The Heart Wants, What the Heart Wants

I saw a show on Netflix about strippers in London. Little more documentary than salacious, but yeah there was an element of crazy train wreck girls half-naked. Anyway, there was this one beautiful Ukrainian girl who hid from the cameras for the first two episodes. Ep 3 they get her to open up a little.

She explained she was there until she had enough to go to nursing school back in her country. Normally that’s bullshit, but she was pretty convincing. Zero sense of humor. She mentions she used to work in Athens Greece but had to leave. “Had to leave”?

She explained…..

“Yes, I fell in love with a customer” She looks down at her feet for a moment then raises back up and says (with shame)

“The heart wants what the heart wants”.

She said those words with so much anguish and pain I stopped watching the series and never finished it.

Ever fall for the wrong person? Too young, too old, too drunk, not drunk enough, too ugly, too conceded? Someone you knew was a mistake going in and you did it anyway?

For women, he is usually the guy who gets them to rob a bank, carry a kilo of coke in their duffle bag from Venezuela, or turn tricks to support his meth habit. But those are obvious. I’m talking about the often out-of-work auto mechanic who is a “good guy”, but works 28 weeks a year (coincidentally, he’s also 28) and you are getting your masters in macro biology. In 3 years you’ll be making $76k a year and he’ll be making $28k (excluding the weed money he sells on the side). It’s ok for women to make more but his trajectory is what it is and you know having kids with him is a giant mistake. Also, “I’m sure he’ll slow down” or “my love will fix him” thing is part of it.

For men, it’s different. We are supposed to make more so the small stuff isn’t that big a deal and because you adjust as a family. She will take care of the baby, society is cool with it. For us, it's reversed. The marginal ones aren’t the problem. It’s the dumpster fires that kill us. The, ‘she lies about everything and is so full of self loath she cuts herself at least twice a week’ girl or the 10 years younger girl who keeps coming home out of her mind on X or worse, doesn’t come home. They will either “grow out of it” or you’ll “fix them”.

Spoiler, no one fixes anyone. Let that shit go right now.

Back to me…

I met a much (much. much — fuck you don’t judge) younger woman and we hooked up. The circumstances were such that we both knew it was pretty meaningless. We go our separate ways and a day later we ended up together again. And it was fun, but this time we peeled back the onion a little and things got deeper. During this 2nd event, she asked me for help with something.

At this point I’d watched this young woman drink a bottle of Jamieson in 2 days, smoke enough weed to keep an NBA team happy and neither of those was the “problem”. She was a good and very sympathetic person and I was inclined to help, but I pulled way back physically. That made no sense in this situation as she was going to stay with me for a week or so and I knew anything physical was absolutely not a good idea.

We quickly get a better hold on her drinking and (I don’t smoke anything, ever and don’t drink as I used to) she’s in the weed industry so that was just going to happen. I made her smoke outside and I adjusted a little.

Then we hooked up once, then we did again, then Saturday night happened.

Saturday we spent a lot of time looking into each other’s eyes and a MASSIVE age difference started to vanish. Then she started singing and she had a great voice, but more importantly, she sang songs from 30 years before I was born. She knew Sinatra songs that no 24 years old knew existed. Then… then she stumbled across a song no one reading this has ever heard. From the ’40s that I loved. Not only did she know the song, she knew the words, and without having any idea of my love for the song she stood me up and sang it to me starring into my eyes.

I’m not mushy. In fact, I don’t really have a problem being called an asshole because I am. I can pretend to be romantic but I don’t feel it. And I don’t care to. However, that night will be one of my most fond memories on my deathbed. I married someone who I never had a moment as soul-touching as that moment with. Whether love is just a series of endorphins popping off in a certain sequence or a deeply emotional reaction no one will ever understand exactly…..that is what I was caught in.

To recap: I am in love with a drunken trainwreck half my age with suicidal tendencies who a week earlier I consciously established a rule not to touch. How could this not work?

During this time we made considerable strides towards the goals she asks for assistance with. She was embracing difficult life changes and I can’t think of a change I would have wanted her to make. Then we had a small fight.

Until this point, I had no delusions that this could possibly work long term. I knew the realities and was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The fight gave me a license to send her to visit her parents for a week. We planned it anyway but I sorta just did it. She didn’t take that well. No, she took it too well.

I assumed her progress was temporary. That once she had new kinetic energy introduced she’d revert. The opposite happened. She was resolute, committed, and longing to be with me. I couldn’t get her back fast enough. I was absolutely in love. My days were filled with things I could do for her, with her and coming out of my skin with anticipation.

She got back and things were perfect for about a week. Then they started to not be.

She started to pick fights with me and would be generally unreasonable. It started slowly but like everything with her and me, it picked up speed very quickly. Until she demanded she go back home. I made arrangements then watched her set fire to everything she had convinced me she wanted in a 3 day period. To the point of absolute unrecoverability. All the while gaslighting the fuck out of me and blaming it on everything but her. And it broke my heart.

If you haven’t seen SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION you have to. Great movie and perhaps the best script ever written. The lead character, after years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, has a monologue that has two memorable lines within it.

“I’m a hard man to love”

and

“I’ve paid for whatever crimes I’ve committed and then some, at a certain point you have to get busy living or get busy dying”.

I am a difficult person. No one I know will dispute that. For two weeks after this burst into flames, I was consumed by my culpability. Not really blaming myself as much as not understanding how or why she nuked this. After 10 days I emailed her and broke it down. We argued and then she fell into a “I need you” place. Because I’m an idiot with little to no regard for myself I was still willing to help her but I was done romantically. Don’t get me wrong, I was head over heels in love, but she did something that ended it and I wouldn’t go back. And she knew it. But acted like she didn’t.

This went on for a couple of days until she called me drunk one night and during that conversation, she explained what I had been incapable of putting my finger on for 3 months.

“I’m a narcissist, and you should block me and never look back.”

Do you know the parable about the frog and scorpion?

The scorpion asked the frog to take it across the river, the frog says “no” you’ll sting me. The scorpion says he won’t so the frog takes the scorpion across the river. Halfway across the scorpion stings the frog in an act that will kill them both. The frog asks why and with his dying breath, the scorpion says casually,

“Because it’s my nature”.

That is how she presented her need to destroy everything. And to be honest, I knew it going in. It’s my fault for carrying her across the river.

Within an hour I took her advice. For all my wisdom and control I possessed, love made me myopic and incapable of seeing the obvious.

Never forget, nothing burns hotter or brighter than a trash fire covered in gasoline. Although it’s pretty, it’ll kill you if you touch it.