He’s Just Not That Into You

We’ve read the book “He’s Just Not That Into You,” or at least seen the movie. We know the rules. We know the score. We are the best “Dr. Phils” or “Oprahs” when it comes to our friends’ love lives, which we analyse with perfect clarity, giving them advice, showing them the error of their ways. Yet, when it comes to our own lives... and to that ONE guy who makes us weak in the knees, who plucks at our heart strings with both hands tied behind his back, who we hear the opening chords of SWV’s “Weak” every time he’s within a 5 km radius…our Spice Girl power goes out the window faster than you can say “I don’t need a man to validate me”. This guy is our blind spot. Our strongest weakness. Our kryptonite. Our Justin Case... Justin Case (more commonly known as “Just In Case”) is a smooth operator. He knows how to push our buttons. He knows how to get under our skin. He knows how to offer just enough of himself to keep us hooked. He doesn’t really want us to stay, but he doesn’t really want us to go either. This is where your relationship status on Facebook becomes “complicated” while you’re daydreaming of family holidays and how you and his mother (whom you have never met) gets on like a house on fire and no matter how black and white we need the terms of our relationship to be, we are willing to stay in a perpetual state of grey just to keep him around. We quite obligingly allow ourselves to take up residence in “Relationship Purgatory” because we’re not willing to give up the ghost of Justin Case and move on to something bigger, better and way more permanent. And therein lies the crazy, tragic, sometimes almost magical conundrum of Justin Case. What I have personally experienced is the bad news about Justin Case, his poisonous venom: he will be perfectly content to keep you around... indefinitely, JUST IN CASE something “better”never comes along. The real kick in the stomach was his definition of “something better”: it involved someone who was clearly inferior to the fabulousness that is ME. For whatever reason, somewhere along the way, he started seeing me as the “safe” choice, the in-between girl, the backup plan. The one who got away according to him (but in my mind he has made his choice and it’s best he sticks to it). I’m not any of those things but in my mind he was incapable of seeing me clearly enough to realize the diamond he had standing right in front of him. And I was blinded by his charm. By our long chats about politics. His mind. His “love”. I try and tell myself that maybe his blinders were there out of fear. Maybe it was immaturity. Or (as much as I hate to admit this) maybe he simply prefers penny polony to Italian ham and no matter how many times I handed him the menu, he was going to keep choosing penny polony regardless. The good news is that my eyes eventually opened and I put on my best stilettos and started walking... in the opposite direction. The thing is, when you finally realize you’re worth so much more, it won’t be so hard to finally close that door! Yes, I was crazy about him. Sometimes my heart still skips a beat when I hear his name. I loved him...(or I was infatuated by him) but I loved me more.... And I loved him, God how I loved him. It wasn’t love of course... even I can see now that it was infatuation. But at that time it damn near killed me. It’s so passionate, so intense, so painful that even years afterward, I still feel hurt when I hear his name... (Anon.) No, my feelings didn’t just disappear overnight and it did hurt for a while. Mind you, a few years on it still does sometimes. Time doesn’t heal but it makes the pain much more bearable. However, the future was waiting and it was never going to fight with the past to get my attention. So I made the decision to move on and I haven’t looked back since... because ladies, you will never find your future in the rear-view mirror.