Please excuse my emotional distance this week

[hot_pastrami]

Originally posted by Undertoad
I have always kind of found the broken women and tried to help them.

I had this same tendency for a while. One of my most serious girlfriends was a woman who had been raped a few years' prior to us getting together... her neighbor had snuck out on the roof of her apartment building, and watched her taking a bath. When she got out of the bath, he broke in and attacked her.

Needless to say, the result was terrible. In subsequent years, probably as a result of devastated self-esteem, she got involved in some really unfortunate relationships, with men who used and abused her. When I found her, she was an emotional ruin on several anti-depressant perscriptions. She put on a happy face, but it was superficial... she was miserable.

I had known her before the incident, we had worked together. When I ran into her later, I asked her out, we dated, and things began to get serious. I remember when she told me what happened to her... I had known something awful happened to her, but to have her tell me the story... damn.

I won't subject you to the boring details of our relationship, but the short version of the story is that I gave everything I had to help heal the wounds, and in the end, she was off medication, and relatively happy, her self-esteem greatly improved. That was probably why it was so easy for her to toss me aside, and pursue another man... who happened to be my best friend and roommate at the time... but that is a long, convoluted tale for another day.

The sad folly of trying to fix a broken woman with love is that there are two likely outcomes... one: you wil succeed, and she will become a confident woman who loves herself and is ready to begin living life, putting her unpleasant past behind her; or two: you will fail, and where there was one unhappy person, there will be two.

It takes profound decency and goodness to want to help someone heal their wounds, but it can also take profound sacrifice. But you succeeded my friend, and though it is a shit sandwich today, in the end you're a better person for having done it. The next thing to do, after a suitable healing time, is admit that you deserve to find someone that makes you deleriously happy-- not a charity case-- and go find her!