Sambuca: The Bad

December 3, 2024December 4, 2024 notsosexinthecity

The man was practically perfect in every way… until he wasn’t. Then, we came to The Bad. Sigh. It’s a tale as old as time, isn’t it? I put these men up on pedestals, setting expectations far too high (for them, not me,) only to have all of my hopes dashed.

This chapter of the Sambuca story contains more ups and downs than the Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, so I hope you’re buckled in tight!

The cancellations (part one)

Listen, I’m an adult. I can take responsibility and accountability for all the ways I fucked up my situationship with Sambuca. Let’s start with my habit of cancelling our dates. I’d double-booked myself for the first one, but it wasn’t the only time I blew him out. I fully hold my hands up to fucking him around.

100% my bad.

I cancelled our second (and third) date because I didn’t feel ready and had spotted (what I thought might be) a couple of red flags. It was suddenly all very real, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I’d not long come out of a long-term relationship, which he knew about. (Neither of us were officially single when it turned into… well, whatever it turned into, remember?)

I couldn’t work out if I really liked Sambuca, or if he was just a really cute distraction. He’d said it to me enough times: maybe he was a rebound, something to distract me, yadda yadda yadda. After a while, I guess I started questioning my own intentions, and anxiety overcame my excitement.

“I think I need a little time,” I told him, opting for brutal honesty. “I’m not over the ex. Arguments with him still affect me. I don’t think it’s fair to dive straight into something with you when things feel so unfinished with him.”

Sambuca The Bad Cancellations

I didn’t want Sambuca to walk away, and I told him as such. I didn’t want to walk away, either. All I needed was time. That’s what I thought, anyway. Time for him to show me that he’s not just some dickhead guy, and for me to show him that I’m not some cunty woman. Time for me to come around to the idea of him/us. Time to grieve for my former relationship properly before jumping headfirst into another love story that would, inevitably, leave me broken-hearted. Don’t they all?

Fuck, I’ve waited months, years, in fact, for men, jumped through all sorts of hoops for men – maybe it was time that I made a man wait for me.

I didn’t know if it was right, or kind, but it felt like the right thing to do.

Wait, take a breath, don’t act without thinking, make good decisions.

I wouldn’t have blamed him for running a million miles in the opposite direction at that point. I gave him the option, but he chose to wait – and I was fucking delirious about it. He was really willing to wait for me? Give me time? Wow. Maybe this one really was The One. (If you believe in such shit, obviously)

Or, y’know, maybe not.

The drinking

“I don’t really want to date a drinker,” I said to Sambuca, super early on in our situationship. “I’m a non-drinker. Not an alcoholic, but I do have a problem with alcohol.”

He seemed to like that about me, even going as far as to tell his mum about it. She seemed to like that about me, too.

“I don’t drink that much,” he replied. “Couple of times per year.”

I mulled it over. It was still pretty early on for “us,” and if it was just a couple of times per year, maybe I could deal with it. He was drunk when we first exchanged phone numbers (something he brought up later on,) so I could hardly make a big deal of it, could I? It’s not like I didn’t know.

After that, Sambuca went out drinking one night, got into a fight, showed me his messed-up knuckles, and mumbled incoherently about punching multiple men.

The next morning, slightly less bungalowed, he retracted everything. There was no fight. There were no punches. The bruised fist was probably from falling over, or something.

Huh?

“You do know that you’ve told me what actually happened already, right?” I asked him.

“I was drunk. Talking shit,” he replied.

*I’m paraphrasing his side of the conversation, obviously. Privacy and all that.

The boozing and fighting knocked me back a little. I’m a “survivor” of domestic abuse, so I’m not exactly looking to rush headfirst into a relationship with Mr. Drunk n’ Violent again. The whole situation felt frighteningly familiar, which I told him.

“I’m not that guy,” he repeatedly assured me.

I believed him. Sort of. It was a massive red flag for me, but I couldn’t tar him with the same brush as the men before him. Right? I figured that I’d give him a shot. He’d given me time when I’d asked for it, so the least I could do was give him the chance to show me that he wasn’t just some drunken, violent knobhead.

The pill

I went back on the contraceptive pill for the first time in about six or seven years. I’m not going to lie; I think it made me a little crazy. Like, a lot crazy. Batshit crazy. I was up and down like a damn yo-yo, and I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like for Sambuca.

He said one time, “It doesn’t matter what I say, good or bad, you’re going to find fault with it. I can’t win.”

And he was right. It was exactly like that. He said some daft shit, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t all him. I was irritable, and everything he said irritated me. I couldn’t let things go. I started fights over things I should’ve swallowed and forgotten about. It was awful for me, so I have no idea how shitty it must have been for him.

He deserves your sympathy here, for sure.

Bitches be crazy, and all that.

The work trip

“I thought I’d told you about the work trip,” he’d said to me, a couple of months into our text situationship.

“Nope,” I replied. “You definitely didn’t tell me. I even searched the chat: no mention.”

Sambuca was going on a work trip, to another country… for several months.

And, once again, everything felt very, very familiar. Uncomfortably so.

“I am definitely going to go mental while you’re away,” I told him. You know my motto by now: honesty is always the best policy. “I’ve been here before, and it really didn’t go well for me. I’m scared it’s going to ‘trigger’ me.”

Truth be told, his work trip terrified the shit out of me. It really was history repeating itself. I kept telling myself, this guy isn’t that guy, this guy isn’t that guy, this guy isn’t that guy…

Did I really know him well enough to make that determination, though? I mean, we’d never met. We’d spoken on the phone enough for me to think I’d gotten a real, true, and honest idea of who he really was… but I didn’t know him. Not really. Just like he didn’t know me. It’s very easy to portray yourself as anyone you want, via WhatsApp and DMs, right?

Not only that, was I really happy to sit and wait for several months, for another man? It almost felt like payback, for making him wait for me.

“Haven’t you already done this for a man?” my mum asked, and the question hit me like a truck.

“Yes, but not like this,” I answered, thinking I’d made a point.

“Why? Because he’s different?” She did air quotation marks, so I drank the last of my coffee and made my excuses to leave.

That woman has never been wrong.

Ever.

Don’t tell her I said that, though. Obviously.

The cancellations (part two)

Time was running out for us. His work trip was coming up fast, and the months that we had left to meet, turned into weeks… then days.

Everything went wrong. Literally everything. The universe had well and truly conspired against us.

We argued.

His flight was brought forward, so we lost a few potential meeting days.

I had a step-kid visit that I deliberately didn’t tell Sambuca about, which ended up being the reason behind another cancelled date, and it went down about as well as expected. (In my defence, I didn’t know if the visit was definitely happening, and I didn’t tell Sambuca because it was ex-related, AKA a bit of a touchy subject.)

Then, I had medical appointments that interfered with new plans that we’d made. I couldn’t make my mind up over cancelling, essentially giving him false hope until the early hours of the morning, when I finally blurted out, “I’m just going to do the colonoscopy.”

Sambuca was gutted. I was gutted. But my mother had, once again, delivered one of her cutting lines, this one an absolute cracker:

“Are you seriously going to neglect your health for a man that you’ve never met?”

Yes, mum, that’s exactly what I’d planned to do until you came at me with that tone, thank you very much.

I had a pre-cancerous polyp removed and discovered a new autoimmune disease, so it was a really good job that I didn’t cancel, like I said I would. I’d chased the appointment for almost three years, going back and forth from the doctors with armfuls of paperwork that they didn’t have a copy of, so I think I’d have been pretty pissed with myself if I’d cancelled. In turn, that would’ve turned into resentment and anger towards him.

I made the right decision…

Even if it did mean cancelling on him again.

The breakups (part one)

I know I cancelled a lot of our dates, but Sambuca brought it up repeatedly. He’s passive aggressive as fuck… as am I, which made for some pretty interesting temper tantrums.

Lots of little issues started to appear, mostly down to incompatibility and high-set expectations, probably on both parts. We had different ways of communicating, especially quantity of messages. We had different ways of dealing with things, too. That threw a spanner in the works more than a few times.

Between the drinking, the maybe-violence, the work trip, and some of the things that he’d said, I’d started to think that Sambuca wasn’t the man for me. Yes, I was very sexually attracted to him, I could talk to him for hours, and I wanted him to stay in my life forever – but no, I couldn’t trust him.

We/he felt like déjà vu, but was that just my trauma talking?

I decided to call time on our situationship before he went on the work trip. I was convinced that we wouldn’t make it through. As much as I wanted to be hopeful, I also had to be realistic. We had so many little cracks, it wouldn’t take much to shatter apart the whole thing. So, I offered him the opportunity to go, have fun, enjoy his work trip, then give me a shout when he got back.