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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tarrasque Wrangler" data-source="post: 1716578" data-attributes="member: 7473">:<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" />: smiley, where are you when I need you most?  I'm gonna tell you guys a little story, so bear with me for a second.  I dated a girl for a while in high school.  We'd been great friends for a few years; everyone around us thought it was a good match.  I was kind and sweet and chivalrous towards her.  She was my first real love, and I loved this girl with every fiber of my being.  She was happy, I was happy.  Then one day, literally out of the blue, she shows up on my doorstep wanting to go for a walk in the park.  We go out to a picnic table and she drops the break-up bomb on me.  I was completely unprepared.  She told me she'd had feelings for me that she thought was love, and they'd just recently decoded themselves, and it turned out she'd never been in love with me.  I told her that's all fine and dandy, but I couldn't turn off my feelings like a faucet; I couldn't make myself not love her anymore.  Her response was "You'll just have to try."  For the record: she was the one who wanted to go steady in the first place.  Fast forward a couple years.  We were in our first years in college.  She'd gone out of state, I stayed local.  I get a letter from her and she's basically taking back everything in the breakup.  She's so lonely and she misses me so much and she wants to go back to the way things were.  And for me, the last 2 years of getting over her just washes away.  We email each other nightly, and see each other on winter break.  She talks to me about how dissatisfied she is at her school, and how she's going to come back and study here.  Needless to say, I'm thrilled with the prospect of picking up again, a little older and (to my thinking) a little wiser.  So she moves back to town.  We see each other once.  I put no pressure on her, just saying how great it is to have her back around and how much I've missed her.  And then she never returns my calls.  It took me a couple weeks to put it all together and realize that I've just spent the better part of a year undoing 2 years worth of emotional healing, just to go back to being hurt again.  I let the same girl DESTROY me twice.  I spent a lot of time after that wondering what the hell was wrong with me, why do women keep leaving?  All of them have agreed in the inevitable relationship postmortem that I did everything right, I was a perfect gentleman and a good boyfriend.    Then I started looking around at the relationships around me.  My buddy's girlfriend of several years cheated on him and left him.  Another friend, as sweet a guy as you'll ever meet, was dumped repeatedly.    I started to see a pattern, and it led me to a kind of truth: Men let women control the relationship.  Women tend to decide when the relationship begins and when it ends.  Also, women (in my experience) tend to come out much better in the end emotionally than men.    All of this led me to the following conclusion: Men need to be more proactive in their romantic relationships.  Men have to stand up for what they want and be vocal about it.  At its best, a relationship has to be a true emotional partnership between two people, and you should always put the happiness of the other person front and center, but in the end you have to look out for your own emotions too.  And I've put this philosophy into play, quite successfully I might add.  I instigated the relationship with my current girlfriend.  I asked her to move in with me.  I said we should share our financial burdens.  We've been together five years and I've never once felt like a passenger.  And if the day ever comes when I can see it's not working out (I don't think it'll get that bad, but you never know) I will be the one to say "it's over".    Is this plan right for everyone?  Probably not.  But we all have a choice to make ultimately: you can be standing in the wreckage of a relationship wondering what went wrong, or you can declare that you are in control of your destiny.  I know which one I'll pick from now on.</blockquote>

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