I couldn't tell you how old I was when I discovered PostSecret. I was in my twenties, I know that, and I think I was living in Colorado at the time. It might have been Vegas, I honestly can't be sure. I've been into Post Secret for a long time. Back in the day, there was a Post Secret forum to discuss all of the secrets and make friends. I met several peoople from the discussion boards, made several friends (the phoenix tattoo I have on my hip is for one such friend!), and checked every Sunday for the newest secrets. I even submitted one, though it was never published. Post Secret has been a fairly constant part of my Sunday for going on two decades. I have most of the books, and I have to assume the joy and comfort I find in them is seeing for sure that we are all so much the same. Our fears, our heartaches, our joys, our secret nihilism or optimism, there's nothing new under the sun. Post Secret is such a lovely reminder to be as gentle with myself as I try to be with others, because I'm going through it, too.
I was looking at Post Secret a couple of Sundays ago, as I do every Sunday, and I saw a secret that made me so sad, and I instantly thought of Dan.
Obviously it hasn't been 20 years since an and I broke up, it's been...uh...twelve? 2013, is that right? I could go look at all of my drafted blogs about it, but the time doesn't really matter. It's been ten years since I last spoke to Dan, I know that. We stopped talking pretty much right before my wedding, and Derek and I celebrate ten years this November (eleven years together in January of this year, and nine years LEGALLY married in just a few weeks).
The thing is...like...I don't actually know WHY I would want to be friends with Dan. I have been thinking about this for a few days, mostly because I had a dream about Dan the other night that bothered me enormously (except...I don't even remember the dreamspecifics, I just know I woke up angry. Derek was in my dream, too, and I think in my dream Derek was trying to pawn me off on Dan and I was deeply disinterested and really upset), and then I was relaying something to a girlfriend and I used Dan as a barometer for something positive and I was fairly fucking shocked because like, he is NEVER utilized as a positive example for anything. I was telling Derek when I recounted the story later that like...I do not think it's bitterness that keeps me from saying nice things about Dan, I think it's that I just genuinely never liked him as a human being.
I loved Dan, I really did. I loved him harder than he deserved, and I feel certain I've writtten this before...I think my love for him was more about trying to find worth in myself. I had self worth when I met Dan, I was very self-assured. I loved who I was, I didn't take life seriously, I was as carefree as being 26 with two children allowed me to be. I never saw Dan as anyboy to take seriously, something everybody who knew me can attest to. The only things about Dan I was truly attracted to were his sardonic conversation style, and his intelligence. Other than that, I wasn't terribly impressed. I have thought about this a LOT. Like, a lot a lot. I am truly convinced that what kept me around and made me invested was how effortlessly cruel Dan was to me in ways that I didn't even pick up on until it was too late, and then I did what most people in my position do: I made it all my fault and made excuses for him.
I think the first thing I really remember about Dan being someone I should have walked away from had to do with pickles. Or gherkins. It might have been gherkins, and it was only like, four or five weeks int seeing each other. Dan was always very casually dismissive about things I expressed a love of, or a delight in. Saying those things were silly, or gross, or laughing off whatever thing I said I liked and rolling his eyes while saying, "of COURSE you like XYZ thing". I did that to him once over text. About pickles. I believe he said he thought pickles/gherkins were disgusting and I...playfully, I thought...responded with, "you spelled DELICIOUS incorrectly"to which he responded with, "No, I didn't. I hate pickles/gherkins, and I don't need your input on my tastes". Which like, fair enough, I didn't need to comment on something he doesn't like, but I had assumed this kind of banter was alright, as he did it to me constantly, and I also thought I was just being a friendly tease. I don't remember what I responded, or if I responded at all, but I know the next text I got from him was, "I don't think you should come over tonight", as we had planned for me to come spend the night, as I had been doing fairly regularly. I was a bit shocked, and I THINK I responded with something to the tune of "alright", even though I should have been like, "over a crispy snack choice, are you fucking kidding me?" I had been at Allen's parents' house hanging out with the nephews, we were having a BBQ. I told Allen what happened and asked him if this was normal, and he told me some version of, nah, that dude fucking sucks. I chatted with Allen about it for a bit, and when we got home, I decided that I was just going to tell Dan I didn't want to ssee him anymore. I definiely didn't think it was fair that he could be so fucking condescending about my likes, but I couldn't playfully rib him about something as small as disliking a pickle, and I knew then that he had to go. I remember sitting outside of my old townhouse smoking a cigarette (I quit smoking ten years ago and sometimes I get heavily nostalgic for smoking. There's something kind of romantic and sexy about the act of smoking...oonce you get past the cancer stuff) and texting Dan tthat I wanted to come over and grab my stuff as soon as he was ok with me coming by.
I know I thought I was being very clear about coming up to grab my shit as a dissolution of our whatever it was, even though I did not explicitly state, "I cannot and will not do this with you anymore". Allen was sitting outside with me, cheerleading the decision and telling me that Dan sucked and I couuld do way better. I was going over everything WITH Allen, because I didn't want to break up via text and have him keep my shit (I didn't know Dan very well at that point, he could have been that kind of petty), I just wanted to go over there, grab my stuff and tell Dan to kick rocks with open toed shoes. I remembeer Allen reading my texts and telling me I was sending a very clear message, I jut hadn't said the actual words. Dan responded by telling me I could come over right now, so I made my way over there.
And the second I walked in, he scooped me up and said he was sorry for how he talked to me earlier. I know I told him he was seriously rude to me and I was just playing, and he covered me with kisses and apologized again, and there is some kind of fucking emotional WMD in apologies like that, because I bought it. I stayed angry for ten minutes...mybe five, my reserve wasn't as steeled at 26 as it is at 40...he came as close to groveling as he could muster, and it worked. It roped me back in. When I texted Allen to tell him I was staying, he said he knew I couldn't go through with it, and reminded me that Dan wasn't even very nice to me when he WASN'T being an ouright petulent prick. Allen was right. But meiocre men who make you feel like shit about yourself are a potent drug.
Negging. Fucking. WORKS.
Through 2011, 2012, and 2013, Dan continued to belittle me and tear me down. Some ways were outright and obvious, like how he made me guess little pieces of information about him, like being withholding was a fun game for both of us instead of taken as not wanting to share his life with me. Which I did. I had to guess his birthday. I had to guess his middle name. I had to guess one of his brothers' names (Nick was the one I guessed, he shared the other two. He was very forthcoming about his brother Tim, he told me about Tim the night we met. Used his name and everything) and how many brothers he had or if he had any sisters. I don't think he ever told me his parents' names, though he did tell me what his parents id, and that his dad was diagnosed with BPD. He told me that when I told him I had been diagnosed with Borderline a couple of years prior, I remember because I used the term BPD and I had to ask Dan if his dad had borderline or bipolar. Dan never told me.
Or how he asked me to wear my hair curly so he could see it, and when I finally did, he laughed at me. It was literally the only time I didn't straighten my hair when going to see him.
And how I wasn't allowed to be his friend on social media. I didn't go by Ondrea Tucci, my facebook name was Galileo Humpkins. He said that was embarrassing and refused to friend me on facebook because of it. Now, I never asked if he would change his tune if I changed my facebook name, an I have no idea if he would have. My gut says he wouldn't have, and I think I knew that even then, but I never evevn allowed for that to be a question he entertained, because as much as I threw myself on the pyre of his whims for most everything, there were definitely ways I refused to capitulate, and I was not about to beg him for social recognition. I liked having my dumb, goofy Psych name, and as I wasn't begging to be on his facebook as a girlfriend, or his it's complicated side piece, I didn't understand why a consequenceless, dumb name choice would have been embarrassing. But I did understand that he saw ME as embarrassing. I had nothing serious in my life, I had no formal education, I was alright enough o fuck but not gorgeous enough to be arm candy, and he didn't even find my antics charming.
Or the time I emailed him while he was seeing his parents (whom I had the nagging suspicion had no fucking clue I existed. I would, about a year later, find out that I was 100% correct about that), telling him that I din't have the guts to say this out loud, or text it to him, but that I loved him, and if we weren't on the same page, that's fine, there's no time limit or demand on someone telling you they love you. He read the email. I asked him if he got it. He said he did. And that was that. He didn't follow up, and with his lack of follow up, I knew he didn't feel the same way. While I had meant what I said about love not having a demand for return, and that love has no time limit, when someone can't even acknowlege that YOU'VE said a big thing, it's pretty clear that they think vry little of you and the sentiment. I internalized that in a major way. This was about four months in, I believe. Nothing weird like a week in. I think it might have been about four and a half months in, and I decided to tell him I loved him instead of waiting for some sign of certainty that he loved me back and expressing myself was safe because his brother had killed himself right before we met, and he was going back to see his parents to talk about their end of life wishes (that was his story, anyway. Who knows if that was true), and I just wanted to be emotionally upfront, and perhaps put a nice touch on what was, as I recall him sharing, a really tough visit for Dan. I understood Dan's lack of even a "let's maybe take this down a notch, I'm not where you are" as being because of everything he didn't love about me. Or even everything he didn't like about me.
Or like when he saw the vibrant coral dress I picked to wear to his military ball and called it "tacky" and asked me to pick out something with "class"...not that this is any measure of my determination, but I told him I loved the dress and wanted to stand out, and it was what I wanted. He did end up buying it for me, but he made several other negative comments about it, including the night of the ball. While it was on me. And for whatever it was worth to me, whoever the head person is in the receiving line, both he and his wife complimented my dress and said it was wonderfully bold. It WAS worth a lot to me, I just wanted to be validated and seen. That whole night was terrible. I accessorized with a HUGE, gaudy ring...a style I have loved forever...that Dan said was ugly and I needed to tone it down. One of his friends complimented my ring and I loudly gave Dan a massive HA, I TOLD YOU in the circle of people we were in, and I'm still very embarrassed about that fourteen years later. Not because Dan didn't deserve it, he very much did. But because nobody there had the context for my triumph, and I have always been aware that I probably looked like the asshole in that scenario. Dan and I had been seeing each other for quite some time when that ball happened, it was right before Dan deployed, and I had never met any of his friends, I had never been mentioned to his family OR his friends, nobody in Dan's orbit knew I existed TO MY KNOWLEDGE. This could be wrong, but there are plenty of other intances that make me think I am prety bang on in assuming nobody knew about me but Dan. I remember being so excited about this ball and telling my friend Ian that there was no way Dan wouldn' have to introduce me as whatever position I had in his life here. Ian agreed and was like, tell me everything! I did my hair, I did my makeup, I told myself, as all negged partners do, that I was going to be on my best behavior and surely it would make Dan happy. Dan didn't introduce me as anything other than my name. I was introduced as, "this is Ondrea". I remember excusing myself to the bathroom, because I knew I was going to start crying. A gorgeous woman in a gorgeous, puffy, taffeta dream of a dress asked me if I was ok, and I played it off as just being sad about the upcoming deployment. Still crying, I went outside to smoke a cigarette and text Ian what I had been introduced as. OUCH was Ian's response. Ouch indeed. I was noticeably crushed the whole night. I barely spoke to Dan, I didn't talk to anybody at the table with us because if I introduced myself to anybody as Dan's girlfriend, I didn't want to make him mad by saying the wrong thing.
And how he used to go out on trips with his friends for four days and never invite me. This was after he deployed and had returned home, and had called me his girlfriend to my face, though I'm certain not to anyby else's. He would text me and be like, we're all in the hot tub, everybody here brought their girlfriends but me, and I miss you so much. I would brush away the urge to ask, "then why didn't you invite me?" and hyperfous on him saying he missed me, but this happened pretty regularly. At least four times I can think of he went on a trip up to Vail or Breck with his buddies, and they all brought gilfriends and he didn't. Allen and I were fairly certain Dan was going up there with other women/another woman. The running gag about Dan in my circle of friends was that he was married or in a serious relationship, and that was why I couldn't be on his socials, because I'd see the reality of his life and possibly implode it. In my heart of hearts, I knew it was because of me. I knew he found me embarrasing, and I was just a vaguely amusing concept he could fuck and sling cash and gifts at to auction away any chance at intimacy, because who would want to be invested in a nobody who was intentionally adrift.
Or when he told me he had struggled our entire relationship to not fuck other people. A galling admittance, honestly, as I give EVERYONE I DATE the option to keep the relationship open. I fuckin' love ho life, and I have found that cishet men HATE a woman with sexual appetite and agency. It really makes you all feel a certain way about yourselves that I could want to fuck anybody but you, apparently. Dan, like every cishet man before AND after him, talked about me as if I were property and said he didn't want to share me. He shut down an open relationship. He did. That shit was on the fucking table, he said no, and he had the absolute pluck to report back to me a year and a half later that turning down pussy was a challenge. Sorry for you, brother. Additionally I was fucking half the city, so I felt prety smug in that moment, and I said, "well it hasn't been a challange for me" because I refused to rise to that occasion, and I had spent the bulk of our relationship fucking other people with aplomb. He didn't want to make me a part of his life in any tangible way, I took that as me not being his girlfriend, and until he called me his girlfriend, over a year into our relationship, I fucked whomever I fuckin' pleased. And I pleased almost everyone I came across, double pun intended. But. BUT. To say I wasn't also hurt by that would be a lie. I was very very very hurt by that. What I heard was that there was nothing about me that could keep Dan from struggling with not fucking other people. Not my beauty (which honestly, fine. Even the most gorgeous people get cheated on, there are plenty of other gogeous people out there, it isn't necessarily a commentary on my looks that he wanted to fuck other people and was down bad for strange), not my perssonality, not any warmth of feeling or affection he had for me. None of it made it easy to turn down sex from other women. None of who I was filled him with loyalty and love and made it a no brainer to not say no, and I can only asume the reason he said no was not because of me, but because he would feel guilty somewhere and that was a feeling HE didn't want. He said it had been hard. The whole time. After Dan called me his girlfriend, I was still approached on the regular by people trying to fuck me, and it was such an easy, immediate "no" from me. I loved my boyfriend. I wanted to be a good girlfriend. I didn't want to hurt him. So my nos came quickly and easily. It hurt to hear in no uncertain terms that Dan and I had never shared the same depth of feeling for each other.
And how about the time I spent Christmas with Dan because Alex was in Wyoming with her grandma and grandpa, and as I was sitting out in the living room, Dan took a call from his mom, went into his bedroom to talk to her, and when she asked who he was spending his Christmas Eve with, he said, "nobody". I wasn't even good enough to be a casual acquaintance, I was nobody. And I really was. I was never a somebody to Dan. Not once.
I have written about these things before. I've written about other things before. I know Dan didn't like me, or love me, I fucking know. I've beaten this to fucking death and gone over and over and over it. From every fucking angle except one: I didn't like him, either.
How do you fall in love with someone you don't even like?
I think I know. I think if the person makes you feel like you are absolutely fucking worthless and treats you like you are absolutely worthless, and you stick around long enough to believe it, you transfer every bit of love you may have had for yourself and you give it to them, because they are clearly the arbiter of what is good, bad, and worthwhile. I think the love I had for Dan, while it felt very real, was more about trying to love myself, and find the good in myself again. Even though I wholesale believed the persistent insinuations from Dan that I was beneath him and not worthy of love or validation or even recognition (not even as a friend, which is just such cruelty), what made me love Dan wasn't Dan, beccause Dan fucking sucked. It was me. I loved Dan because I wanted to chase my own validation of me and get it back. Was I really ok with being someone's, for all intents and purposes, live in pity fuck? No. Somewhere I knew that, but I think I needed to see it through Dan's eyes to believe it. He had so sucessfully torn me the fuck apart and down that what I loved was not him, it was the idea that his affection was some sort of transitive thing that redeemed me over time. Dan could make me beautiful. Dan could make me not embarrassing. Dan could make me valuable and worthy of anyone's love if I was only who he wanted me to be. I started trying, I really did. I toned myself down a lot. I stopped being vivacious. I wasn't as colorful. I was quiet a good deal of the time. I expressed interest in most of he things he liked (except his taste in music was a bummer. Country music AND Christmas music? Barf). I assumed he would love me if I had a degree, so I enrolled in college as a fucking business major, because that's what Dan was. Nevermind that I think business is atrocious, and I am a virulent anti-capitalist, and business was ALWAYS a choice I made only for Dan's approval. We used to read together, and I picked up the Game of Thrones series because Dan wanted to read it, even though fantasy shit like that was always, in my approximation, kinda silly. I lost myself in what I thought would make Dan pleased with me, and I've often wondered if maybe he could have loved me if I had been myself.
Bu like. I was myself. For months and months and months. And Dan did not love her. He did not love me. He did not love any version of myself that I presented. The me I really was at the beginning of our relationship, the me I was when I understood he saw no value in the me I really was, or the husk of both versions of that girl who realized there was no love to be found in Dan, but was in too deep to get out, and who would want her as a girlfriend, anyway.
Like and love are not the same. I always thought they went hand in hand...to love someone you have to like them. Right?
Right?
Maybe...maybe not.
I know I liked myself and loved myself when I met Dan. I know I loathed myself when we broke up. I know now I didn't like Dan very much, if at all, while we were together, ad I did fully eognize how fucking shitty the way he treated me wa, I really did. In real time, I understood that. I never for a second thought he was a good person, or that his behavior was just and good. What I DID think was that our relationship was a meritocracy, and I had not yet earned his like, his love, his affection, or his recognition. If I could just get there, then I could leave.
I've wtached snippets of grifters like Andrew Tate talk about how they refuse to validate women, and this is the dudeliest behavior there is. That you talk shit to women because their place is beneath you. I've watched Mystery successfully get women to sleep with him by tearing down the very core of them in jus a few minutes, and I alway think to myself...how do these women fall for this?
But that's judgment from me that they don't deserve, because I've fallen for it. I fell for it so fucking hard that it still fucks me with twelve or so years after the relationship ended, and ten years afteer we stopped speaking.
I cannot speak to Dan's intentionality here, to give him the little bit of grace I will afford him. I don't actually believe he destrroyed my sense of self on purpose. It occurs to me, all these years later, that I don't really actually know him. Or didn't, really. A few months ago, while talking about the upcoming election, Allen brought Dan up for some reason, I can't remember why, and I mentioned I had no idea what his political beliefs were. Allen scoffed and was like, "that dude is a fucking republican, through and through." And I was like, "...you think so?" and Allen laughed at me and was like, "think about it, Drea."
I did think about it. And I have no fucking idea.
There is so much shit I just don't know about Dan. Shit I didn't even bother to try and utilize for his intimacy guessing game, because fishing for hints about your partner is exactly how therapists suggest you form a bond.
I am positive now that I really just did not like Dan. I think I've said before that somewhere, I knew he was beneath me. I wonder if he ever felt that way. If there was any aspect of our relationship that shook his foundational beliefs about himself and his self worth that he stuck around because he didn't feel like anybody outside of me would have him. Maybe that's where his struggle to follow through with fucking other people was...he just didn't believe they'd want to, because he was just some whatever negative thing I made Dan believe about himself. I doubt it very much, as one thing I always thought about Dan...and vocalized about Dan...was that his self assurance was misguided. Dan and I seemed to suffer opposite problems to each other. On paper, Dan was fantastic, and on paper, I was not. But in practice, I was fine, and in practice, Dan was a fucking inconsiderate monster that placated my fairly obvious sadness with money and gifts. Love bombing when necessary, I think. I always thought it was uncany how Dan seemed to know right when I was on the verge of breaking up with him...which wa fairly regularly...because the second I got there, I would get gifts, and attention, and a week of deliberate care. And it would dissipate as soon as I let my guard down again. I am ashamed to admit I saw that as a coincidence rather than a tactic, but again...I can't speak to Dan's motivations.
After all of these revelations, after all of this time and all of this borderline obnoxious debriefing, sometimes I still get it in my head that I want to reach out to Dan in friendship. To extend an olive branch and say, "we have a messy history, but maybe let's get to know each other as adults and friends?"
But...what is behind that, really? Because more often than not, I still find myself standing firmly on the idea that Dan owes me an apology, and the version of me who knew him in her late twenties wants an explanation about why he treated her the way he did. I think my desire to talk to Dan has nothing to do with Dan, and everything to do with me still seeking out his validation and confirmation that I did not, in fact, deserve the way he treated me.The closest I ever got was him telling me after he moved to Michigan and we broke up that he had read my blogs and come to the realization that he had been "unduly unkind" to me, and those were his exact words. I remember becaue I love alliteration and I wonderedd if he used those words on purpose to soften the blow. Maybe he apologized for that, I don't recall, but I do not think he did. I don't have to work very hard to rob Dan of any decency in any regard when it comes to how he treated me, so it isn't like I am blocking out his apology to make him look like a remorseless monster. I genuinely do not think he apologized to me for the admission of being unduly unkind.
Why would I want to strike up a friendship with someone who made it so clear that they didn't like anything about me, and when it has become so obvious over a decade plus that I similarly did not like anything about him?
I wonder if somewhere the desire to still think the best of people and let them redeem themselves is behind my occasional drive to reach out. Maybe Dan has grown up and we COULD be friends, but I am still left with, ".....why, though?"
This is the trick. I know it's self-serving. Dan and I couold be completely in lock step with our social and political beliefs, our core values, and our interests. They could be 10000% perfectly compatible for a genuine friendship, I have no idea. But the reality of it is I don't acually want to find out, I want him to validate me an apologize.
The other side is, if he reached out to me, I would embrace the chance to become friends. Talking with Dan was always fairly easy, and for whatever grief from me he rightfully deseves, it wasn't 100% a bad time being his whatever I was. We did have fun together, he made me laugh sometimes, and there were small slivers of access to Dan's humanity that I recall with a rosy, hazy softness that I only allow for moments wherer I genuinely care for someone. To say I did not care about Dan, and that I did not have genuine love for Dan in the small cracks he allowd that love to exist would be selling both of us short.
But I did not like him. I did not love him.
My relationhip with Dan was the river's reflection for Narcissus: I looked in, saw myself, and drowned.
