Lucky you!
My personal experience hasn’t been good at all and, although I’m aware that the one common factor in all of my failed relationships has been me .. and hav, thereforee, spent a lot of time looking back at them trying to work out why it was my fault … what negative behaviours I engaged in that doomed them to failure … I do seem to have had a habit of allowing myself to fall for totally unsuitable women — including, I suspect, a few with Borderline Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder¹.
I blame my parents: together for sixty years, their relationship gave me entirely unrealistic expectations … a totally irrational faith in the fairy-tale, Hollywood ‘happily ever after’ trope — that and the Catholic guilt, whereby saying “I love you” to someone means you don’t walk away when things get difficult but stick around to try and make it work <sigh>.
I’m now working on the principle that, like flowers, we were originally meant to have three sexes, not two ² but something went wrong with the hermaphrodytes (they’re sterile), so it just can’t work.
The only women friends I have are the ones I’ve never taken it any further with — thank goodness … because they’re damn good friends and I’d hate to lose them from my life!
So … having decided that I don’t really care if the problem was me all along … or if it’s simply that I’m a naif, lousy judge of character and don’t (or refuse to) see the signs … I just don’t believe in it any more and am sticking to friendship — so far, with only one or two exceptions, not getting romantically involved with my friends seems to have worked out well and I see no reason to replace a winning formula with one that has equally proven not to work.
The conceptual grouping of “women fire and dangerous things” makes absolute sense to me 😉
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¹ I’m no longer in touch with any of them and not in a position to diagnose them … nor would I feel able to, given my baggage in relation to them … but, abstractly, in retrospect, they do seem to have displayed traits and behaviours pretty consistent with those diagnoses.
² Flowers have three sexes: male, female and bees.
