Johnny Rotten

You're probably not going to want to hear this, but you did ask.

How a relationship develops down the road begins with the context of how much you say at the beginning. If you tell her your deepest secrets at the point where you're just friends, that will usually put you on the wrong track, and keep you there. If you put too much of yourself on someone's plate at once, they won't be able to eat more than a few bites before they get full. In this world, people don't want to know as much about you as you might think--not at first, at least.

Second: In my experience, people do not wake up one day and magically realize something about you or themselves.

Let me repeat for emphasis: She won't start looking at you in a different way out of the blue. It takes two to tango, and the chemistry isn't there.

Lastly, your heart is obviously not in tearing yourself away from her, since you call her on a daily basis.

However, if it's any consolation, she wasn't and isn't treating you right by not gently extricating herself when she saw you were hopelessly in love with her. But people like that kind of attention, so human nature often creates such a downward spiral. I think she did you a massive disservice by keeping you at arm's length but inviting your constant presence. I doubt this will really sink in, though, since you're obviously in pretty deep and are probably already thinking up ways in which I'm slightly wrong here and there and how she's really not like that, etc.

But believe me, I've been there to a degree, as have many others, and I'm familiar with the patterns and the lines of thought. The best you can do for yourself is that which you would find most repulsive: Getting the hell out of Dodge ASAP, getting rid of all the mementos and correspondence, and finding someone special in a place and time that reminds you not at all of where you came from.

Mistakes happen, people learn from them, and time heals all wounds even though the scars may never completely disappear. Two years ago, I was unemployed and wandering through Europe, recently broken up with a girl who'd I'd been with for years and was within a week of proposing to when she cheated on me out of the blue with one of our co-workers and told me, on the heels of that, that she loved me but was no longer in love with me. Now I'm three hundred miles away, living in a great flat in San Franciso, I have a great job, and I'm currently angling for a date with a cutie who I think digs me.

Two years ago, I stared at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris, and felt nothing. I stood in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, the largest and most opulent church in the world and home to what many say is the wealthiest organization in the world. Through a pane of glass on my right was a life-size sculpture by Michaelangelo (or maybe it was DaVinci) of Mary holding her dead son Jesus in her arms. And I felt nothing. I went to Vienna and Amsterdam, and nothing followed me everywhere.

Two years later, getting a nice parking spot after coming home from work puts a shit-eating grin on my face.

These stories are everywhere and tellable by people all around you. And they survived, they are here, they are there, and they are doing just fine, thank you, she wasn't no good for me anyhow. Mistakes happen, people learn from them.

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"The idea that money doesn't buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich, to stop the poor from killing them." -- Michael Caine