The guy that I refer to as "the horse's ass" (to myself), came over today and tried to twist my arm into going out tonight and changing my plans, when I didn't want to. I stood my ground firmly and said "no". I call him a horse's ass because he keeps trying to twist my arm, and I've had enough. He still thinks it's 2009 and we're fresh out of college and he can just help himself to my time - he doesn't respect my time. I was nice before, but I'm tired of it. The guy isn't thinking of me, he's thinking of himself.
Eventually we got to talking about running and I agreed, out of niceness, to go for a run on Sunday. He then tried to say that we should run regularly...yeah that's not going to happen. I'm not walking an hour one way, then running a 5K, then walking an hour back, regularly. I'll do this ONCE to be nice. That is it. I'm not torpedoing my whole day for this, on a regular basis. I've done it before and my whole day was shot.
It's not that I like being mean to this guy, or in general. It's that I'm protecting my time. I was generous with my time in the past, but I'm not getting any younger, and I still don't have what I want out of life yet -
a career that doesn't make me hate life and myself because it makes me feel inherently inferior/incapable of learning skills,
being good at something cool and becoming an interesting person,
and a romantic relationship.
That's what really matters to me, and what it's the utmost importance to me that I don't miss out on it. Only I can figure out how to get there for myself. And that's why I don't feel bad being assertive and setting boundaries - cause if I don't get what I want out of life, because I let my arm get twisted into giving this guy my time instead of figuring out my life, he's not going to magically fix it for me. He's just going to say "oh well, I guess you missed out".
He's like "oh you're just on the computer all day". Uh no dude. I'm figuring out my life. Trying to figure out why I've been so unhappy for most of it. Trying to figure out who I am. You're not going to do this for me, and you're not going to be the one who suffers if I don't get what I want, I will. So I'll choose if and when I feel like going out. I won't have my arm twisted.
And that's another thing, this guy doesn't care about getting a girlfriend. He's OK with going through life single, and with going through life as just an audience member. I'm very much not OK with either of those things. So that's a huge difference between us. I don't want my life to be like his life. I know myself enough to know that I would never be happy like that.
The only thing I forgot to do, was answer the door in a cowboy hat, wearing shades, and shirtless, and then told him "boy I done told you, you need to quit acting like the east end of a horse headed west".