The Public Transportation Theory of Deciding When and Whom to Marry

****TransitGrrrl is new to the blogosphere and is quite opinionated on all subjects that involve dating and men. This is her take on how men marry. ENJOY!*************

Most women (at least I'll only speak for myself here) wait until they meet the RIGHT one. Among men, I have noticed a trend. They decide they are getting married and the NEXT one that comes along, they hog-tie with an engagement ring and a line of bullshit that they tell themselves and the hog-tied party in question. And voila! They're married. This concept has been discussed on "Sex and the City" so I know I'm not the only one who's noticed this one. It's like I decide I want to go somewhere, so I go to the bus stop and wait for the RIGHT bus to come along. Some men decide they want to get on a bus, so they go to the bus stop and get on the NEXT paying no mind to where it's going. Doesn't matter. They just had to get on a bus now. Thing is, they probably convinced the woman that he IS the RIGHT bus so she'd let him board. Me? If the bus isn't going where I want to go, I wait for the next one. If there's a problem and I know I'm going to wind up being late, I take an alternate means of transportation --- a clear sign that I was off-track in my choice of a destination.

Metaphors aside.

Twelve years ago when I moved to the city I dated a guy that I was quite taken with. Had the relationship continued, I would have let him board. In fact, I was hoping it would go that way, until my birthday that year. He was an asshole to me. I'll spare you the details, let's just leave it at that. He was an asshole. I called him up the next day and brought up his behavior in question from the night before. The response I got was basically, I was an asshole for bringing it up. Dictionary definition of passive aggressive. I do something shittie to you, and when you bring it up, I make you wrong for speaking up for yourself. So we broke up, and I was broken-hearted. I really liked this guy. He did have other qualities that were good. Fast forward a month later. He is planning a big surprise birthday party for a mutual professional acquaintance of ours. I was surprised to hear from him. We hadn't spoken. The conversation went on for quite a while. During it, he confessed how "unmarried" he was feeling since his ex-girlfriend was going to be coming to the party with her new fiancee/husband. I guess this was my clue that he wanted to get on a bus and I was potentially the NEXT available one. There was no apology for his behavior, though. I didn't ask for one either. So after he ignores me at this party, I spend the next few months broken-hearted and upset and cursing his existence and wishing him bad dating/love karma. And guess what? During that time he met the woman he would marry and have a child with.

Fast forward about 10 years.

Through a series of serendipitous events that seem to only occur in New York, I came into contact with him again, we became friends and hire each other on jobs now. I've let go of what happened back then and we're actually quite close. Thank God I'm only half-Sicilian and can let go of a grudge eventually. The ex in question is now going through mediation with his wife and trying to figure out custody issues with their 5-year old daughter. Turns out that after she had the baby, she went into a bad post-partum depression that hasn't lifted in 5 years and she refuses to get help. They haven't had sex in years and have had separate bedrooms for a while now. My ex at one point recorded their conversations at home to bring to his counselor because he feared he was going crazy. She compulsively cleans their massive house and spends most of the time in her room when he is home. He describes it "like having an imaginary live-in housekeeper." I feel bad for him and especially for their daughter. This has been going on for a while and the laws in New York state do not favor the father when it comes to primary custody.

So on one hand, I have to laugh at the fact that while I was sending him all this bad mojo, he met a woman who would come to torture him about 100 times worse that what he did to me and in a long-protracted manner. It makes me realize that I really shouldn't wish things I wouldn't want to happen on my worst enemy on anyone. It really does come true. I never knew that it did, but how often are you actually privy to how an ex-boyfriend's life turns out, or doesn't?

And on the other hand, I realize that she was just the NEXT bus and he probably just convinced her to let him board. I was too much work to board since I was not about to give him a pass for bad behavior. Part of me wonders if he would have married me and then the thought of having spent the past 10-12 years putting up with passive aggressive behavior and shittie birthdays snaps me out of it.

The silver lining in this cloud is that I am able to be friends with this guy all these years later because he's changed. Rare to see, but true. After having a child and being her primary care-giver and dealing with an insane wife, he has become much more caring and humble. He used to be so arrogant it wasn't even funny.And another part of me wonders whether or not he would have gotten married if his ex-girlfriend (the one prior to me) didn't move in with someone else within 3 weeks of leaving him and gotten engaged and married within the year. I think it's an easy trap to fall into --- making huge life decisions based on all the wrong reasons. This is why I'm still unmarried at 32. When I think about it, I realize how incredibly stupid it would be to jump into getting married to just keep up with the exes, but so many people do it. And, by the way, my ex's ex got divorced within about 5 years of getting married! I sometimes wonder why even some of the most intelligent people I know make decisions about love and marriage based on the most trivial and surface reasons and here's what I came up with. I think that really soul searching for what you want and having the belief in your heart that you deserve it and trusting that the universe will deliver is much scarier for most than getting married to look good to friends, family and society and then subsequently going through a shittie protracted divorce and custody battle. I also think that being single in New York for the past 12 years has been no picnic either, but I know in my heart had I married any of the guys I had dated, we would have wound up divorced hence why I always said no. So I keep working on defining what I want and believing that I deserve it.

The latter seems to be much tougher than the prior.

Recently, I met someone that I really, really like. This doesn't happen all that often. I could really see myself falling in love with him and spending the rest of my life with him, based on what I know about him so far and how he has been treating me up until now. If things keep going in the direction they are, I'll probably want him to board the bus. Very handsome, smart, successful trial attorney with all his hair. Plus we have what I would call tractor-beam attraction. I woke up the other morning because he was laying next to me with a hard-on without him even touching me. Pheromones. Man. Pheromones. Here's the catch. We've been dating a month and his ad is still active on match.com and he has logged in within 24 hours. I've been checking this ever since he told me that he didn't want to see other women. Now, we've only been dating a month so it's perfectly fine to be seeing other people at this point. If that's the agreement. Even though we're sleeping together I have no problem with this. At this point we really don't know each other. So, today I get to have a conversation with him about this. This is usually where things break down. Because I refuse to sell out on myself and I'm aware of the fact that if I let things like this slide, it will set the tone for the entire relationship and I'll create my own prison of a bad relationship.

I'll let you all know how it turns out, and whether he's at the bus stop or not.

TransitGrrrl