Advertisement

Lifestyle

I keep going back for more when more is less

Rating: NNNNN


“You can’t re-date someone. Isn’t that bad karma?” my friend Shannon said. “Besides, you broke up the first time for a reason.”

True. Chris and I did break up for a reason namely, because he was a melodramatic juvenile. But come on. Bad karma?

I’m superstitious and tend to base major decisions on my tarot cards and Magic 8-Ball, so after Shannon’s warnings I began to imagine the disasters I’d be courting. Would I be hit by a TTC bus? Attacked by sewer rats? Suffer an eternity of bad hair days?

But romance is a funny thing. When I recently ran into Chris, the lingering sparks were too much for me. I chose to see our reunion as fate. Why else would we have run into each other after all this time? Maybe Cupid is trying to tell me something.

Chris and I broke up two years ago after I made a lame wisecrack about our relationship. We were newly dating and he’d invited me over to his place to “watch movies” (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) for the third weekend in a row.

Being my usual not-so-subtle self, I told him if he wanted a booty call all he had to do was ask. Why the secret “movie” lingo?

His response was a panicked, self-defensive speech in which he accused me of a) distastefully calling him a fuck buddy, and b) trying to make us into some going-steady, lovey-dovey couple. How he could maintain both these interpretations simultaneously I’ll never know.

“Um”. okaaaaay. All I meant was if “Let’s watch a movie’ was really code for “Let’s get it on,’ then couldn’t we just jump the code and get right to jumping each other?” Unfortunately, in the end my lack of subtlety soon had me watching movies alone.

Yet here I am, two years later, willing to give it a second shot.

I admit I deserved the raised eyebrows for this one. Did I think he’d changed? That I had? That somehow after our time apart we would magically be compatible? Or was it just that his seriously cute dimples piqued my libido?

As it turned out, Shannon was right. The karmic gods had spoken, and once a doomed relationship, always a doomed relationship. Four weeks, one date and an unreturned phone call later, Chris was MIA for for no discernable reason .

This time, instead of saying something that made no sense, he said nothing at all before walking away.

This wasn’t my first mistake of this kind. There was the guy from those parties back in university whom I chased (and caught) every time we were drunk (at least four nights of the week).

There was the vacation fling who disappeared, then resurfaced two years later. (Come on, who reunites with vacation flings? Oh, that’s right, I do.) There was the co-worker we flirted, hooked up, tormented each other by pretending not to care, then flirted again

Logically, I know if someone’s bad for me in the first place, he probably won’t improve with age.

So why do I continue to torture myself ? My friend Julie says some relationships are like heroin: you keep running back, chasing that initial high you felt the first time you hooked up. In my dating life, I fear I may be a full-fledged junkie.

Yet no matter how many times I crash from the high, part of me still believes in destiny. I know it’s naive, but superstition can be a hard habit to break. Besides, fate’s got to come through for me one of these days, right?

**

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted