Eating Out of the Trash...

Sounds pretty gross, right?  Agreed.

Yet I have done it, many, many times.  Not the actual trash, the metaphorical one mentioned by Taylor Swift on her album.  I heard the lyric and thought, “mother fucker, if that is not an accurate statement if ever there was one!”  

And it got me thinking...

Why do we go back to relationships and people that didn’t work out for us the first time, or the second time or the forty second time?  I am a divorce attorney, and I will tell you that the average divorced person attempted to make their marriage work with the person they are now divorcing many more times than 42.

I think we have a lot invested in who we date, partner with and marry.  So much so that we become invested and committed to things that perhaps, if we were a little more honest, a little more aware, we would have seen the coming wreckage in time to avoid it altogether.

It is this same denial that allows us to go back to people we broke it off with previously.  We miss some aspect of them: the company, the laughter, the sex, the comfort, and we return the the scene of the crime for another episode of relational murder.  And if we are successful in not picking the exact person again, literally, we tend to pick the same person just with another name who is actually almost identical to the person we just left but we like to pretend that they are totally different. I don't know how many times I have said, "Yes, he is like _____, but he is totally not _____!" Spoiler alert - he was EXACTLY like ______.

Every bad relationship I have ever had was basically with the same guy:  hot, funny as fuck, sexy, damaged, delusional, broken and not really willing or able to do the work to heal that, incapable of being honest about pretty much anything, and not really a huge fan of fidelity.  And, perhaps most importantly, they told me I was special. They tended to see things in me that others missed. And they were able to be emotionally available to me and for me, but just for very limited periods of time.  And this was the perfect set up for me.  Show up for me just enough to keep me wanting more.  Hooked every single time.  Fuck!

So I have eaten out of the trash a lot.  And by saying this, I don’t mean the person was trash, (although there have been a couple trashy people in my illustrious past) instead what I mean is that I had trashed the relationship and it landed in the scrapheap where it belonged.  But there I am back there trying to get sated by something I discarded long ago. I am not sure what Taylor meant by this phrase, you will have to ask her.  Most of the men I dated were not trash...but I do see that our ability to make a going concern of our relationship was a brilliantly fruitless endeavor.  Resulting in me scrapping the whole endeavor and the resulting trash can full of broken dreams, promises, and love. Which I feasted upon as if it was a banquet, and not the fucking trash can.

I am wildly committed to never doing this again.  If I dated you ever, we are not ever doing that again.  No more eating out of the trash, it does not, in fact, ever work out.  Because the law of relationships rekindled is that whatever ended you before, will end you again.  Don’t want that to be true?  Then both of you are going to have to do a fuck ton of work to make sure that doesn’t happen.  And in the land of temporary dreams and disposable emotions, that is growing more and more unlikely by the minute.

Why work it out when you can replace it with the smart delusion that THIS TIME IT WILL BE DIFFERENT.  Trust me, it won’t.  You will find yourself in some seedy alley eating out of the trash every single time.  Stop it.

I will if you will.

Again, still...