You’re an Alpha female, they insist: strong, confident, hard to impress, high-maintenance, and easy to bore. That I don’t waste time validating my partner’s feelings since I’m too busy validating my own. They speak of how I intimidate others around me, how I’m not afraid to ask for what I want.

I seem so strong and self-contained but then I read what it is I write to him in the pages of my diary and I see another side of me.

“I am afraid…I’m afraid of what I will become without you. Not professionally, not financially either, I have that covered here. I’m afraid that without you I will never love, that I will never again feel the thrills of loving someone the way I love you.

I know of these two guys. I want neither.

One of them resembles you which makes me reconsider

Maybe I was too harsh

But…

He never had a chance even when he did

Maybe he is what I need to forget you…maybe

Or maybe I just want you here”

I pretend to read the article all the while meeting his steady gaze, searching the photo for some clue as to why he is not the man for me. And suddenly it’s obvious. We are poles apart and from two different worlds.

My friends used to laugh at my naivety, but now they ask how I manage men so well. I smile and say nothing because I know the remedy is far worse than the pain: I simply don’t fall in love.

“I am not okay. But I will be.

This could take weeks, months possibly a year or more. Until one morning, I’ll wake up and realize that I’m thinking about something else and then I’ll know the worst is over. Strangers Again. It’s happened before; it will happen again I’m sure.

Meanwhile I remain grounded. Be in my present –which is here and now. From the look of things, you’re barely in it. Yet you occupy the most space in my thoughts.”

With each day that passes, I see more clearly how fragile men are, how inconstant, insecure and surprising they are… a few of my friends’ guys have propositioned me. At first I was shocked, but now I think that’s the way men are.

“Parting ways has never been easy. By far this is the worst.”

I am wiser now, I tell myself, Immune to pretty words and vacuous conversations. As I write, I hope that thinking sad thoughts would bring tears into my eyes but I find that I can’t evoke any. It’s as if my mind has decided that my life is without adversity. So I blink and silently wish that I will love the man beside me. It would be so simple; it would make the poor guy so happy. But I have never felt a stronger instinct than the one that insists I work that I stay away from affairs of the heart that I never again fall in love.

Love makes a person stop eating, working and feeling at peace. Love demolishes all the old things it finds in its path. No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control and are somehow capable of sustaining a relationship that is already rotten. They are engineers of the superseded.

Other people are the exact opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find love a solution to all their problems. They make other people responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either excited because something wonderful has happened or depressed cause something unexpected has just ruined everything.

” Instead of feeling depressed, I experience a strange sense of pride. I would like to believe that I’m in love with you. With someone who didn’t figure in my plans. That I have seen and felt things very few people around me will, that I was pushing my own limits experiencing things which one day in the silence of my heart, in the tedium of old age, I would remember almost with nostalgia- however absurd that may seem.”

Keeping love at bay or surrendering blindly to it – which of these two is the least destructive?

I don’t know.