July 21, 2024
So, I ended up not taking the new job. At the eleventh hour, my old workplace decided to make me another offer to try to keep me, and it was one I would have been REALLY stupid to turn down. This offer means maybe I won’t go into old age still in debt. Maybe I won’t go into old age dirt poor. (That is, unless we elect Trump and he completely trashes the economy in an effort to funnel yet more wealth to people who already are stratospherically far from needing it. We already know he’s going to turn the US into a dictatorship and throw anyone not white and “Christain” completely under the bus. There will be no more social safety net, so whatever damage this raise allows me to undo from my finances is all I will have.)
The person in question came on here, saw my posts about possibly taking the job, but then never even came back to read whether or not I actually took the job or not. Obviously, a person who does not even care to find out if I’m going to be working literally down the street from his house or not is a person who no longer cares a living shit for me or whatever relationship we might once have had, so our connection is now permanently over.
I no longer care. I’m not the person I was ten years ago when this all started, and I’m just not interested anymore. I’ve grown a lot more independent. I understand I am headed into old age all alone and I’ve adjusted to that. Whatever is going to happen to me is going to happen to me, and I will accept whatever that is alone. I’m fine with it.
That person was never relationship material in the first place. In order to be relationship material, you cannot believe you are a worm. You have to know what you feel and need and be willing to articulate that in plain English and stick up for it. If you can’t, what you will get is a codependent relationship in which you do wayyyy too much to please others in the vain hope that they will please you, throw out subtle hints about what you need and want, and then get angry when other people don’t notice.
Fuck knows, I didn’t need to fall victim to that. I watched my mother do that to other people for years, and it wasn’t pretty. This is the kind of person who won’t put their dukes up and fight for the relationship they need in a way that puts up any kind of consequences to the other person, lets the other person run all over them, and then goes around and complains about them … which is how the Other Woman tends to get drawn in, by the way—a guy who’s putting his best personality forward in public and looks like a catch complains piteously about his marriage.
I hope those two found the tools to do better with one another, went to a competent counselor, and are now happily married ever after.
I doubt it given the history, but one can hope.
As for myself, I’m retired from relationships of all kinds. I’m no longer trying to be a writer. I realize the latter is impossible, and the former you lose more and more of the older you get. At my age and size, no man is going to consider me attractive (and that’s the main criteria, what your body looks like, to most men). I’ve also been through the whole final illness, caregiving and widowhood thing, and it was bad enough in my forties, thank you very much. I’ll be sixty soon and I don’t have the energy to do that again. By the time you’re this age, men have already given all their money, all their time, and the best years of their lives to some other woman and some other family, and all that’s left for you is the final illness. Plus the adult childen will hate you because you aren’t their mother.
So, no thanks. I’m retired from relationships. I work, pay bills, and peck around at fan fiction and astrology. I expect to finish my last few years working and in due time I hope to be able to pay for a decent nursing home in which I can spend my last years before going to join my late husband in an urn.
I really hope this is my last lifetime here. This planet is going downhill FAST, and this life has been no picnic. I hope there will be a slight upturn here at the end, now that work isn’t so bad any more and there’s finally the hope of enough money, and silly worries about “Finding Someone!” are all over and done with.
It’s always easier to have great sex with yourself than it is with a man, anyway. However many years of that I might happen to have left.
I hope to live my last few years in peace, and I hope I can have a fast and merciful end, without a long horrible decline in a shitty nursing home all alone.
I think I’ve been through enough.