I've been trying to deal with the issues that have caused me to be single for about two and a half years now. I think I finally traced it back to the source. Well... I am finally admitting it. This rant is pretty much my closure.

My second-to-last boyfriend was mentally and physically abusive. He cheated on me multiple times with multiple people, and he usually made me feel like it was my fault. We broke up about five or six times. The first time I asked him to forgive me and we got back together. Every time after that he came over, played a different love song by some boy band and convinced me that he would never cheat on me again. But he made everybody he knew think I was the bad guy in the relationship. He even told some people we were still broken up when we had gotten back together. He would leave a voice mail every day telling me to call him after work. He then told people I was bothering him by calling him all the time. He would make plans to do stuff with me then turn off his phone and disappear when we were supposed to meet up. He wanted to know where I was every second of the day, but I never knew where he was unless he was with me. He rarely answered the phone when I called him, but he would bitch me out if I didn't answer his calls. Then he beat the hell out of me one day because I got too drunk and embarrassed him. He told me how sorry he was and how sad it made him feel every day after that until my black eye went away.

I know I wasn't the perfect boyfriend, but I didn't give him anything like the mind fuck he gave me. All this made me afraid to open up to my last boyfriend. I couldn't get intimate with him. I couldn't treat him like any more than a close friend. An incident at Backstreet was the nail in the coffin for our relationship. I tried to date twice shortly after that, and then I lost all interest in dating. Since then I seem to have programmed myself to subconsciously ignore anyone who flirts with me. I have been told a few times that someone was flirting with me and I just brushed them off. I was completely clueless about doing this.

A week or two ago I noticed a guy who worked at the movie theater was staring at me. I thought he was cute. Hersh told me he knew the guy and he was gay. I am also recently feeling the urge to date again. Like a dog in heat, I want to go out and find a man. About four years later I am finally getting over the trauma from an abusive relationship that lasted eight months. Talk about a lasting impression. I'm just glad that I am finally getting over it.