The Melodrama of my youth

I think Mills&Boon and all the assorted romance junk (I was very particular to the historical stuff) I read as a child ruined my early love life. Gee... is your computer hot from my embarrassment? Aneeeeeway, I didn't grow up with both my parents (hell I barely grew up with one!) so I didn't have a realistic example of relationships in my life so when I got to a boyfriend having age, those relationships were what I modeled mine off - or mebbe I did but Mills&Boon made it so much more exciting to look forward to.

From age 7-ish when I smuggled my first cheesy novel under the covers to about 23-ish when I began to realise my formula wasn't working, the Mills&Boon idea of love is what directed my love life. I thought that love always triumphed, if he offended you you should slap him run away and he'd always follow, that girls always had an orgasm too, you were supposed to pretend not to need him while secretly spending your hours obsessing about him, and that no matter how horrible the stupid fight he'd always come back. I thought everything was supposed to be uberdramatic; and boy did I honour that idea by living my relationships in heightened drama. And in retrospect, when I look at how ridiculous I was, I realise those boys must have loved me extraordinarily much to put up with me - I dare you to try and guess just how many of my shenanigans were straight off the pages of one of those books.

Ultimately though, all that junk didn't work out so well in my favour, and I had a wake up call when I was 18-ish (I'm getting old enough now that I'm forgetting dates and ages) and my 2nd serious boyfriend left me. Left. Me. Rejected me really. I was utterly confused. The men NEVER left their heroines, at least they never stayed away. I'd kept breaking up with him cause that's what the girls in Mills&Boon did! And finally the last time I broke up with him, while I was busy preparing for our passionate make up he was getting to know a girl less obviously nuts, and who his mother actually liked . So after I bitched slapped him (I'm so embarrassed) and had him in such a tangle HE was the one calling me to apologize, he wised up and told me "Listen, I'm tired of this shit. I love you, but you're crazy and you're going to drive ME crazy, SO STOP CALLING ME! I'm gonna go date someone who isn't crazy" After being told that way too many times for a girl as smart as I am I realized that I was the only one following this formula, and um.. it wasn't working. It actually kinda was the opposite of working.

The months after that were one of the saddest times in my life, Sade's "King of Sorrow" album had just come out, and I spent my days behind blacked out windows, crying to the title track on repeat. I'm serious. DAYS on end in a dark room... weeping. I should get some kind of Mills&Boon award for that. "life most screwed up by Mills&Boon" or something like that.

After he kicked my "feisty heroine" wanna be ass to the curb I went to visit with my girlfriends on the other end of the island. I called probably in a last ditch effort to beg him to take me back, of course he said no his exact words might even have been "hell no crazy!" So I slunk into the dark kitchen to sob by myself, but I was so frikkin dramatic it was more like cow bawling that had everybody piling into the kitchen to see what was wrong. I explained everything to my friend Shani, and she put her cup in front of me and said "pour all your sadness into this cup and then throw it away". And me with my dramatic self started wailing and said "All my sadness couldn't hold it this cup." Wail! "All my sadness couldn't hold in this room".

This post is a public service announcement to say "Use my life as a cautionary tale, don't let your kids read that junk"
And since today is thursday, let's just file this one under TMI thursday cause you just might not have needed to know this tidbit about me:
***Alright, folks, you know the rules. Join us all in humiliating the crap out of yourself every Thursday by sharing some completely tasteless, wholly unclassy, "how many readers can I estrange THIS week??" TMI story about your life. Or hell, about someone else's!***
p.s. I learned about TMI thursday from Racquel at Smell the Glove