Why would I want to be the guy who commits to you for life?  I’d get to be the one who takes out the garbage.  The one who gets to listen to your whining.  I get to deal with your PMS.  I get to come to the rescue when you get a flat tire. 

Perhaps I should go on living like I am now.  To this very day old girlfriends who are currently married or committed contact me in one way or another.  Whether it be email or facebook? (effen facebook!) Every once in a while, completely out of the blue, some old girl contacts me to chat me up.  Of course it’s all supposed to be on the up and up.  No improprieties here.  Riiiight.  Only a couple have had the intestinal fortitude to admit the truth about their reason for contacting me.  They’re bored as hell!  They long for the bad boy to come back and sweep them off their feet.  They want to be taken to a bar, gotten drunk and then who knows.  They want to completely give up control and become lost in a fantasy world of my making.  And in all honesty, I have more respect for the ones who admit the truth and dispense with the BS.  I have a feeling that they are the ones who will find a resolution to their problem one way or another. The majority of them however, just pretend like they want to see how I’ve been and “catch up.”  They think that I can’t see how pathetic they are reaching blindly for some type of excitement to get them to feel alive again.

Fast forward to me in a relationship that has progressed for a few months and see the other side of the coin.  Complacency starts building and after a ho hum night of frozen pizza and a movie rental, what comes next is all too predictable. I see her wondering, gazing, and imagining herself taking this relationship to the next step.  She thinks back to when it was new.  She thinks back to when she went on some spontaneous date.  I sit there and ponder the old days.  I ponder the nights when the unknown was always just around the corner.  The excitement is intoxicating.

Go ahead and call me immature.  Tell me a thousand times that I haven’t met the right one.  You see, High School never ends and when John Cougar said that life goes on after the thrill is gone, I didn’t understand what he meant because I was too young, but now I do.  I see a lot more people get married out of sheer giving up.  The basic realization that they are dying is to strong to ignore.  Desperation sets in and there is no alternative.  You may deny that death’s distant gaze does not faze you. You can reassure yourself that you’re still viable and you very well may be.  However, you become weary.  Encumbered by baggage your legs fail you and you reach out for a shoulder to prop you up.  Ironically, for the majority all you’ll do is delay the fall of two who are hobbled.  Had you stayed by yourself would you have found the strength to find yourself?

So yeah, maybe I don’t want to be your husband.  Maybe I’m not going to acknowledge that I’m done. Maybe I take a turn for the worse and show you that excitement lies just around the corner.