How this seemed reasonable to me at the time is beyond me, but I remained patient, and though I didn’t see a lot of him, I assumed that he was working out his issues with her. Apparently, he hadn’t gotten around to telling her that he was breaking up because she was so emotionally fragile and he feared that she would relapse. It became clear to me that he had not taken care of business when she called me.

I distanced myself from him although the attraction never went away. He called me one day after his girlfriend disappeared, saying that he feared that she was in a crack house in a nearby city and asked me to help him, saying that he knew how God answered my prayers and would I help him search? I did, much against my will, because I secretly hoped in a delusional way that he would be thoroughly done with her and would turn over a new leaf himself. As I prayed while we drove around the neighborhood where she was thought to hiding, I asked God to help us find the needle in the haystack. I told him to turn down the alley, and there was her vehicle, parked behind a crack house. He went in after her, asked me if he could borrow money to put gas in her vehicle and I went home, glad to be out of that mess. So long, farewell, thanks, see ya.

Months later, the law caught up with him when they got into an argument and he was arrested for felony assault. He called and asked me to visit him in jail and trusted me to bring him his personal items from his apartment, his girlfriend long gone in her addiction. He also asked me to wait for him three years until he was released from prison. I declined, saying that I had myself and my children to look after. The upside of this story is that he took responsiblility for hurting me when he got clean and sober several years later, and I got a lot smarter. Now I’m deconstructing the walls that I’ve built and learning how to attract emotionally available men and I can laugh at the craziness. Thank you, Marni!

However, I have one example I can think of from back when I was in college. I had actually started dating a guy who was already in a 3 year relationship. Bad idea, I know…but I was young and naive and believed him when he told me that he was going to break-up with her any day now. Well when it came down to the day he was actually planning on doing it (a about a month or two later), he went over to his gf’s dorm room and told her that he had been cheating on her and he wanted to end things with her and be with me instead. Well she apparently got SO upset that she cried and screamed and followed him back across campus in her bare feet in the middle of a thunderstorm and she told him that if he broke up with her it would be too painful for her so she would have no choice but to drop out of school and move back home to get away from him. Well after their conversation, he came to see me and told me that he was really sorry and I was the one he really wanted to be with but being accepted into this school was his gf’s lifelong dream and he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he let her drop out because of him. So even though he claimed he didn’t want to, he said he was going to stay with her JUST so that she would stay at our university and then he wouldn’t feel guilty about her giving up her dream because of him. (what??!?!)

I never knew if he was lying to me about the whole story or if he was just too weak to actually follow through with breaking up with her but either way, I learned a very important lesson that day about the kind of person he really was AND about what happens when you give someone permission to keep you in second place.