Ryan > Recent Status Updates

…if you try one hundred times and you score five times, that's five more times than if you didn't try. And Paul tried for something every day [..] Paul tried for a smile, a look back, an eyeful, a number, some illicit hallway kiss, a blowjob, a romance, a massage, a handjob, a finger up an ass, a free show, a licked lip, a passed note, a present, a surprise, something good, something better than the nothing he had.

Poets partied and fiction writers stayed home to work.

Restarting 😌

They seek The Person who will relieve the stress of the original abandonment experience. As adults, almost any other person will do: a lover, a parent, a friend, their own children, a counselor, a minister. If the other party isn't powerful, it doesn't matter. The Love Addict will invest this person with enough imaginary power and unconditional love to make the Love Addict whole and deliriously happy.

Not only is it irrational to expect unconditional positive regard from another person, it seems preposterous to expect a person who is trying to avoid intimacy to take care of us.

🤡🤡🤡🤡

Not only do Love Addicts have inaccurate beliefs about who their partner is, they feel angry because of their repeated disappointment in the partner for not behaving according to their expectation (which is of a Higher Power). Love Addicts begin to retaliate with toxic fighting against what they interpret as a willful failure to love on the part of the other party.

Eventually, as Love Addicts try harder and harder to manipulate the other person to live up to the mental image they have created […] they experience repeated disappointments, because no one can satisfy these insatiable desires. When the pain gets bad enough, Love Addicts may even decide to end the relationship, only to find that they can live neither with nor without their partners.

I’m throwing this book away

These two fears—of abandonment and intimacy-bring up the agonizing and self-defeating dilemma of the Love Addict. Love Addicts consciously want intimacy but can't tolerate healthy close-ness, so they must unconsciously choose a partner who cannot be intimate in a healthy way.

Coooooooollllll super cool

So in adulthood, while Love Addicts often think they are intimate and are seeking an intimate relationship, they are in fact frightened by offers of healthy intimacy because they don't know what to do. When they reach a certain level of closeness, they often panic and do something to create distance between themselves and their partners again.

😀right

Codependents with the core symptom of difficulty identifying who they are (their reality) and sharing appropriately cannot be intimate in a healthy way, since intimacy means sharing their reality. Without the sharing of healthy intimacy, codependents cannot check out their immature perceptions and they continue to have painful problems in their relationships with others.

The nervous laugh that erupted out of me

I suggest, therefore, that a person with an addiction is probably also a codependent; and conversely, a codependent most likely has one or more addictive or obsessive/compulsive processes. This secondary symptom, then, is the primary link between codependence and any other addiction—particularly love addiction.

Me smoking a cigarette reading a love addiction book: 😀

I felt like we were playing cover songs of our own conversations. We just didn't enjoy each other in the same way.

James was sure he was an unlovable person. Maybe it was why he had decided to accept scraps of it from Dr. Byrne.

“We knew we loved each other, but we didn't know whatto do with it, given the current circumstances, or what it meant. Neither of us knew how long this would go on for, and neither wanted to hold the other down.”

Girl 😀

"I just feel like I want to staple him to the ground, you know? Like, nail his shoes down," I said, tears slipping off my chin and onto her. "I feel like we could really do love properly, if he let me." I don't know why I was so upset. Carey and I were, technically, still together. But he couldn't be relied on, and I needed so badly to have one thing I could rely on. The uncertainty overwhelmed me.

Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in.

THERE'S PLENTY OF LANGUAGE, now, for what Carey did to me in April of 2010. […] ghosting, as psychological manipulation. As gas-lighting, even. The only credit they would give him would be the fact that he rightly assessed his situation. That he was too old for me, that the relationship was doomed, that he was too childish, and that he needed to grow up and get an age-appropriate girl-friend.

"The thing about you, Rachel," he said softly, "is that you make me insane."
"Fucking hell," I blurted out. "Is that it?"
"It's true! And I make you insane!" He picked up his phone.
[…]
"Pet, listen to me. I'm twenty-seven."
"So?"
with a teenager."
"Twenty-seven is very old to be dossing off work to stay in bed
"I'm twenty-one, Carey," I spluttered. "Which you would know it you came to my birthday party."

This was the problem. I could stay with Carey for as long as I wanted, but as soon as I left, it was hard to get back in again. Like a Grimms' fairy tale, or a reverse Hotel California.

“When we had sex I could taste the day on him.”

GIRLLLLLLLLLLLLL

It was easy, now that I understood passion properly, to see why you would move heaven and earth to secure it.

“My attraction to him came on like food poisoning.”

THIS IS SO GOOD

For years straight women talked about men never eating them out, and now that they do it all the time, none of us want to admit that most of them are bad at it. They sucker on to your clitoris like a fish at the side of a tank, or they randomly poke about with their tongue. With Carey I felt like a shrine. He was going at this not like a person with a plan, but a person with a calling.

BAHAHCSJVAHAVAHAHABAHAB

But on the whole, I was curiously unbothered. Not because I was this divinely liberal, unselfish twenty-year-old. I was quite self-obsessed, but I was also used to being passed over. I had learned not to take it personally.

“Maybe that's why the Fred Byrne fantasy had been so appealing to me, as a rebound option. Something that had to be kept a secret and that guaranteed touch, stimulus, novelty.”

EXCUSE ME !!!! WHO has cameras around me in this airport

“I don't know who I was trying to impress. I did not want a boy-friend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.”

Some sick shit right here

I wanted to protect him against the world's many disappointments, guard him with my body like I would a baby or a small dog.
On top of all that, he was the only man I'd met who made me feel petite, and to feel protective over someone who physically towers over you is a hell of a drug.

This is what it's like to love an unreliable man, or to have an untenable job, or an unsteady parent, or an ill child. It is the outfit you constantly dress up and down, accessorising it according to what insecurities hang well, what caveats are the most slimming. But we were close in age; but I was still his student; but we are in love; but what's to say he won't fall in love again.

Despite being so uninvolved with college, I was very aware of the situation with Dr. Byrne's wife. Crushes are like that. No matter how checked-out you are, there's always one microphone left switched on, and it only records information about your desire.