No One Is To Blame

During some debate, Joe Biden once said something about how you can question a man's actions, but you should never question his motives.

This spoke to me, and I still go back to it again and again. Not just in general, but especially in my current situation.

I just need to be really clear: There are no villains here.

What we have are two people who made decisions that ended up hurting one, and perhaps both, in deep ways. People who thought they knew what they were doing, who went into a relationship with an outline of how it was supposed to progress but ended up, as we all do anyway, making it up as we went along.

I thought I was the girl who couldn't be got, the Chupacabra of every married man's fantasy -- the girl who could be had without being had. I subscribed to Chris Rock's notion that the only thing that keeps men faithful in their marriages is opportunity. (Okay, I still do subscribe to that notion, for 99.9% of men. I just happened to meet and fall in love with one of those 0.1% guys)

I don't know what his deepest motives were, and I never will. He did tell me the most blatant -- that he thought his marriage was over and that he was ready for an affair. So why pick the girl-formerly-known-as Jane and not someone nearer at hand? Who knows? Maybe because I had been so open about things on my blog and he thought, here is a girl who will walk me into this new phase of my life and she will come out unscathed? Maybe because there was something gettable about me? Maybe because he didn't know me at all before we met and the strangers-passing-in-the-night-with-no-hard-feelings had some sort of romantic appeal.  Maybe he just liked how I wrote and that made him want to fuck me.

The point is, I am not privy to that information and never will be.

So I can't write his larger motivations for getting into it, or for getting out of it. You have to take some things at face value, don't you? You can wish a single had Ben Franklin's face on it, but don't try to buy dinner with it.

Women, being women, have some reflexive need to try to find reasons for things happening. And, oh boy, will they go off on wild flights of fancy to do this. They will make up stories out of whole cloth to explain away the end of a relationship without even realizing they are doing it.  When they've constructed a satisfying narrative to palliate their insecurities and fears and ignorance, then they feel safe walking away from a hurtful relationship.  (This explains all that bullshit they do about "Maybe he got scaaaaared." God, I hate when chicks do this. You women give the rest of us a bad name sometimes. Me? I've always believed in the "he's just not that into you," explanation. I just wasn't smart enough to parlay it into a bazillion-selling book and a TV talk show like Greg Behrendt did.)
 
I'll be the first to admit I  do this, too, but my instinctive reason, my go-to choice in self-hatred is, "It must be because I wasn't pretty enough."
 
It frankly bugs the shit out of me when people say, "Everything happens for a reason."  You know what? NO...it doesn't.  Most times, things just happen. The universe isn't out there constructing some fairy tale for you out of events and people.  The universe isn't personal, folks.  Sorry to break that to you.
 
So, for me, things happened.  I got hurt. This doesn't mean I am a good person, and he is a bad person. In fact, when people feel the need to ascribe shit to him in order to bolster their idea of who I am, that's when I take a step backward and say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on there. I then have to remind them:  Hey, do you think I would choose an ASSHOLE to fall in love with?  Do you know me at all?
 
Neither of us did the right thing.
 
Neither of us did the wrong thing.
 
We were both right, and we were both wrong.
 
We did human things, and we have to forgive ourselves and each other.