What if No One's Watching?

It's been a weird couple of days. I'm in my head more than I should be, and I'm particularly in my memory. I spent some time yesterday with one of the most influential people of my past, and my discussion with him led to the kind of night where I toss and turn and don't sleep and hate myself and hate everyone I have ever been and wonder if anything I remember was actually the way I remember it. Good times.

Basically, the situation is that I spent pretty much my entire college years dating the same guy. I loved him, at least, to the extent that I was capable of it at that particularly narcissistic time in my life. And he didn't love me, didn't really believe in monogamous dating, and didn't want to be with me. That sounds like a pretty horrible situation, no? And yet I don't remember it as miserable (at least, mostly not). I don't remember realizing, at least not until fairly late in the game, that any of those things were true. I don't remember having any idea that I was deluding myself.

Which is where it all breaks down. I think I could deal with having been in a bad relationship for four years. That's pretty normal, happens to everyone. But what I can't figure out is how I didn't know I was in a bad relationship. I mean, I don't think I ever really thought it was going to end in a picket fence and 2.5 kids, but I didn't know it was a joke, either. I didn't know he didn't love me, or didn't want to be with me.

After all this time, you'd think it wouldn't hurt to write that, but it does. It gives me this weird mix of emotions I can barely separate from one another. It makes me feel guilty, for wasting his time, and stupid, for wasting my own. It makes me feel unlovable, like if anybody could stay with me that long and not love me, there has to be something wrong with me. It gives me this weird distrust for my own memory that I can't shake. Am I just remembering it wrong? Are the memories I have, of stuff that certainly gave a really good impression of love, of a relationship, figments of my imagination? Was I really there?

That's the feeling that bothers me the most, I guess. I feel like maybe I misunderstood this whole huge period of my life. Like this integral part of how I know myself is wrong. This makes me doubt myself. Is there something horribly stunted in my self-awareness that I spent four years with someone and didn't know he didn't love me? And how much worse is whatever is wrong with me that I still, ten years later, can't figure out what the hell was going on?

It ends up calling into question not just who I was then, but who I am now. If I was this desperately wrong about that relationship, could I still be deluded now? Maybe Mark doesn't actually love me either. Maybe nobody does. Maybe I've vastly misread the signals I thought I was getting not just from this college boyfriend, but from everyone I've ever thought loved me.

That'll keep you up at night.