The joy of being Matt

Not to be confused with The Joy of Being Aaron, which available in my book on Amazon.

There is a certain freedom in the way I live my life. I went through a series of relationships before I met my current wife. Those relationships more often were measured in days or weeks than in measurements of longer periods. Most of that falls on my shoulders. I was always in a quandry of knowing that I would have a hard time being in a relationship with someone that was in a relationship with me, because people need to set higher goals.

My relationships fell into a few categories:

Random women and random bars who were given random names and random backstories by me. Step one to ensuring a successful relationship is if you've known someone less than a day, maybe their cock shouldn't be in you. "I've never done this before" doesn't hold a lot of weight if you're good at it.

Women I tried to hard to be with. I can think of a couple examples of this where the tables were turned and I had had anything but the upper hand. Once I landed in Ohio I was "successful" enough to let money flow pretty freely. Nothing extravagant, but dinners, drinks, always on me. I think I wanted so desperately to be part of something that had weight that I was willing to give up a big part of me to try to find that. Step two: be true to yourself before all others.

Fuck buddies. I think if you bounce around the dating scene long enough you eventually date someone, or multiple someones who don't work with you on a relationship level, but you have a physical symbiosis with. This generally works for short periods of time, but eventually someone wants to put definition around what you "mean" to each other and a perfectly good situation is ruined.

The ones in the middle. I dated a girl in Columbus (actually on a mile or two from where I now live) for a couple of months, twice. That is two different sets of a couple months. After the second time we remained friends for awhile and would see each other now and then for shits and giggles. After the second time we broke up she said that I was a great person to date because I was fun, but I had no long term potential. I liked her a lot (love was never part of it), but while we were together I had no value beyond the now. Afterwards she actually recanted that thought and raised the possibility of a third go round right around the time I started dating my now-wife. The problem was no matter how comfortable I was with this person, I could never be me. I told the pre-relationship lies before the first go-round so I was forever bound by ties of dishonesty. Plus I was only the third guy she slept with and she was around 40, which meant that everything meant a lot more to her than it did to me...and, well there were some other things.

That's what brings me to today. Before I met my wife I decided that I'm just going to be me, warts (figurative) and all. From day one and date one I'm not going to put on any act, I'm just going to be me. To this day, people will threaten me with, "I'll tell your wife you said that." My response is always, "Go ahead." There's nothing I'll say or do that I wouldn't do if my wife was there. This is a tactic that probably doesn't work well in general, but it worked for me. My wife will be the first person to say that she figured I was a two, three date person at best. Nine plus years later, I'll still here pissing her off and embarrassing her.

I spent so much of my life scared to be who I am that I would pretend to be someone else in nearly every situation. With the exception of work, I pretty much am who I am. I came to the realization that though I may be far from perfect, I like who I am. If people like that, great. If not, they can EABOD. There is a freedom to being who you are. That's why you have to be happy with yourself before you can be happy with anyone else. That's not to say that you can't improve yourself, but everyone is a work in progress.