I was in attendance at Sofi Stadium in Inglewood CA on January 9th, 2023, when the University of Georgia beat the piss out of Texas Christian University (otherwise known as TCU) in the National Championship. The final score was 65-7 — the biggest blowout by margin of victory in the history of college football title games. That last part shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, because it’s really fucking hard to earn the right to play in the National Championship game, and thus it’s really fucking hard to be that good and lose by 58 points.
After the game I ended up going to a strip club in Redlands CA, closer to where I lived, and that happened to be the night I met a dancer I eventually ended up dating for a few months. Her stage name was Cat; her government name was Caitlyn. She was about 5’1″ tall and had these really beautiful legs and an incredible tushy. Everything about her was so tight, and compact, and she was quite adept (even among stripper standards) at making conversation.
I was taken by her immediately, but also I was in love with a girl at that time. More specifically I was in love with a girl who didn’t love me back, or at least not in the way I wanted her to love me. I got trashed that particular night so I didn’t remember getting Caitlyn’s phone number, though apparently I did because I saw her again at the club some handful of months later — while I was going through a depression stemming from the girl who didn’t love me back — and when I asked Caitlyn for her number she told me I already had it.
Long story short, Caitlyn was in a polyamorous relationship and so she did indeed have a boyfriend when her and I started dating. But it was cool, you know, because she was poly. I obviously didn’t know anything about that lifestyle. I just knew when the two of us began seeing one another it was a really gentle almost like innocent sort of exercise. We hiked and went shopping and got lunch and shit. I’m pretty sure we ended up sleeping together the first time we hung out, but it was also one of those things that just, like, happened, and wasn’t orchestrated or preordained on either end.
I was in the rut of my professional life in May, 2023, having been in the casino industry for the better part of a decade without ever having taken more than three or four days off consecutively. I requested the big boss for a week-long leave of absence and was granted a full two, and it was then that Caitlyn and I basically spent every day together. I must’ve slept over at her town house in Loma Linda CA for like ten of those days, and every morning and afternoon (or whenever it was we woke up) we would find things to do. That’s probably what I remember most about her, was that she was very active. We went to Los Angeles together and Pomona and Rancho Cucamonga and it was just so regular and natural in the way that I didn’t even have to think about it.
She was an amazing distraction, in other words. We were always out and about, and when we weren’t out and about we were watching shows together and having sex and going outside and smoking weed and having really lively really stimulating conversations. She filled an important role in my life, because she was there for me when I needed someone to be there for me.
There’s no doubt my memory of her became tainted, or like cheapened, because things got pretty nasty between us towards the end, which was due to myriad factors. We fought all the time. There was a clear age difference — both in terms of literal age (because she was 22 and I was 33) and in the ways we each dealt with conflict resolution — and it became a situation where all the little fractures in our relationship turned into a wedge that couldn’t be overcome.
Ironically one of the things she liked about me was that I was a writer, which even inspired her to do some blogging of her own, and yet it was her reading about herself on my blog that pissed her off to the point where she blocked me across all platforms.
Anyway, the reason I write about her now is because her and I were talking one afternoon outside of a Korean BBQ place and I had this epiphanic realization about her — basically just so I could tell her how great I thought she was. There I was: sad and stewing over another girl who didn’t love me, and all the while I had Caitlyn, right there in front of me, who chose to spend time with me, who enjoyed spending time with me, and who, as I admitted to her in that specific parking lot in Fontana CA outside the Korean restaurant, ‘makes me feel like a champion.’
I think that’s why, even in spite of the grievances she holds against me, which mainly revolve around me speaking my truth about her on my blog, I don’t actually have anything bad to say about her. I really liked her, in fact. It’s clear and obvious that it didn’t and wouldn’t have worked between us. But that’s an entirely separate issue from how I feel about her as a person, even in retrospect. Even after all the out-of-pocket ad-hominem attacks she levied against me when she was upset.
The moral to my story is similar to most. It’s that I’m good at attracting women with whom I see no future, and have a poor track record at retaining those whom I deem special. The nature of human beings tends to work out that way. When I don’t care — or at least care enough — the opposite sex seems to embrace me. When I do care — or care too much — I run the risk of pressing, to the degree that they can almost smell the desperation on me. And no one ever likes that smell.
Before I knew anything about anything and was unable to catch a single fish (in a manner of speaking), it bothered me as I stood on the proverbial sidelines that the same guys were always in the mix with the same attractive girls. I had certain feelings and impressions about myself, the kinds that told me I was smarter than this person and that, or that I was more handsome than this person and that, and so it never made sense why they were the consistent winners and I was left without any real prospects.
The secret, generally speaking, was that most of them already had something, and so they didn’t need anything, and it’s when you don’t need anything that everything seems to come. It’s always better to look for a better job when you already have one, in other words. And since I didn’t have one, it was harder for me to get one.
What was funny, in a tragic sort of way, is that when I did inevitably ascertain my first real girlfriend I was so pot committed to her that I pressed and wreaked of desperation, anyway, because I was punching so far out of my weight class and was constantly afraid of losing her. Without perspective on relationships, or the very legitimate uppercased version of Love, in general, I broke just about every Good Boyfriend rule in the book. After I got broken up with about a year later, I was more or less back at square one insofar as female prospects were concerned.
In cliché fashion I vowed both never to act that way again, and never again to feel that way about another person. I was 19 years old. It was a time for reflection and growth, and drugs, and depression — the tumultuous cocktail that laid the foundation for my adult life. It was equal parts the worst I have ever felt and the most important learning process I have ever been through. I don’t miss it, and yet it’s undeniable that I needed it to get where I was going.
For the next handful of years my relationship history became very spotty. On the one hand there were numerous women who entered into my life, but none of them posed a credible threat of hurting my feelings because I was only passing the time aimlessly and didn’t know what I was doing or why I was doing it. It wasn’t even like I was sleeping with most (or even the majority) of them — probably because that was all I wanted to do. Whatever so-called game I thought I had clearly was not a thing.
It wasn’t until I graduated to my mid-to-late 20’s that the world sort of opened itself up to me, because that’s when I stopped stressing about it. Girls, sex, etc. I don’t know when or where my mindset changed, exactly, but I imagine it arrived out of trying to do everything opposite of what I’d been doing before. Always I pictured myself being more observant than most, but I never truly practiced putting any of my observations to good use.
An example that kind of illustrates what I mean was the difference in my behavior at strip clubs. As a young man (who literally lived down the street from one) I was one of those who did what one does at establishments such as those: I talked to the girls when they approached me, I got drunk, I got dances, and I spent a lot of money. And somewhere in my head, by doing all of these things, I turned into a sucker who genuinely believed the girls liked me.
Having been enough times over the years, however, I began to understand how goddamn lame I was for thinking that way, and how goddamn lame most of the guys are who show up. So, instead, I would just sit at the bar and drink. I was so confident in doing nothing that I would pay the girls a $20 bill to leave me alone, because I told them I don’t do dances and that I didn’t want to keep them from making money off the other suckers. I think they appreciated that.
By the time Cat (er, Caitlyn) came into my life I felt like I already had all the leverage. By refusing dances, and sort of just stating my intentions, it ironically made the other girls — including her — want to talk to me more, even without the prospect of making money off me. It was a bizarre exercise in opposite land, but it’s also a microcosm for how I began to operate in everyday life. I quit going into every situation with hopes or expectations of simply having sex, or thinking everyone just wanted me all the time because I’m just so fucking great.
The returns from this change have been bountiful, to the extent that it’s almost annoying. I wouldn’t say it’s like what Meek Mill said on Dreams and Nightmares that ‘I used to pray for times like these,’ but it’s pretty damn close. Post-age-19 the child within me only ever wanted to be noticed, commensurate to how I felt about myself internally, and yet now, as a 35 year-old, all I want is to have one person to dedicate all of my affection. Many men want what I have, and I want only the boring life that so many of them have.
What I find so backwards is how easy everything seems to be when I don’t give a shit, and how I become an entirely different person when I do. Further, I don’t even like the person I am when I care. I don’t like feeling insecure. I don’t like the stress of not knowing if I am enough, or if it’s going to work out how I want it to. I don’t like being vulnerable. I don’t like putting my heart in any sort of jeopardy.
And yet the reason Caitlyn’s name is currently flashing through my head like neon lights at a seedy local institution is because I find a very real parallel between that specific era of my life and the reality I’m stuck in now. Which is to say: I have as many as a handful of options I don’t particularly care about — at least not like that — and yet my heart and my focus is reserved for someone who I doubt it’s going to work out with. I keep clinging to faith (i.e. nothing), because that seems to be all I have left to hang on to.
There are a couple things to be said about that. The first is the most obvious — the fact that if pretty much all of my current stresses revolve around one single entity, and an individual person, at that, then my life is in solid shape. Naturally as a selfish person I want and/or expect everything to work out in my favor all the time. But with the randomness of life, and not everyone being on the same timelines, I should be more aware than I choose to be that I can’t have it all.
The second thing to be said, pursuant to how I turn into a totally different person when I am in love with somebody, is that I truly believe even the most overwhelming odds against me can be overcome. Without any reassurance from the other side I play all manner of games in my head, making all sorts of excuses, while twisting my brain into a pretzel, to find a reasonable path to my dreams coming true. It’s the way a child believes in the Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus.
In the meantime it is in fact the extremely unromantic blunt-force reality I often exude that so many woman — those whom I am unable to reciprocate the feelings they have for me — love about me. They love that I say things few others do, because I happen to believe in things through a narrow un-superstitious logic-based scientific-method-tried window. Everything flows through that prism, and the amount of people who see the world that way continues to dwindle, making me more of a rarity than I ought to be.
So in a way I am living as two halves: The cold world that is so easy to see when I am dispassionate towards others, versus the irrational needle-in-a-haystack belief system I follow wherever love is involved. As you can see, I like one version of myself substantially more than the other. One version brings out the best in me; the other brings out the worst.
But all hope is not lost. Honestly I have never loved somebody like this before. I have never been in love with a woman who has kids. I have never been in love with a woman who is taller than me. Never have I been big on having a so-called type — I am, after all, an equal opportunity lover — but she clearly falls outside most of my track record. And maybe that’s part of the ostensible allure.
In a way it almost, like, reinforces my feelings. It shows that this ain’t no joke, what I desire. Although it isn’t normally my style to be direct about my feelings and intentions — because I have always been so much better at speaking in riddles and talking in circles to obtain what I want — I have been with Her. I have left no room whatsoever for any mysteries.
Naturally my history with relationships, even those that never got far enough to have the official label, have been littered with irony. The kind where my greatest strengths turned into my greatest weaknesses. My first love (the original Caitlin) really liked the fact that I was so inexperienced and that I was a virgin when she met me, but it was that same inexperience with girls and relationships that became my undoing. My second love, the late Niña, met me when I was at the peak of my flirtatious playboy image, and yet over time she could never, like, unsee it, and thus she regularly thought I was cheating on her. And I’ve already gone over the irony with the second Caitlyn (see: above).
I don’t know if I would exactly classify the downfall of this current love interest of mine as ironic, mainly because it isn’t over. There is still some glimmer of hope for me. If it is inevitably to be ironic, however, the story would probably read that she loved me before I was ready to be loved. That she loved me more than I loved her. And now, here, more than a year later, after sobriety got my head on straight, and I saw her more clearly, and I saw myself more honestly, and clearly, it seems a helluva lot more like I love her more than she does me.
Just as I play the games with myself, in my head, to rationalize why it logically makes sense for me to keep going, and believing that this will all work out, such that the two of us will live happily ever after, by the time it’s made clear that it’s over I’ll have to start the process of playing the games in reverse. I’ll have to tell myself that it never made sense with her. I’ll have to tell myself that I never wanted a partner who has kids. Or that she didn’t make me feel as strongly as I do. I’ll be forced to tell myself all sorts of things that help me sleep at night.
For now, I will continue to be a slave to the side of myself that I hate. The one who actually stresses and feels insecure about himself. The one who worries about how he’s being received, and wonders in idle confusion if he’s being delusional. The one who knows who he is, and what he has to offer, but who can’t seem to put together the right action, or perfect combination of words, to make them see what I see. It is an incredibly frustrating way to go about life.
Especially when the other half that represents me is just itching not to care anymore. He always just wants to turn the page, and convince himself that he doesn’t need anybody else. That he never did. He wants everything to be easy again, so easy that women by the handfuls won’t be able to help themselves from coming into his orbit. He wants life to be that way, forever, which is how it will be… until the moment comes when he has no choice but to care once more.
Future Bets 
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