  So the topic that dominates my mind (this is so stereotypically woman) is romantic relationships. It's the one thing that I think I am worst at doing well. Lately I have been on a terrible streak. I'm 34, a single heterosexual woman, never married, and I haven't been in a long relationship since college. Although I have had a few positive relationships, the two men I have "hung out with" in the past year have been terrible for me. I'm sure they are nice enough men on their own, but they were bad matches. The most recent was A-----.
A is a 34 year old male who I met on the second week of my new job (I work as a human resources analyst doing HR systems). He captured my attention because he seemed smart and witty, although he clearly had some ADD. We started chatting online (our work has an in-house IM function); he works across the building from me, so it's actually fairly meaningless that we work together. A began revealing inappropriate info to me right away--within 24 hours of starting to talk, he had referenced his sexual proclivities and apparatus, told me all about his prior wife and girlfriends, etc. etc. We began going to lunch regularly, and at the end of the first week, we went out for drinks after work. Part of my brain kept saying, "this will never work, this is crazy. " Another part of me really liked the attention and that pheremonal attraction. I was more physically attracted to this guy than I have been to anyone, ever--he's not that attractive, per se, but it was the right combination of body, personality, smells, whatever. It turned out that A has almost no time in his life, but worse, that he needs large blocks of time to himself to feel okay. He admitted he needed 3-4 hours alone every day to feel okay. So his priorities of work, time alone, and some side work he did as a photographer used up all his time.
Over the three months we hung out, we only met outside of work 2 times. Our "relationship" consisted of this: hours of IMing during work and sometimes at night at home; a couple lunches during the week together (although this tapered off dramatically after the first few weeks); once a week or so, making out in the backseat of his car for 45 minutes after work (ouch!
painful to write); phone calls 2-3 times per week. Plus two hours of drinks the first week we met (mentioned above), and 3 hours at my house one time about 8 weeks after we met. He also took me out to a nice lunch on my birthday. Those were our 3 "dates. " Now I don't think many rational people would call this a relationship. I got very emotionally wrapped up in it, however, because we were spending so much time IMing. Worse, he was pushing my emotional buttons in a big way, because he was promising so much.
He would talk as if marriage was in our future, but then he couldn't make time to see me. I railed and railed against him about his--I told him he was being a huge tease for being so emotionally intimate on a verbal level when he couldn't put any time or companionship in on an actual level. Lest you think this was all one-sided, a little game I was playing in my own mind, let me tell you: he was telling me he loved me, that he wanted to take care of me, that I was the most amazing woman he had ever met, that he wanted me to move in with him.
He wanted to be my gardener, and I was the garden. His own words! It was just so confusing, so troubling, so hurtful--here was a man I was attracted to, who spent hours upon hours talking to me via IM, who professed love and adoration. But he couldn't spend any time with me. And he couldn't see that this was a contradiction, a problem. He thought I couldn't accept his love, and I was creating difficulties so that I didn't have to accept the love of a "healthy" man.
Anyway, I tried to cut it off multiple times, but he would just ignore that and continue as is. Finally, I laid it down that I didn't want him to talk to me about anything sexual or romantic, and I stopped logging on to the IM function at work. This seems to have finally stopped him. But I was so mad at him for so long. It felt like he was holding out a platter of love and then always yanking it back when I walked toward him. There are other details here, painful to admit. I'll stop here--if you want to know more, tell me. And remember, all analysis is fair game! 
