Some Lessons Are Hard to Learn

The lesson that I finally internalized today is that old dogs do not learn new tricks.

To whom may I be referring?

Why, to my ex boyfriend, of course. He who has been seeing someone for three months yet was trying to get into my pants last week (and failing miserably).

Yet he expressed abhorrence when I said that I thought he wanted to meet with me for drinks, as friends, so that he could get me drunk and in the sack. I'm not saying that tequila makes my clothes fall off, but liquor certainly does lower my inhibitions and clouds my judgment. And I don't mean after a whole bottle of wine. I mean after one or two glasses.

After I found out the truth, which I thank God for, I was a little mean to him. I don't like it when people do nefarious things such as what he was attempting to do...cheat on his girlfriend with me, just like he did to me at about month four of our fledgling relationship. I had some of the same feelings that I had had previously when I found out that he was cheating on me. I admit that I called him a POS.

I read only the first of the nasty text messages he sent to me. The worst he could come up with was that I was a Pollyanna. Woe is me. I'm naive and positive. A friend of mine told me that if that's the worst he could come up with, then I should buy myself a dozen roses.

Actually...he probably did come up with some other nastiness to hurl at me, but I don't know what he hurled, because I erased everything else without reading any of it.

He kept saying in our conversations that I had supposedly gotten some honesty in my life from my association with him. I may have gotten some honesty...but apparently not enough to dismiss him from my consciousness forever. Certainly, I wasn't honest enough with myself to remember why I dumped him in the first place. Clearly, I lied to myself and told myself that he was surely different, he had surely learned from his experiences. It is just as clear now that he just is who he is.

I suppose no more energy need be expended on this bastion of dishonesty that is my ex boyfriend. He is in the past now, a mistake not to be repeated again. I just feel sorry for his new girlfriend. I guess she will learn after he screws up and gets caught cheating. Or perhaps she will learn after she gets pregnant and realizes she doesn't want a creep like him anywhere near her child. Or perhaps after he gives her AIDS, which is something that someone who has slept with 62 women and whose feelings about condoms are limited solely to disgust, is certain to do eventually.

I may be angry at him. But more than that, I feel sorry for him. He would definitely turn up his nose at any pity that I feel for him, insisting that he feels even more for me. But I can't help but feel sorry for someone whose life is ruled with an iron fist by his dick. An existence like that might seem fine now. But its luster will wear off one day, and all he'll see behind him is a wake of hurt feelings, of bridges burned, and things that might have been. I don't envy anyone that.