#NotANerd: Confessions of a Broken Heart
Editor's Note: Nerds ... meet Lindsay. Lindsay is my bat shit crazy buddy that had the friend who knew the dude that owned the pot farm in Northern Cali (read more about that adventure here). This chick is insane - I know, I know, it takes one to know one ... I'll own it. That being said, Lindsay and I are total opposites with the same free spirited personality. For reals, she's totally hardcore with everything in life except getting her nerd did. Dudes, it was hilarious, I was tweeting, emailing, and working from my Droid Charge on the way back from NorCal and every 15 minutes she would say, Jen look up! You have to see this!! We're a great team because we're both so alike while remaining super different. I'm going to help Lindsay start to understand tech - she just got a tumblr!!!!! And she's going to help ground me and serve as a reminder to look up every once in a while. I'm excited to have her in my life ... totally am. Either way, Lindsay just had her heart broken by a duderino like the day before we left for our trip. I asked her to write about what she experienced ... and here ya go!
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Lindsay Mc
I was recently dumped by my boyfriend because I am a vegetarian and he wants to hunt. Yeah. Seriously. Besides the fact that the whole situation is ridiculous, I really can’t believe that I didn’t see it coming.
We started dating almost as a fluke. We were friends that had a previous fling who decided to move in to a house together with a few other friends up in Big Bear (a ski and snowboard mountain in southern California.) Literally, two nights after I moved in, we drank too much cheap whiskey, make out and I claimed ‘my side’ of his bed and moved in to his room for the rest of the season. It was an interesting situation that was unexpectedly awesome. We got along great and honestly, there isn’t shit to do up in Big Bear in the winter besides snowboard, drink and hook up so it was the perfect time to fall into a new boyfriend. I, in no way was looking for a relationship but things with T were so effortless. He was one of the nicest guys I have ever met and I loved doing stuff with him, from making dinner to taking day trips off the mountain to fight cabin fever to just taking laps snowboarding. One time, I remembered that I had left my yoga mat outside in the windy, snowy cold and he jumped up out of bed and brought it inside for me with out me even having to ask! Not only was he amazing in those ways, but he intuitively understood me in a way that no guy has ever gotten me before. Needless to say, I was smitten.
We took a bunch of trips to visit his family in Solvang (which is 5 hours from Big Bear, right outside Santa Barbara) and I fell completely in love with his family. T’s parents are hands down two of the most amazing people that I have ever met and I absolutely loved every minute I spent with them. I was totally cool with the idea of having a commuter relationship once summer came, where we would be three hours away from each other with me living in Venice. It’s all good, “love conquers all,” right?
Me and T were perfect all winter long. We never fought (we ‘disagreed’ but we always talked things out before anything ever escalated) we had extremely similar temperaments, sometimes we partied, other times we stayed in and all and all, it was a pretty freakin’ stellar relationship.
I was in the process of writing T into my life but I kept saying “If we make it through the summer…” because a relationship is easy when there is nothing else to do but if we made it through the summer, I knew it would be huge. I knew that being up in Big Bear and snowboarding every day diluted our personalities. I am a slightly different person in Big Bear than who I am in Venice simply because of my surroundings and daily activities. I knew from meeting T’s family and friends back in Solvang that he was different as well. What I was curious about was, would our summer personalities be as compatible as our winter ones?
T is a ‘cowboy’ in every sense of the word. He grew up on a farm, goes to rodeos, knows how to drive a tractor and he definitely won’t be voting for Obama in the 2012 election. I’m from Virginia and went to school in North Carolina so I understand the mentality and I have a soft spot for southern boys. That being said, I’m pretty hippie-ed out. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was old enough to tell my parents I don’t want to eat meat, I spend a lot time looking into and understanding far out concepts and ideas and I’m really getting into yoga and meditation.
We had very different interests but we were operating from very similar moral compasses (or so I thought.) I loved the fact that we were so different and I, from the bottom of my heart, enjoyed what made who we were.
The cracks started to show a month into T being back in Solvang. It seemed that back in his hometown with his hometown friends, T was a different guy. Without the laid backness of snowboarding and our mountain friends, me and T had very different ideas of what ‘fun’ was. His late night texts were regularly incomprehensible (gotta love drunk texts) and what ever little time I did get him on the phone to catch up, he rushed me off the line. While I was at the beach, working on stuff for the show, and grilling out with friends and surfing, T was getting black out wasted on “$200,000 dollar boats” with his little Rich Kid Friends accompanied by fake-blonde, fake-tanned, fake-boobed chicks and posting things like “GOING HUGE!” on Facebook.
Apparently, in Solvang, my boyfriend is a douche.
A few days later, we got in an argument over him wanting to go party on the lake and me wanting to go to a Dispatch concert and little did I know at the time but that would be the last full conversation of our relationship. Miscommunication was taking over, things were starting to get heated and I tried to break the tension with a Big Lebowski quote “This aggression will not stand, man” and it went right over his head. We opened the relationship up.
Our entire relationship, I in no way ever thought that T and I were meant to be. My parents are happily married after 27 years together and my mom always told me that “When you know, you know”… and I didn’t know with T. But then again, “I don’t know” was SOOOO much closer than I have ever gotten with any other guy (which is usually “Absolutely not”) so I started thinking, what if my “I don’t know” is “I Know”?
With all of this, you would think that I would be okay with him finally sending me an ‘It’s over’ break up text… but I wasn’t. I had never been broken up with before and I NEEDED to work it out. Love conquers all and I LOVED him. If I could just talk to him face to face, if I could just touch his arm while he was talking to me, if I could just be with him, we could work it out. But I didn’t text him because in my heart, I knew he didn’t want to and I was crushed.
At the bottom, I called my best girlfriend Chevas and broke down “Maybe I do want to live in Solvang, work at his parents bakery, let him hunt and be happy with T” What was so bad about killing a bunny anyway? I could live in the country!
And then I realized- I had lost my damn mind.
And I started laughing. Seriously. In the middle of my tear-filled speech, I heard what I was saying and I started laughing.
It was done. We were done. Love is blind, sometimes borderline delusional but it’s going to be fine and I am okay. Phew. Holy shit, shake it off.
It scares me how distorted things can get when powerful emotions are involved. It scares me that I might have been willing to settle and give up on my dreams and love of living in LA. It scares me that I was willing to possibly compromise one of the longest commitments that I had made to myself ever over a guy (my vegetarian lifestyle.) But most importantly, it EXCITES me to think how amazing it will be when I meet the guy who I’m meant to be with… and I won’t have to.
#TheDudeAbides
