High Maintenance, low maintenance, headcase or..

..Doormat.
NB: There was supposed to be a pic of a doormat here with a highly witty caption saying 'me'. Sadly picture uploading doesn't seem to be a goer for me at the moment.

WARNING: This post may contain mawkish self pity.
If I was entirely honest I would probably start it with ‘Cigarettes 131 this morning (vgood), pounds lost 9 (vbad), overanalysis indulged in 6hrs (improvement)' and just admit to myself that I’m a damn sight closer to being Bridget Jones than I would have hoped.

A week and a half after being dumped, the emotional dust is beginning to settle. My rational side is kicking back in – and finally I can eat again (I wish I was one of those ‘trough ice cream, cry on your friends and watch chick-flicks in your jim-jams’ kind of girls – instead I’m one of those throw up, loiter alone chain smoking and find yourself entirely unable to even get a piece of toast past your teeth types – good for the waistline, bad for the sanity).

Anyway, the majority of the dumping itself was straightforward enough. Slightly odd that he was the one crying – but I can live with that (as he himself said – he’s a blubber guts). The main thrust was predictable - he thought I was lovely, but didn’t love me. Didn’t think he ever would. And at ‘our age’ (clearly dotage-bound) we shouldn’t be wasting time on relationships that we didn’t think would be the one. You can’t really argue with it. You can be gutted – but you can’t argue. However, there was one thing that stuck in my mind:

“I’m looking for somebody that will curb me”.

This came in the context of the ‘you’re lovely’ bit by the way. Apparently my laissez faire approach to his life was a turn-off, my belief that you should make your own decision as to whether that third bottle of wine and a joint is a good idea.. didn’t really work for him. So, I asked him whether he meant I was a doormat. And do you know what – he didn’t really deny it all that convincingly.

Now this is obviously taking it down to its minutia – no doubt he was talking about bigger and deeper issues than drinking or smoking, after all – he has been in therapy (Not that it seems to have helped that much) he doesn’t really know what he’s doing and where he’s going with his life – only that it’s not where he is now (not surprisingly given he’s an Estate Agent) and as I speak he is haring off on a trip to Afghanistan to chase some kind of life fulfilment and a career there..

So maybe this isn’t about me. Maybe it’s his problem and he’s looking for some kind of mother figure who will make his decisions for him. Who he can blame in his old age because he never did half the things he wanted to. Maybe, deep down inside, he wanted me to tell him that he couldn’t go to Afghanistan. That he should stick to being an Estate Agent and grow up. But I’m not built like that.

And so I leapt back to a quandary that has bothered me for years. Am I too low maintenance?

Now we’ve all heard guys talking about how they hate high maintenance girls. How they’d never go near them. How they’re actually self-obsessed headcases. But let’s face it – these girls always seem to end up with their guy wrapped around their little fingers. They get their protestations of undying love by the second month. By six months they’re shacked up with big plans for the future – and once they are living together, these are the boys who on a lads’ night out are home by 8.30pm rubbing their girlfriend’s feet. Any hint of rebellion in the ranks and the gentle suggestion that their relationship might terminate if she doesn’t get her own way pulls the man back into the appropriately slavish devotion she’s accustomed to.

Me? By month six I’m still sending hesitant emails asking what they’re up to this weekend, stuttering over the suggestion that we meet up and asking if it would be too much of an imposition for them to agree to spend my birthday with me.

And I honestly don’t know why this is. The guy meets me. I’m in control, I’m occasionally funny – I look like I can hold my own. But the minute I start to fall for them, something happens. I’m suddenly too eager to please. That sharp wit that took the piss out of them on our first meeting (it’s like an aggressive form of flirtation - promise) which they found so attractive, suddenly becomes a slightly hesitant voice asking them whether they want a cup of tea or not. The text that says ‘it’s fine if you don’t make it home till 4.30am and that you come in wasted – you just make sure you have fun’.

I haven’t lived up to my promise. Suddenly I’m a low maintenance doormat. And they weren’t after that – they were after somebody that would curb them.

And then something challenges my belief that it was my fault. I bump into him exactly one week afterwards (just before the trip to Afghanistan for those paying attention). He’s looking sheepish, his feet are shuffling. He can’t meet my eyes. He is the epitome of schoolboy done wrong. Suddenly I’m back to the belief that this is a guy who isn’t after a relationship of equal partners, that he really is after a mother figure who will keep him under control. That actually, I might have just been having a genuinely ‘meeting of equals’ relationship with him and it was his problem that he couldn’t deal with that. Suddenly I begin to feel a sense of freedom. Did I really want to be in a relationship where I’m telling somebody what to do? Where I put my hand over their glass at dinner parties when they’ve had too much to drink and press them to invite the ‘right kind’ of people to dinner? No.

So rationally I feel better. Admittedly I have to keep an eye out for that subservient streak when I next embark on a relationship but I know, deep down, that it’s not so very bad. I’m more of a living room rug than a doormat and it’s nothing that can’t be dealt with with a bit of stern self talking to.

There's just one little problem - now I need my heart to catch up with my head. Because it is really beginning to get on my nerves that I miss this person who was so very very wrong for me.