of it is at least partially flawed. This is the best I’ve presently got, though, especially considering I’m at work (needed to get this out but haven’t the time to consider the question with any further rigor today). One of my personal goals in life is to be among the most mature people I personally know (if not to be the most mature person I know). Pardon the relativity of the definition, but I do feel I know enough people that I get some hint of statistics on my side (big enough population makes for a more and more perfect pool blah blah).

But what about you - what do you think maturity is all about?

Reach for my hand

Touch my heart

Grab it tight

Keep it warm

Hold it tight

Pump my blood

I’ll do it all for you, too