Entry for March 17, 2007

"Sorette owatteru yo."

That is so over.

Several months ago, my friend O and I fixed up one of my co-workers with one of the secretaries in her department. The secretary had caught glimpses of my co-worker and had developed a crush on him and confided in O. I'd heard at the time that K used to have a girlfriend who was strangely clingy, insecure, and somewhat, um, unstable. O asked me if I had K's e-mail address, I forwarded the addy to O, and the next thing I knew O told me Secretary and K had met each others' parents.

That was several months ago. A couple days ago, I got a call from O saying that K had been pulling some seriously weird stuff on Secretary. Stuff like contacting his old girlfriend and then lying about it. Stuff like being very cold and cruel one day, warm and sweet the next, and then not returning calls for days on end. Stuff like saying he wanted to marry her, and then saying he couldn't marry her because his parents didn't approve, but that he still loved her so they didn't have to break up if she didn't want to. Secretary was so upset by all this, she got depression and went on medication.

If there ever was a sign that a relationship was over, having to go on antidepressants is probably one. (I don't mean to say that being on antidepressants disqualifies you from having a relationship. What I mean is that if the relationship makes you so unhappy that you end up needing antidepressants that you weren't on before, he/ she is probably not right for you.)

I used to have a boyfriend who described all his old girlfriends as "insecure psycho-women". Like K, he was good looking. And like K, he was one for mixed messages and infidelity and stringing along (Btw, another sign that the relationship is over: you are getting relationship tips from a book titled "Rules for being a Mistress"). After having had a very bad relationship with him, I see now that he turned his girlfriends (including me) into psycho-women.

My relationship with K is purely professional. Some co-workers I consider my friends and do stuff with them outside work. K is not one of them. K as a co-worker is easy enough to work with. He certainly is a hottie. I never would have guessed he was the sort to hurt someone by sending confusingly mixed messages, but I understand that what I am hearing is quite probably true. I understand that his old girlfriend might have been less clingy, less insecure, and more stable before she started seeing K.

So some people just do this, and K is not the only one. I don't know why they do the things they do. Maybe it's the only way they know how to keep drawing attention to themselves once the relationship has moved beyond physical beauty. Or something. I don't know. But they do, and it hurts, and it's all right to protect yourself from getting hurt.

One good thing about having survived a seriously dysfunctional relationship is knowing how nice it is to be in a functional relationship. So, thank you, psycho-women generating boyfriend, for driving home how lucky I am to have the Pumpkin Daddy (and the Pumpkin Princess, too!)

So sad for Secretary, though. Since she's depressed, part of the disease is that you can't bring yourself to make decisions, so she probably can't make the decision to end the relationship. It isn't my place to say anything to K because, well, I hardly know Secretary, not to mention their relationship is none of my business, and it isn't O's place to say anything to K because, well, see above (but replace first person personal pronous with "O", "Secretary" with "K", and conjugate verbs appropriately). If Secretary can't decide to get away from K because she is depressed, and he is going to string her along because that's just the way he is, what's going to become of her?