Reflections of a born-again optimist

"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency to not only see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential man, rather than with the man himself, and then I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance, I have been a victim of my own optimism."

- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love


I have been a life-long optimist and damn proud. Not just in matters of the heart but life in general- though this positive outlook hasn’t always brought fireworks to my life, especially my romantic life. I have a tendency to fall hard and fast. And that is precisely what happened with Riley. It was like one day this boy was my fun drunken hookup and the next day, he had become someone I could see myself in a relationship with. There was no gradual transition period over which this transformation occurred. I think the combination of my optimism and my deep inherent inclination to trust people sparked my abrupt change of heart over Riley and his role in my life.

So it all started during winter break 2008. There was beer, there was wine, there was vodka, rum, and gin. And I’m pretty sure I did it all. Needless to say, I was drunk. Too drunk for my own good. My attempt to elaborate on this night that really defined my transition into officially morally sketchy grounds with Riley is going to be a failure as I have critical chunks of my memory from that night missing. Suffice it to say, we ended up back at my apartment and in bed. According to reports from my trusted friends like Bitesized, there was a lot of making out on the dance floor despite several attempts at intervention. Apparently, I am quite a strong-willed drunk.

Over the next year, the hooking up continued most instances when Riley was home from his law school endeavors. While I still believe that casual hooking up doesn’t operate the same way for girls and boys, there were additional forces at play here in my situation with Riley. It wasn’t just hooking up and the subsequent oxytocin that fucked with me. For your information, oxytocin is known as a love hormone because while it evolved to enhance the mother-child connection, it goes beyond it to intensify bonding in intimate relationships. Oxytocin is released to a greater extent in the female brain during physical intimacy that creates a desire for the woman to bond with whomever she is having an intimate relationship with. Basically, this translates into: if you are a chick and you hook up with even the biggest loser in the bar enough times, you’ll form an attachment and it all goes downhill from there. But don’t get me wrong- I am certainly not classifying Riley as “the biggest loser in the bar” ha. My point here is that generally speaking, casual hook-ups do not work out well for us girls and it’s all thanks to the evolutionary forces that made oxytocin such a fucking powerful hormone. Anyway, like I said earlier, I don’t actually think it was just the oxytocin that was responsible for my predicament with Riley. It was part of it for sure but the other part was his incredibly astute ability to say all the right things at all the right times. Riley is of the category of guys I would classify as “charmers”- he’s a talker. He’s the guy who can talk and charm his way into anything and out of any situation. Your grandmother will love him and your friends will be jealous. While I certainly cannot recall all our drunken conversations, I do remember that they were essentially what my friends and I term a two-way “drunken emotional faucet.” It boiled down to him and I expressing our mutual attraction for and liking of each other and the prospects of a real relationship between us. In hindsight, I realize that he was not completely full of shit but mostly. I don’t think he meant to lie to my face. Maybe in the moment, he thought he actually felt those things. Maybe not. I’ll never know. But you know what? I don’t think I fully meant half the things I said to him either. Moral of the story? Alcohol will do wonders! Haha, just kidding. Real moral of the story? Judge guys based on their actions and not their words. Talk is cheap. However, in my naïve optimistic and trusting mind, I believed and ate up everything Riley said to me. I actually believed that he and I could have a real relationship with trust and honesty and without vodka and pinot noir.

The funny thing about reexamining the past is that you always learn something new. I’m finally able to write this last entry about Riley because after my last escapade with him on NYE 2010, I certainly do not find myself in a better place with respect to my mentality on boys and relationships, but I do believe I see things clearer with regards to Riley.

On the eve of 2010, I hadn’t seen Riley since the summer and I thought I had rid my system of him. My life felt under control. My apartment was clean, my mom and I were at peace with each other, I finally managed to schedule this conference call for work that had been the bane of my existence for the past 2 weeks and I had even managed to fit in a 5 mile run that morning. I changed into a cute outfit to ring in the new year and was pysched to booze and schmooze with some of my favorites. Life, around 7 pm on NYE, was pretty damn fabulous. Now, flash forward several hours to New Years morning. I woke up next to him hungover, topless, and missing a few crucial memories from the previous night — namely, how the EFF I managed to break the one and only goddamn resolution I forced myself to make. Despite not remembering how I ended up with only one of my own shoes and one large male white sneaker and one large male loafer (a whole other story), I do remember that Riley and I again had one of those emotional faucets. However, this time the central message revolved around me declaring (perhaps somewhat misleadingly) that I was very clear that he and I would only ever be hook-up buddies and nothing more. That I didn’t even want anything more than that from him. This declaration was triggered by his attempts at proclaiming to me that I hadn’t just been some sexual object he used. In any case, here I am finally having freed myself from that delusional oxytocin-induced romantic attachment I had developed for Riley. Or maybe not? I would like to think that our relationship has returned to phase 1 where he is just a fun drunken hook-up for me.

But I know this is not entirely true. Probably not even mostly true. I think what’s really going on is that for the past few months, I’ve been convincing myself that relationships are the precise opposite of great. Instead, they are emotionally precarious, troublesome and unnecessary. Perhaps I am just clinging onto my independence for fear that I will lose some part of myself in the process of falling for someone else. Maybe I simply don’t know how to respond to someone who might actually exceed the expectations I’ve habitually lowered in light of my failed romantic endeavors. Maybe I’m not willing to run the risk of abandonment. But though I’ve been afraid for weeks to make this concession, I must say: by and large, love is worth it. Love didn’t use to terrify me. In fact, I was (and to some extent, still am) optimistic that love is just around the corner for me. Because unlike learning to swim in the kiddie pool, love is like learning to swim in the ocean. Once you’re far out, there are no lifeguards or railings, and more often than not, your final destination is not forward but back from where you came. For the girl who used to throw herself headfirst into the water without hesitation, it seems like I’ve taken one too many steps away from the sand to remember that the view is worth it, that drowning is more fear than real possibility, that even those who never properly learned how to swim — or who have long forgotten — are capable of staying afloat.

So while I almost drown out there, I believe that my experiences with Riley have made me wiser. While, I am not at all optimistic about him and I developing anything resembling a functional relationship and I’m not sure I would even want to, I am optimistic that he and I will remain friends through the storm and that I will come out of it with my optimism intact.