Attraction is a Mental Disorder

I’ve already shared what I consider to be my relationship history.  There have been other stories involving men, but unless I felt seriously injured by the interaction, I didn’t bother sharing it.

Now, however, I have to tell you about Allen.  Allen was my personal trainer when I was working at the Catholic High School.  I would go to the gym, early in the morning, and he would be there, working the counter.  He’d flirt and we’d giggle, and often times I’d end up standing there so long, I’d run out of time to actually work out.

If we were to have an appointment, we’d meet in the afternoon.  He’d help me set up the machines and adjust them to my body.  We’d chit-chat while I worked out and found that we had some things in common.  I finally asked him if he’d like to go get food together one morning when I didn’t have to work.  He accepted.

We met at a diner and looked over our menus.  As I browsed the breakfasts, he began to open up to me.  He told me that he was going through an ugly divorce.  He had a daughter from a previous relationship, and now his wife was pregnant and he didn’t believe that it was his.  He talked about how hurt he was, how much he loves his little girl but his ex won’t give him opportunities to see her.

“Wow!  That’s a lot.  But I get it,” I told him.  “I got married at 18 and was married for 8 years.  And when we split up he k-”

“I like oranges,” he interrupted.  “But I don’t like marmalade.”

I looked around for a hidden camera.  “Okay,” I said slowly.

He pulled the little container with individual jams into the center of the table.  He pulled out the marmalade and showed me.

“Okay!” I laughed.

He said, “Oh yeah, I have ADHD.”

“Oh!” I said good-naturedly.  “I have students with that.  I understand.”  I didn’t want him to feel embarrassed.

There was another day in which he had errands to run.  I went with him when he took a car to be fixed.  He told me that it was his roommate’s car.  He told me that he slept on the floor behind the sofa at this friend’s house. I felt bad for him.

This continued for a few months.  We never got physical, never even a kiss.  He was a bit younger than me and seemed kind of immature, but he was cute and sweet, and I was flattered by his attention.

One day he came to my apartment with some video games.  It was a karaoke game or something.  I don’t remember.  We got a little playful, tickling and silly stuff, and then he suddenly had to go.  Before he left he said he needed to let me know that he wasn’t really ready for a relationship since he was going through the ugly divorced and all.  Besides that, he was in the Army Reserves and he was being deployed to Iraq.

That news actually made me sad.  We continued the flirtation.  The gym had a giant banner set out that said, “We’re proud of you, Allen” for all the gym members to sign.  Finally, the day arrived that he was to depart for training in Texas.

He called me one morning, just as I was getting to the gym.  He told me he was in Texas and that he already missed everybody.

We would email now and then.  One night after he’d called me, I sent him an email telling him that it was good to have heard from him.

He sent me an email back almost immediately telling me that he’d already told me that he wasn’t interested in a relationship with me and that I needed to stop emailing him.  He said, “I’m sure that some guys might find you attractive, but you’re really not my type.”

I was shocked.  Since he’d told me about his psycho ex, I thought that maybe she’d figured out his password and was responding as him.  So I wrote back, “This doesn’t sound like Allen.  If it’s really you, call me and tell me these things.”

He wrote back insisting that it was indeed him and that he was in love with a beautiful woman and I was jeopardizing it.

I asked him why, if he was in love with someone else, he called me and emailed me and even came to my apartment.  He told me that I was psycho.  He’d never been to my apartment and he didn’t appreciate my pathetic attempts to cause drama for him.

We went back and forth a few times, and then I got an email that said, “Please just go along with it.”

I wrote back and said, “Maybe I am, psycho.  One of us certainly is.  You’ve hurt me.”

I actually heard from him a couple more times.  He called me once to tell me that his ex had hacked into his email and that he was sorry for what she had said to me.  Another time he called me to tell me that he had subscribed to World of Warcraft, which I was now playing.  He asked me what server I was on, and I told him.

He told me how much he missed his daughter.  He hadn’t seen her in months.  While he was talking, I got curious and searched Myspace to see if he had a page.  I found him.  There was a picture of a woman named Hellen.  The caption under it said, “Hot!!!”

So I asked him, “Who’s Hellen?”

Huh?

“Oh, I looked up and found your Myspace page and there’s a woman on the page named Hellen.  Your caption says, ‘Hot!!'”

He insisted that it wasn’t his page.  Someone must be trying to cause some drama by using his name and pictures.  Hellen, he told me, was his best friend.

While he continued flinging the bullshit, I switched back over to his Myspace page.  In the few moments that I was away from it, he’d changed the caption under Hellen, from “hot” to “my best friend.”  I also noticed that there were pictures of him playing in the snow in Truckee with his daughter.  So that meant he’d been home for Christmas.

I told him that he was lying trash and I didn’t want to ever speak to him again.  I blocked him on WoW, Myspace, and filtered his emails to go to a special folder.  (I was curious about what other lies he might come up with).

A couple of months later, I got an email from someone named Hellen.  The subject was “You don’t know me, but I know OF you.”  She was very polite and respectful, asking me if he’d actually been to my apartment.  She told me that she had been standing behind him when we had that email exchange in which he told me I was psycho.  And no, he had not been deployed to Iraq.  She also told me that there was no question about the paternity of the baby he was expecting with his estranged wife.  Hellen and she had actually become friends.

When I wrote back and told her that he had actually been to my apartment, I also told her that nothing physical ever happened with us.  I told her the stories he’d told me and how I figured out that he was a lying sack of …..

We exchanged email for a few days swapping stories and making fun of his ridiculousness.    We talked about getting together for lunch.  I don’t remember if we ever did, but she did look for me at Renaissance Faire and it was like meeting an old friend.

We’ve kept in touch over the 14 years since.  He’s reached out to both of us at various intervals.  He only reached out to me once after Hellen and I spoke.  Then I sent him this:

Tue, Jul 29, 2008, 7:06 AM
  
Dear Allen,

Back in January/February, when we last spoke, I was angry with myself for terminating communication with you before giving you the opportunity to explain yourself.  It’s not, however, that I believe you’d have been able to credibly explain the MySpace page, or how there were pictures of you and Cheyenne together at Christmas despite the fact that you’d told me you hadn’t seen her since you left in May.  No, indeed, it was because I didn’t get the chance to say to you the things that I truly needed to say.

Firstly, I want to say to you that I believed you to be the most honorable, sensitive, and sincere gentleman I’d ever had the pleasure of meeting.  When you actually demonstrated some interest in me, it took my breath away.  You were young and attractive and not only did you have wonderful ambitions, but you had this beautiful daughter whom you adored.  When you told me about your painful childhood, I thought, “Here’s a man with whom I can heal and help to heal.”  I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt on everything, so of course, I wanted to believe you when you confirmed my suspicions that your ex-wife had been the one who said those cruel things to me.  Of course, I wanted to believe everything you had to say.

There is so much you don’t know about me.  My childhood was filled with neglect and abuse: physical, sexual, emotional.  I have been in therapy for 8 years off and on, trying to understand who I am and how to use my pain as a source of power rather than an excuse to be nothing — or worse, a deficit to the world.  You see, I believe that people have three choices.  One can exist through life, neither taking from nor giving to the world.  One can take from life, hurting people and creating negativity.  Or one can give back to life, helping people and creating positive energy.  I believe the last of these to be the true purpose of God (whatever God may be).

I try to give back to the world.  My job as a math teacher for young women with various learning challenges gives me the opportunity to create a safe and positive environment for girls for whom math had always previously been a source of frustration, anxiety, and failure.  But I don’t just teach them about Math.  I teach them about respecting themselves.  Having high expectations for themselves.  Loving themselves despite their own weaknesses.  

My heartbreaks give me new insight into each child.  They feel safe coming to me when they are hurting.  These girls come to me for comfort when they are frightened or sad.  And when it passes, they continue to come to me because I provide a place of warmth and safety for them, even if only for a few hours a day.

I’m an exceptional person.  Aside from these things previously mentioned, I am also a good communicator in a relationship and an incredible lover.  Any man should be ecstatic that a woman like me could find him worthy of her attentions.  

And now we come to the reason for this email.  I’ve recently come into quite a considerable amount of information.  I’ve learned that you had a lover the entire time that you and I were carrying on whatever it was that we were carrying on.  I’ve learned that you did not leave for Texas when you claimed to, that you were never given orders for a tour overseas.  I’ve learned that your wife never cheated on you; that the paternity of Leah, the daughter you choose to ignore, has never been in question, and that if anyone was unfaithful, it was most likely and most certainly you.  I’ve also learned that it was, in fact, you who had written those hateful emails to me, and not some psycho ex.  I have also learned that though you claimed to be in Texas when that whole incident occurred, you were actually still in Folsom.

I’m happy to say to you that you do not have the power to hurt me.  I am disappointed that a human with so much capacity to do good could be such a selfish, self-centered, heartless, lying, cheating, disrespectful, insulting, and forgive me, but stupid individual.  Could you honestly have thought that you could have played three or four women at once?  Who am I kidding?  Who else was there?  Women in your unit, perhaps?  Other clients at the gym?  I hear that free personal training sessions are a habit of yours.  

You, who claim to know true pain, use other people with absolute disregard for their hearts and their pain.  You are a disgrace to the men and women who have served overseas, my uncle being one of them — a 54-year-old chaplain in the army reserves who insisted on accompanying his unit to Baghdad despite recent back surgery that could have exempted him from the tour.  Unable to carry a weapon as a Chaplain, his job was to drive a truck in regular convoys to Baghdad, putting his life on the line daily.  He’s just returned from a full year in Iraq and expects no one to feel sorry for him, despite the fact that as Chaplain, he saw death regularly.  You expect everyone to feel sorry for you and your fictional drama.  You exploited the respect of an entire gym full of people.  You should be ashamed.  You have no honor.

Please do me a favor and do not insult my intelligence further by claiming that you’d never been interested in me in the first place.  Whether or not that was the case, you certainly exploited my attentions with little regard for how I might interpret such things.  Men who are not interested in women, do not make dates to spend time with them; do not call them, do not introduce them to their children; do not go to their apartments, etc.  I am not some pathetic loser of a woman who cannot get a man.  There is actually quite a list of men who would leap at the opportunity to be my partner/lover.  I happen to be selective, though poor in judgment, and mistakenly thought you met my high criteria.

In all seriousness, you need psychological help.  You are pathological and you will be the destruction of your children if you do not change.

Jenna

P.S.  I had originally intended to write this as an extension of friendship, just to see what new lies you could come up with (it’s rather fascinating, you know).  But after three attempts at starting, I realized I didn’t have the stomach to pretend that I care about you.

Allen apparently tried to get back in good favor with Hellen after that.  It turned out that he’d gotten back together with the crazy ex and then dumped her for another woman.  He got engaged to her and then they broke up and she kicked him out.  Apparently, he liked to keep several women in the wings in case he needed a bed to crash in.  I never heard from him again after this last email.
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September 5, 2018

Wow… Allen sounds like he was a really despicable man for doing everything that he did to you. Hopefully he’s grown up and changed over the past 10 years, since you last wrote him.

September 5, 2018

@justamillennial, from what Hellen tells me, he has not.

September 5, 2018

wow..what a jerkoid……I love the way you say things. Maybe you should have gotten your PHD in English…..I have often tried to write like you do but I have a tendancy to go off topic alot and then go back…..

September 6, 2018

A guy I used to work with told me the gym was the best place to pick up women because that’s where the fit ones go. That sounds like Allen’s slogan, too.  Does his ADHD just apply to relationships with women?

Compulsive liars have been some of the weirdest people I’ve met.  Life is a lot simpler without them.  On the other hand, why do we read fiction if we really don’t like being lied to?  Why do people keep taking them back?  Is it their charm?  The false promise that, “I lie to everyone else but I won’t lie to you (any more)?”

September 6, 2018

@sleepygene I wish I knew.  I don’t like liars.  I struggle with having my young nieces and nephews lie to me.  My first impulse is to reject them, but they’re children.  I just try to explain to them that if they tell me the truth, nothing bad is going to happen.  But if they lie, I don’t know when they’re telling the truth, and that could cause something bad to happen.
I absolutely love fiction, though.  Especially stuff written for young adults.  But I know it’s fiction going into it.  They’re not trying to convince me of things that are not true.  They’re just taking me on a magical ride.

September 6, 2018

@oniongirl Yes but there’s this implication or understanding that fiction is supposed to be “truer than life” or at least contain truths about life that are more plainly observable in the presentation.  So how are we to know the author isn’t lying about life for reasons the author might not even understand?