Review 2005Caro

on the first week of january, titled 'more', i wrote down a list of things i wanted more of in 2005. it was a list of the mundane and the grande: more snowboarding, more giving up on grudges, more home-cooked meals, more yoga, more photography more standing up for my beliefs. i also wrote down: more love.

after years of good and decent but ultimately half-hearted relationships that demanded a whole lot of 'trying to make it work', i think deep down, i wanted to believe in love again. i wanted that grande, grandiose thing you see on movie screens and hear about in songs and that i kept seeing happening to other people. i wanted intensity and that soulmate thing. i wanted to be with someone who understood and loved my quirks. i wanted that 'not needing to hide those parts of yourself that you think no one will like them anyway' thing.

love hit me over the head a few weeks after writing my 'more' list as i read the sunday paper. it wasn't anything special: just one sentence about radiohead. i contacted the authour and to my great surprise, he replied to my email, and that's how it started. i lack words to describe the intensity of those first few days. within two or three emails, i' realised that i'd fallen head over heels in love. yeah, i'd heard that that happened to people all the time, falling in love through writing, over the net, but i'd never expected that it would happen to me. it was the same for him, apparently, as electric currents were transmitted through fibreoptic wires, yadayadayada. he wrote sentences that felt like i'd written them, we shared the same strange views on strange topics, like a love for the fonts used on dutch street signs and travelling on trains. we wrote a thousand emails in that first week and very quickly started talking on the phone. without having met this man, i was sure he was my soulmate. i left my then boyfried days after that first email, one of the hardest things i've ever done, no matter how mediocre that relationship was. i wanted to be able to start fresh with this new thing, i wanted to be as open and honest as possible. a short while later i met him in his hometown, a few hundred kilometres away. our first date was at a bright eyes concert. he looked much different to the photos he'd sent, actually, he looked nothing like those photos at all, but i thought that if this guy was supposed to be my soulmate, if this was my one love thing, which all of our contact, all my emotions seemed to point to, i could neglect looks. and it was all sweet, the connection, the conversation, the sex....well, almost all.

there was that marriage thing. his marriage, rather. over the weeks, i came to realise that what he'd described as a marriage that was 'as good as divorced', a family life which he had described as 'living together because of the child', was a marriage that was still very much a marriage, one were the word 'divorce' had quite likely never been ushered, and a real family life. wanting to follow my whole 'surrendering to real love' project, i did what lovers of married men have done for centuries: i believed that he'd leave her, eventually, he just needed time. and things between us were great, really, intense and clichéd, but great. meetings in expensive hotels. phone calls worth thousands of euro. sex filled rituals. mix cds. i was so blinded by it all, that i even stayed at the family home when his wife and kid were travelling. one day, it would all be fine, i thought.

one day however, after four months of bliss, of living the grande thing, it all fell apart.

his other lover had found my weblog and my flickr stream. no, not his wife. his other lover. it turned out that he'd met another woman through that article on radiohead after which i'd contacted him. they'd had a first date at an interpol concert. she'd stayed at the family home while his wife and kid were travelling, hours before i had arrived there. they had the calls and the rituals and the tons of emails, too. and she had the exact same mix cds as i did.

the next few days and weeks were extremely terrible as i tried to cling to my feelings, to love, after (t)his betrayal, trying deperately to find some kind of justification for his actions. no matter how hard i tried, i just couldn't. i eventually had to realise that the love that i'd felt between me and him had quite simply never existed, that it all had been a great ploy of his to just see how far he could take it all and that he had never, not even for a moment, even recognised the real me. this had never been about love for him, this was all about fucking. 'just 'caus you feel it, doesn't mean it's there.' sings thom yorke in 'there, there.' thom's right. he kept saying that 'this all just happened to him' which i just couldn't believe. i couldn't believe that he hadn't felt great at least for one minute or two to be smart enough to betray three women at once.

in 2005, i believed in love and in finding my soulmate, and i failed, in every way possible. the believing in love part was what i'd always wanted to do, the failing part very obviously wasn't. looking back on it, i am happy and thankful and kinda proud of myself that i did it all, that giving in and letting myself feel it all and the taking chances. - not because those four months of bliss were that great, - in retrospect, they are worthless and ugly and full of lies and betrayal, as nothing that happened then was real, but because only good things came out of it, eventually. i'm single now, and that's far better than being in a half-hearted relationship, just because you don't want to be alone. i rediscovered what is important for me in life and in relationships, rediscovered my love for music and live music, met incredible people, him excluded. his other lover is my best friend these days, the best friend i've ever had.

and i still believe in love.


halfhearted.
Originally uploaded by misscaro.

caro writes bloggold and takes photos. one day, she might start writing caroville again.

For an introduction and list of contributors to Review 2005, follow this link.