The other day, I was describing to a friend what I would ideally want out of a relationship with a guy, and after hearing what I want, my friend called me misanthropic. In certain ways, I can’t dispute this. I don’t like having anyone in my space, I consider sex more of a physical activity than an intimate one, and I don’t like telling people how I feel. When it comes to dating, apparently I have issues.

I had a long term relationship that was really fantastic for years, but ended with me fucking it up royally. The details aren’t important (well, they are, but I’m not going to blog about them; even when I’m in an emotionally revealing mood, there are still things I’m not going to put on the internet). Suffice it to say, I handled it as badly as was humanly possible, but I learned from it and think it was important to have gone through.

That formative relationship was followed by another that managed to have a large impact on me without lasting nearly as long. This one was never good, even when I thought it was. Or maybe it was, but after it unraveled during a particularly painful and confusing part of my life, it was difficult for me to look at it objectively. Even several years after the fact, I’m hurt thinking about it.

I spent a long time shying away from romantic entanglements after that. The couple times I tried to dip my toe back in the water seemed to backfire fairly quickly, and it wasn’t long before I was gun-shy enough to convince myself I was better off ignoring the entire idea of dating.

Here’s the problem: closing myself off to all that slowly bled out into my approach to all my relationships. I’m certainly not anti-social, in fact I’m part of a community that I consider nearly hyper-social and (unless I’m woefully mistaken) am generally well-thought of within it. But even though I could tell you an awful lot about my friends, part of that community and otherwise, there are very few people that could tell you anything significant about me.

Somewhere along the line, I became a person that’s easy to talk to, yet nearly impossible to really know. I stopped allowing myself to be vulnerable with anyone that hadn’t already seen me through bad times, thus proving they’d stick around rather than bolt if things were anything other than rosy. I lost the ability to trust people with anything other than the surface elements of my life.

Having realized this, obviously I have to change. And I’m trying. I’m answering honestly when friends inquire about what’s going on with me rather than giving a stock “I’m good” and turning the conversation to their life instead of mine. I’m actually considering it when I get asked out rather than turning guys down out of hand (and if I’m honest, this has resulted in some fun dates, though I still have a hard time imagining wanting to date someone seriously). I’m trying to remember that letting people be close to me doesn’t mean they’ll let me down, and that even if they do, it isn’t the end of the world.

If I know I can pick myself back up when I fall (and I do know that), then there isn’t any reason to be afraid of falling in the first place.