It’s taken me years to be selfish about my own time. I had been giving away my time like grains of sand — endless and unwanted. I was spending my time with men that didn’t appreciate me. All because my psycho mother convinced me that marriage was necessary to be a worthy human.

I was giving my time trying to make boyfriends happy, but they weren’t. I was giving endlessly and not getting back. Those were countless seconds, endless minutes, and piles of hours wasted for dipshits who just didn’t give a rat’s ass how much of myself I was wasting on them, all because my mother injected the idea that marriage was what I was supposed to do with my life. I wasn’t worth anything unless I was married.

During my dating years, men constantly cheated or returned to unhealthy women just because the woman made shows of absurd tantrums, citing endless love—when in reality they were all just insecure and trying to manipulate the situation so they weren’t rejected and alone. You’d think I was one of those sappy, sniveling girls who begs for a man’s attention. But I wasn’t. I was relatively independent. One friend would tell me almost too independent while another friend would tell me not independent enough. Either way I felt screwed. Too this, too that. Never quite perfect, but somehow still too perfect. And yet I prayed continuously for the dipshits to see my worth and reject the hoochies like the heroes in novels. How could they be so easily fooled by stupid, selfish women? Wouldn’t it all work out in the end? Don’t they know better? 

And the worst question of all:

Why bother being good at all if it never, every amounts to anything?

The man I asked that question to actually did return to an alcoholic bipolar cheater. How do I know she really was? She left a psycho message on my voicemail, confessing.

Men have proved to me over the years that they’re not worth the effort. Oh, believe me—my male friends are brilliant and I love them dearly. But men to date? I’ve found them all incredibly bitter disappointments, saying they were divorced when they weren’t. Saying they were getting divorced when they weren’t. Saying they weren’t alcoholics when clearly their police record revealed they were. Saying they were done with abusive women but returning to them. Cheating and blaming their impotence on me. The list was endless and quite laughable, if not horrifying. I was floored at the lack of integrity and honor. And yet I constantly forgave, forgave, forgave. For what? My best relationship even ended with an “I’ll destroy you,”  from my boyfriend, via email while I sat in horror reading it at my desk.

“Why don’t you try one of those dating sites?” a friend asked. Just hearing the question made me want to peel my skin off and singe my nerves with a white-hot poker. The mass majority of men that I came across on dating sites were an insufferable mass of liars, hell-bent on not being alone. They were loaded with fear and bouncing from girl to girl like their asses were made of rubber. I could barely hear the question without wanting to scream. It was bad enough that the men I dated were like that when I had discovered them organically without inserting myself willingly into the scenario.

I had absolutely no tolerance to even think about giving away more of my precious time to a single cell of dipshit anymore. The thought was repulsive. I had so much I wanted to do with my life and was putting it off. Grossly procrastinating while searching for a dimwit to share my life with. All the while assuming that when I found such dumbass, the fool would be able to help me run my life.

What a damn joke.

“You need a sex toy,” one of my guy friends said. We laughed. I told him a sex toy with old batteries would probably be more reliable than what I’m used to. “Let me pick it,” he added.

No man who I’ve dated has ever been able to help me with anything except maybe a flat tire. It’s not to say that men are stupid or useless — far from it. It’s just the fools I’ve been saddled with knew far less than I hoped for, especially considering that I’ve been taught from an early age to believe men had all the answers and I had absolutely none.

Do you suffer from this? Did your parents teach you that you’re too stupid to make your own decisions and that you need a male proxy to think?

It’s taken me 45 years to realize that the only person who really knows bum-kiss about my life is me. That’s damn right—me. I learned that, and I learned that I’ve been wasting precious gobs of time on people who had both no desire nor intellect to my life.

When the full blast of this realization finally hit me, I wanted to vomit. I will no longer be spending time wondering what man will “save” me from my life, nor even to help me make decisions. How absurd. I’ve watched fools make a mess of their own lives, the very last thing I’m going to do is let them control mine.

And with a vise-grip on that thought process, I’ve started forming my bucket list. It’s getting done faster than ever before because I have so much more free time to work on it.

xoxo
-1Yos