Mentioning either of these men in this series will seem odd, because they really aren’t worth mentioning however, their purpose will lead somewhere in the future.

I never really had deep feelings for either Joe or Kye. Both of these men were just happenstances within my life, but they do have meaning within my story.

I met Kye through MySpace (yeah, that MySpace). We happened to have some of the same acquaintances therefore our meeting was eventual.

Kye was a decent guy. He just had a drug problem. We had sex twice. One of those times really wasn’t sex I suppose, because he came before he ever got in, so there was that.

Joe was another man I met through one of my brother’s friends. He was much more interested in me than I was in him. At one point he rode a bicycle 23 miles to come to my house to see me. At that point I slept with him, and then told him to leave. I know this is pretty screwed up, but I didn’t really have any feelings for him, and didn’t want him to come over to begin with. He kept persisting on coming to my house, so I said okay. Then, whenever I found out that he rode a bike over, I felt almost obligated to sleep with him because of his efforts. I understand how idiotic this sounds, but women have often been conditioned for this. We have been led to believe that we owe men something. To be quite honest, I still struggle with these feelings of obligation to men, but I’ve gotten much better.

I felt like both of these men had some sort of feelings towards me. I’m not certain how strongly they felt about me, and this is probably because I wasn’t tuned into them. I felt more towards Kye, but he always had other things going on in his life, and I was just a standby friend to him. Because of this, he became back burner material to me. Plus, I was just never into the drug scene. Drugs weren’t my thing, and still aren’t. I smoked pot, and drank quite a bit, but that was it. I never liked anything else and preferred to stay away from it.

With Joe, I didn’t even really like his personality. He was an ass hole, obnoxious, and strange. I was happy to totally ignore him every opportunity I got.

The mention of Rick brings me to Bear.

After my breakup with Sam, I found myself in a poor spot. I wasn’t losing the 15 pounds I needed to lose in order to join the military, so I had to find something to do with my life. I’d decided to join cosmetology school. Honestly, I didn’t do so well with cutting hair, so I transferred to esthetics. I thrived and did very well in the program. It kept me on track, focused, and forced me to set goals.

While I was going to school, I became friends with a woman by the name of Leah. Leah was so kind to me. It was as if she said “I chose you” and took me under her wing, and we became close friends quickly. We would leave class and go to the liquor store and drink beer in her car during our breaks at school. We really had a lot of fun together.

Leah was engaged, and she and her fiancee lived in a house with a roommate. That roommate was Bear.

Leah had shown me pictures of him in the past, and whenever she did, I asked her how old he was. He was 17 years older than me. I wasn’t really interested in men that much older than me. I was really kind of looking for someone to be serious with, and I didn’t believe that I would be able to settle down with a man 17 years my senior. It was really the factor of thought of introducing him to my family. I could just see the look of shame from them.

So, initially whenever he asked me on a date in front of everyone, I asked him if he thought I was desperate. I told him that I believed our age difference was a defining factor. Well, we still drank and had a good time. That night whenever we were going to bed, he told me that if I wanted to come sleep in his room, then his door was opened. I took him up on that offer.

Obviously, we became intimate, and it started from there. I will say, that during our time together, he really was a great guy. The problem we ran into was that he is a man of few words, and our levels of communication are just completely different. Whenever he wanted to ask me if I wanted to be exclusive, he asked me like this:

How about we don’t bed hop anymore?

Bed hop? What? I don’t bed hop!

Okay, so I won’t bed hop anymore.

Okay, that sounds good.

It took me until about two years ago of mulling it over for me to truly understand what this conversation meant.

As a side note – my husband, whenever we became exclusive, he asked me if I wanted to move in. I took that literally, and actually moved in. Ha! He really just wanted to be exclusive, but hey (!) I take things literally.

So, Bear and I were apparently exclusively dating, but I didn’t really know that. Ha! To think about that now makes me roll with laughter.

We went out on double dates with Leah and her fiancee regularly. He also mentioned to me that he wanted me to meet his parents. I told him that I was totally against that idea. I really did not want to meet his parents at all. So, whenever the time came, I told him that I was busy that weekend. Looking back, that was seriously quite rude of me. I was just scared. I was running from him all while sleeping in the same bed.

Looking back on it now, I believe that he was really in love with me. I’d dropped him like a hotcake for something that was beyond stupid, and really, I regret it now. That man would’ve reached up, gotten the moon, and wrapped it up with a pretty bow to give to me. I’m sure of it. This was yet another heart I’ve broken, and maybe one that got away.

More on Bear later.

Moving out of a relationship with Sam, brought me into a relationship with Rick.

There is so much that I have to say about Rick, that I’m not sure that I’ll be able to consolidate it. I will attempt to do so, and add more on him in a different series.

I’d known Rick, long before I’d ever met Sam. I’d met Rick through one of my brother’s friends. Had this been a different life, and had I made better decisions, I might be with Rick today. However, this lifetime was not meant to be in a dedicated relationship to him.

Rick is probably one of the gentlest souls I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. He was kind and caring, but lost. He would often make the statement to me that all he wanted was to be happy. I recall asking him multiple times if he was happy, and since he was not, asking him what would make him happy. I’m not sure that Rick even knew what would make him happy.

Rick’s lost soul, like millions of people within the United States, brought him to drugs. He was an opioid addict. I’m not entirely certain who or what brought him to drugs, but I do know that they never made his life any better. He – well, we – ended up losing a dear friend to a heroin overdose, and I believe that was the beginning of Rick cleaning up his act, and attempting to get his life into order.

Rick and I decided to live together for a period of time. That was not a very happy time for either of us. Rick was at the height of his addiction, and he ended up getting arrested after I called the police one evening because he went off the rails one 4th of July night, and jumped out of my car while we were driving down the interstate on our way home from a friend’s get together. He ended up getting tazed by the police, and his father had to go down to the jail and bail him out.

I’m quite certain that was beginning of the end for us. There was simply one problem. Rick and I had a child involved.

The story of my daughter is a complicated one. But, this is part where I will say, that this story will have to wait. I still, even after eight years, have not fully processed this story well enough. I can tell you Rick’s heart is one that I broke. I did it not so intentionally, but it was a terrible heartbreak. I know that’ll I’ll pay for it at some point.

After mine and Sam’s breakup, things started to spiral downward pretty quickly. I was smoking too much, drinking too much, and got myself into a few bad situations due to poor decision making.

Sam had a friend, Mike. Mike was someone who I believed to be my friend as well. After Sam broke things off with me, many of his friends started to pursue me. I was never aware that any of them were even remotely interested in me during our relationship together. Mike was one of these friends.

I never really was very interested in Mike, and purely thought of him as a friend. He asked me on a date several times, and I declined. However, one time he was going to see the same movie that I was also interested in seeing, so I told him that we could go together. Everything went well.

A few weeks after this, Mike asked me to go to a bar with him, and I accepted the invitation. We went, and I drank too much. I don’t recall much of the night, and woke up in a hotel with several of Mike and Sam’s friends, but neither Mike nor Sam was there. I asked one of the friends to call a third friend, Kevin. Kevin came and picked me up, and asked me what happened between Mike and I. I stated that nothing that I could recall had happened other than us going to a bar.

Kevin then told me that Mike told him that Mike and I had sex. This was not true to my knowledge, and if it were true, then I certainly did not consent to the action. I was extremely upset. I told Kevin as well. He stated that he believed that Mike would have never taken advantage of me, had I not wanted him to. I became even more upset, and asked him to call Mike.

I was at Kevin’s house and Mike was on his way over. I told Kevin, that if Mike came over and said to me in front of both of us, that something happened, that I wanted him to take me to the hospital so that I could have a rape kit completed and then to file a police report.

Whenever Mike arrived to Kevin’s house he stated in front of both Kevin and me that nothing had happened and that he was just making false accusations of sexual intercourse with me. I explained to him that those are serious accusations, and that he should no longer do things like that.

At that point, Mike, Kevin, and I no longer spent any time together in one another’s company.

I learned a lot from that situation, and never have I ever put myself into any situation that was similar to this one since then.

My husband and I have been together for nearly seven years. Because we have been together for so long, and we are still in a healthy, loving relationship, this isn’t about my relationship with him. These serious of events did lead me to him, and helped me understand how to be in a healthy, loving relationship. So, maybe it is about our relationship in a way.

In order to give you some knowledge of how I got here, I guess I should start from a place where everything began.

During my high school years, I was obese. I’m talking I was walking the line of being morbidly obese. Then, whenever I was 19 years old, and just out of high school, I moved a state away to live with my grandmother. She is a typical woman who was raised in the southeastern United States during the 40s and 50s. She wanted what was best for me, and shamed me into losing weight. Looking back, I’m glad that she did this for me. Had I grown up in a household with her as my mother, I believe that many other things would be different. (That is a post for another time.) While living with her, I ended up losing about 100 pounds.

After I lost the weight, I moved back in with my mother. I had plans on joining the Army, but still needed to lose about 15 more pounds in order do so. While I was working on losing the last 15 pounds, I started getting a lot of attention from men. I had never gotten attention from any men in my life prior to that time. It was taking me time to lose the last 15 pounds, so I got a job at Blockbuster. Whenever I did so, I was asked to work at one of the sister stores for a night, and while I was there, I met a handsome fellow by the name of Sam.

Sam was a great guy. He had just gotten out of a relationship with a girl he had been with for several years. I was intrigued by his passion for life. He had chosen to be an artist, but was working as a delivery driver at a local pizza joint. I suggested to him that he should just go for it and give up the job at the pizza place and work on his career as an artist. He did. I loved watching him bloom into something beautiful. He was truly a passionate and fantastic artist.

Sadly, Sam broke my heart. After he ripped it out of my chest, he shredded it into very small pieces. One day, without any prior warning, he just told me that he no longer wanted to be in a relationship with me. He never gave me any reasoning behind it, but of course, I later found out through his actions. There was a woman that was working with him who was also an artist, that he became interested in. I am grateful that he broke it off before pursuing anything with her, but that’s what happened. I had became very close with his mother before we split, so it was even harder to deal with. I had come to believe that we were going to be together for a long time. This was my broken heart. I still think about him regularly, and I am not sure that I will ever not think about him. It has been 11 years, and I still have him cross my mind.