i should just give up on men. on the one hand i have saxy who, despite being told otherwise, thinks he can seduce me and when he gets shut down decides everything else is pointless. then there's emce, who can't make up his mind about me and who isn't ever going to get married. the men i care about just don't care enough back, or want to own me. and i am stupid enough to believe that the first one knows and respects the boundaries, and to hope the second one will love me enough to want to stay with me. isn't that just sickening? now here's the kicker: i no longer have a reason to trust either of them...or any other man for that matter.

i used to be so trusting. really. i may have been naive, or stupid, or whatever, but it used to be that when i met someone i would trust them right away. it wasn't that they did anything to be trusted, it was that they hadn't done anything to NOT be trusted. i take people as they are, and it used to be that, until they did something to prove themselves to be untrustworthy, i wouldn't hold any of my trust back. not that i would share my innermost thoughts and feelings with them, but i would never regard them with suspicion or anything. i used to think that this made me special, now i guess it just made me far too innocent for my own good.

and then it all got taken away, piece by piece, by the men in my life, friends and otherwise.

it began with the first husband, who couldn't or wouldn't protect me from the viciousness of his mother. now i under stand he was/is a victim too, but at the time it just would have been nice to have him turn around and say "mom, this is my wife and you will not speak to her like that." just once. then there was another friend. to be honest the relationship as a friends has been so long and so full of ups, downs and garbage, that i am not even sure what he did. the erosion he caused was small...but still affects me today. we used to talk about deep personal things, now the conversations seem so shallow and stilted.

then there was the friend who was there for me after my first divorce, helping me out, being very supportive. i had told him that there would be nothing between us, but apparently he decided there was. i have heard from several sources how he referred to me in a manner indicating we were together. when saxy and i got together, at some point he decided he couldn't deal with it and told me good-bye...a very final good-bye as far as i could tell. at the time i was paying him back for some of his help, but he made it pretty clear he wanted nothing to do with me. the next month, when he found out that i wasn't going to pay anything (based on his decision that he just couldn't deal with me being with saxy and needed me out of his life), he says, "can't we be friends?" well, what the hell were we BEFORE? between the fact that he wanted to be friends so he could get his money, and all the manipulative bs i found out later from various sources, he ransacked almost every last vestige of trust in others i had left.

then there was saxy. every promise made broken. the psychological abuse. all of it. it just destroyed any trust remaining. and not just mine. i wonder about my girls. how are they going to do when it comes to trusting a man in their life?

and you know what? i want it back. it may have been have, stupid, or whatever, but i want that innocence back. i hate looking at someone and thinking, "so what do you want? where do you draw the line? how long will this friendship between us last...because we both know it won't be forever."

innocence is so fragile. once gone it can never be reclaimed.