Difficult

I have this strange habit of staying friends with my ex's. CB can't understand it, although he's not too bothered by it. There are likely a million boring emotional reasons behind it. I'm sure a psychologist somewhere would have a field day unravelling it. Fact is, they hold a piece of my life in a capsule. The years I spent with each of them make up who I am today. With the exception of one who I am not really friends with, but am friendly toward when I run into him, they all treated me well and are good people. We just didn't make a good couple.

So during a particularly tough period in my life about five years ago, I was having a conversation with one of them. Let's call him LA Boy. I was dating, actually living with, Nature Boy at the time. We were really struggling and NB had explained to me that he loved me very much, despite the fact that I was very hard to love. So the following week in an IM convo with LA Boy (this is also the benefit of having ex's as friends, you can vet things with them that no one else knows about you) I posed the million dollar question, LA-Am I difficult to love? Was it a struggle for you to be in love with me? Oh the naivete of youth, I can't believe I even asked him that. LA Boy was shallow, is shallow. He lives in LA, it sorta comes with the territory. So naturally he replied, well, I don't know. Yeah, I guess. You aren't easy, that's for sure. You're definitely a challenge. I internalised this, marinated with it for awhile and then promptly left NB. I took a job in London and left my comfortable life behind in search of someone who didn't struggle to love me. Me. I realised at that very moment in time that if I had to ask the question, I needed to love myself a whole lot more before I could expect the same of another.

Fast Forward nearly 5 years, a lot of tears, a million smiles and more frequent flier miles then a Condor later and here we are. I did what I set out to do and I didn't let myself fall in love with another person until I felt safe in the knowledge that I could easily love myself. Now here I am ready to leap into what I see as a permanent step toward the end of my single life and well, I am freaking out a little. I have no reservations about the who this time. CB is amazing. He's everything I want; all things I didn't know I needed and then some. Quite simply I am afraid of failure. When I take those personality tests that Communications teams so often inflict, the one thing that appears constantly is that I will succeed in the face of opposition because my nature is to be anything but a failure. The tests also say I am Type A, overly sarcastic, hyper critical and rash; but who's counting? The thing is, I can't bear the thought of disappointing CB, but more then that, I can't bear the thought of disappointing myself. The Aries in me is screaming, DON'T SCREW THIS UP, so loud that I can hardly hear my poor little heart whispering, CB is a keeper GirlFriday, you can't screw it up.



Why can't I just be simple?