Dating Jordan Catalano

Welcome to Over-Sharers Anonymous. I'm your host, Lidiya

I hope this finds you surrounded by love, romantic or otherwise.

The first person I fell in love with was a skinny white boy with long, straight brown hair. He didn’t know how to communicate anything let alone his feelings and after a never-ending year (I was 15 and so time was like molasses), of being tortured by the hot and cold nature of being in love with him I made a dramatic exit from the relationship and moved on to someone who I thought was a different person. Of course he turned out to be just a black version of the same guy. He had curly hair and replaced Savage Garden with Mystikal but he was otherwise the same person. 

The point here is that for most of my early dating life, in those formative years when we learn about ourselves and our place in the world, I was entangled with men (boys?) who made me feel like I was just a stop on the way to someone else. Beautiful, interesting, emotionally stunted men who couldn’t communicate a feeling to save their lives and didn’t know how to talk or relate to me. I told myself I liked “the mysterious ones” as explanation for why I always found myself having the same fight with different guys. I internalized a lot of this, believing for many years that if a man actually wants to be with me, something must be very wrong with him and I should be careful. Add that to your normal teenage and early 20s angst and see what happens to your sense of worth.  

It wasn’t until I met the one who got away that I realized the role I also played in this pattern. I met him at a cafe in Paris outside a museum where I was reading at a table on the terrace, my cappuccino long gone and only foam clinging to the little black mug. He walked past me, stopped, and walked back to my table. He said hello in a voice that shot straight to my core, familiar and new all at once. And so of course I said yes to meeting him later that evening. Suddenly, here was a romance unlike anything I had experienced before. But I didn’t know what to do with it so I became convinced that it wasn’t real, choosing instead to brace myself for when it turns into the familiar thing. I kept him at arms length through the year that we tried to create a relationship across the ocean and time zones and everything else that stood between us. I found every possible scarp of evidence to support my worldview: I do not date men who are honest and loyal, there’s always something lurking beneath their charm. Of course it came as no surprise when our fragile attempt at a relationship collapsed at the first sign of trouble. How could it not? I was chipping away at its foundation from the very beginning.

I’m talking about this today because of something that was recently said to me by someone I trust, about the difference between instinct and trauma. I listen to my inner voice because I have always believed sure that it’s the most important voice. Knowing my instinct tells me about every situation (and person) and acting accordingly has contributed to my strong sense of self, which is something I value. But now I find myself wondering: is that voice always my instinct guiding and protecting me, or is there also something else there? Can our trauma sometimes mask itself as instinct? How do we tell the difference?

And, worst of all: if trauma has been masquerading as instinct in all of my relationship decisions thus far, am I the architect of my own heartache?

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately while walking in the Seattle rain. What have you been thinking about lately? Are you, like me, also trying to drown out the cacophony of urges to buy buy buy everything ASAP so you have some tangible proof of your love to give to people soon?