Hmmm...I'm kind of stuck between this guy Steve and this other guy Brian. Steve was the first guy I ever kissed; I was 14; he was a squirrelly little thing and had semi-long, curly hair. Sometimes he had a mullet. I met him in a Christian club. We really clicked at first, but eventually he just started to get on my nerves. It was like he was always feeling sorry for himself for the stuff that happened to him. I would always wonder if he had done anything to deserve it. A few months ago, he contacted me through classmates.com. He repented and admitted that he had treated me like crap, and that he understood my initial reaction (I was irritated that he had the NERVE to try to somehow get back in my life; I thought he had a romantic relationship that went bad and was crawling back to me). Things were okay at first over AIM. Then when he was taking forever to respond to each message I sent him, I started to get irritated with him because he was so cavalier about it. Like he expected me to wait for him and be accepting of his lukewarmness. Grr. I guess some things (and some people) never change.
Then there's Brian. We met through a mutual friend. He was very nurturing; his mother used to be a nurse, and I think he got those characteristics from her. He seemed accepting of me for who I was, and was pretty much an all-around nice guy. We were together for 2 years, and we were engaged for about a year and a half. Brian never got me a ring, though, and I'm glad because when I broke it off with him, it would have been much harder for me. I would have felt really bad giving it back to him. Brian had very high emotional intelligence (if he had the drive and the brains, he would have made a good psychologist!), and was very, very good at creative writing. But he completely lacked any kind of book smarts. I was getting tired of being the brains 97% of the time. It was frustrating because I had to explain how things worked and how to do things fairly often. He had had an intelligence test sometime in high school. On parts of the test, he scored at the genius level, while at other points he was borderline retarded! I don't know how reliable this particular IQ test was or the name of it, but that's another story. Brian had some kind of learning disability. He didn't have much of a future (as far as making decent money goes), as he went from job to job. My parents didn't much like that about him. He wasn't interested in higher education. In fact, he might not have gotten his diploma, but he did! If I was going to get out into the world and be making my own money, my parents didn't want him leeching off of me, and I felt the same way. Furthermore, I didn't really want to bear children (IF I'm going to, I'm not sure...) that had learning disabilities. In fact, I noticed that he acted like he didn't need education, when in fact it was just that it was difficult for him. Another thing that irritated me about him was that he seemed to have a problem with me surpassing him in knowledge and doing things that he couldn't do himself. Brian discouraged me from learning. It showed that he didn't feel very confident about his own intelligence. His brother and friends told him he was "whipped." What's important to me in a relationship is that my needs be just as important as his, and that there be a balance. He was listening to his brother and friend, and therefore acting differently around me! Several times I feigned kicking him in his private area because he irritated me. I dunno, maybe I was going through a groin-kicking phase because I felt mild aggression toward men or something...
Anyway, I said I just wanted to be friends, and that didn't last long. His initial reaction was, "I never want to see you again!" You know, really mature. Things cooled off, but he just treated me like crap after a while. He would use any little excuse to be disagreeable or difficult. It's been almost 2 years since we've talked.
I don't regret our relationship, but I never want to see him again! I was working a Springfield Hospital (in Maryland) as a summer worker, and a friend of his worked there. That friend told me that Brian says "Hello." I told him to tell Brian what you see I most recently put into italics. Also, he was Bipolar, and 2 Bipolar people together when they are both having a bad day is not a pretty sight. We could really irritate the crap out of each other.
Edit: Wow. I wrote a
lot! 
