I'm writing Tragedies that are also Sins

This day I could have been married.
Hah!
What a sick joke.

Technically my marriage is saved

I'm finally ready to make a public statement about the scene.--I think I fully understand what happened, and I think I am calmed down enough to share my side of the story without being emotional:

A few months ago, I drove down to T, her home town, to have a chat with N. She knew ahead of time what  we would be chatting about. I was going to give her her stuff back, and she was going to give my ring back. It was a week or so before my fall school semester started. I knew that the distance would kill us. I knew that my lack of time would kill us. I knew that I was fed up and frustrated by her and I didn't want any more to do with her. I went through a struggle with her which I shouldn't have had to. True, I learned many things from it, but only if I can only make sense of the things I learned, and I'm still trying to make sense of it all.

Let me back up.

In my past, I have been known to act the paladin. Many people see it, but most of the time I am oblivious to it. I wish I were not a paladin because it causes me more trouble than it helps others; it isn't very efficient, I sacrifice a lot and others only get a little. I'd do much better, utility-wise, in helping myself and swearing off everyone else. A paladin type is someone who goes out of their way to "rescue" others in distress, particularly damsels. Because there is a false misconception that women are oppressed more than men, and because men are attracted to women, male 'paladin types' are prone to fall for women who need rescuing. I do that without knowing it.

N needed rescuing. She was living in Logan and her aunt and uncles'. She was making minimum wage. She was anti-social and didn't know how to make friends in a new town. She was tricked into get student loans for a degree that would get her a job that wouldn't even pay for the student loans, and on top of that she had a car loan. She was born poor, in T--a lower class town in a middle-class state. To add to it, she was uneducated--she wasted her public-school education and barely got by with the basics. She and her family were destined, before they were born, to live an unambitious life. The most ambitious one in their family, N's older sister, ruined her life at a young age by getting pregnant and having three kids, out of wedlock. And if all that wasn't enough, they were among the blind and disillusioned who live on the culture of church rather than the root of religion.

I wanted to help N so badly. I can remember, after our first date, thinking how she might turn into a sweet person if she only had more confidence and talked more. So my paladin side stepped in and wanted to help her break out of her shell. I spent more and more time with her thinking I could change her and, as I put it at the time "if nothing else, she'll becoming exactly what I want; I am not going to give up on her until she has been molded."
Not only do I have a nasty habit of playing the paladin, I also have a nasty habit of playing the artist--on people. I want to perfect people, make them better, improve them. Everyone I meet, I want them to succeed. I want them to leave me a better person. Some people appreciate this--no one has rooted for them  before and they want so much to have that support.--I've made MANY close friends because of this. But at other times, my playing the artist is more a force of my own personality convincing and persuading them to become something they are not and do not want to be.

After a while, the exact thing happened that shouldn't happen: she started fitting the part. I let her read a copy of an Evil book that I wrote. It is a book for women meant to explain to them exactly what men want. It's very Mary Wolstencraftian. For some reason, I still cling to the belief that women are divinely designed to be a help-meet for their husbands. Something deep inside of me encourages me to believe that a non-patriarchal society would be very faulty, just as it was in Cihuatlan, Mexico anciently. Something tells me that men and women can never be complete equals because men and women are unique and different. But women can be masters of their own lives. They can be the masters of their own sphere. They can navigate the world in the way that it presently is, and that can grant them anything that they want, but only if they develop the right skills and talents. --I told you it was an evil book. Even though it might be insightful, the presentation and the initial premises of the book taint the rest of the book. Anyone who reads that book will be able to act the part--but being a film director, I know that acting is not reality, and acting isn't for everyone.
N began to play the part. Mixed with my own desires to find someone who was the part, and my desires to morph her into what I wanted--and even my arrogant belief that if anyone can get people to change, it is I--I began to plan my life around the world I had created. But it wasn't her own choosing. The only thing N had was more of a tabula rasa than most people--she wasn't confident enough to project her own reality and went along with everything I said, plus she was too uneducated to know if what I said was correct or not and she assumed that I had the best intentions in mind.
It wasn't until she was provoked that she started to get smart and play cunning; subconsciously, or perhaps it is just by some sort of fate, she realized that she was not being herself. Although I had her best interests in mind, although I was willing to offer her more than she could ever give me in return, she couldn't handle the acting and she gave up on me. I was a monarch in our relationship, and the unfortunate thing about monarchs is that they are only as powerful as the power they have in the present, not their past or future power. I had none.
It was some time around when I moved back home, because I couldn't stay in Logan, that she ran away and gave up. She was all alone again. She wasn't tied with an umbilical cord 5 minutes away from me. She didn't have friends to entertain her, and with me gone, the movie dream went with it. Everything I ever created for her, my web of magic spells, future deams--they were gone because I couldn't maintain them.
The trouble with people who don't have confidence (which is most everyone) is that they can be led around by those who do have confidence. The sooner you believe in yourself, believe that you matter, that you can accomplish things, that you don't need to rely on other people--in that moment, you will have the world in your hands and no one will persuade you unless they have more confidence than you do. N had that problem--her family, her old friends, others beside myself were feeding her their own desires. They controlled her. They controlled her better than I ever could. Especially living 45 minutes away.

[[--Lest anyone get carried away with my metaphors: I am not a wizard. I did not cast some "spell" on her. I didn't breathe lies into her head. I had as much influence on her as I do other people. But because of the way humans work--the way the world works--the way life works, some people are more prone to be "persuaded" than others are; and I mean persuaded in the rhetorical sense. This isn't a magic trick. However, I will confess to ALSO having a problem where I am TOO persuasive--had I been a country bumpkin with no rhetorical muscle memory, none of this would have occurred.]]

Others convinced her to abandon me, to return to her hometown. They probably did so with good intentions, but good intentions do not amount to moral acts. Good intentions, I found the hard way, often lead to bad outcomes, and bad outcomes are all that matter in a utilitarian world. This was for the better though--it has aided me at least, and who else matters in my world!? (I'm practicing) At home she was exposed to more of others influence, and the more that others persuade her, the more my influence doesn't work.
Influence is a funny thing, it requires constant input in order to succeed, because if you stop influencing something it reverts back to its internal state. If I stop listening to dirty music, my mind gets out of the gutter because I am not being influenced by it. If I stop reading my scriptures and going to church, then I stop being a religious person because it's not in me to be religious. To overcome the natural man, we have to influence ourselves otherwise, until eventually our core has been transformed. For instance, I have never smoked or drank and it is not in my internal state (although it is part of the natural man) to do so. I would need other influences to get me to drink or smoke...such is the way our eternal world works: power and influence. :-/

I found, when I moved away from Logan, that N was slowly re-attaching herself to her family. All young people attach themselves to things they know are familiar--women especially (here I go again with my patriarchal views, but psychological science argues this, not me [not that their science has any more authority than human science...]) N strengthened the strings she still had attached to her others. Instead of tying herself to me and our future, she tightened the chains she had around her others. It was then that I began to realize everything I saw was a creation of my own hands. N moved back home to T to be back with her old influences. That's all she ever knew, and she wasn't ready to spread her wings and soar.

I made N into that sweet girl, when she was a spoiled brat of a poor family. I made her into a confident young woman who could do anything independently, when really she required my assistance to believe in anything. She was confident--but only in me. [[I can't stand people like that. That's called hero worship in my book of life.--Get your own gods and quit worshiping me. Search inside of that hell you call yourself and anchor yourself to what's inside of you, not what's out in the world, because if you don't you'll be lost!--my two cents]] Once she lost her confidence in me, she realized that she was in no situation to get married. She was too poor to afford me at the time, even if I could have paid off all of her debts with the money I have stored away. She wasn't mature enough, or independent enough, to separate herself from the rest of the world and anchor herself to a husband--she only thought she could do it. It was all just a dream, a wish, a want. Her blind following of her culture led her to believe that she was at th

With me not around, she reverted to her old ways. I started to notice that she acted like a little kid when she wasn't acting for me. I started to notice that she was rude and selfish to everyone around her, especially to me--she was probably taking her frustrations out on me for putting a spell on her. I came to the realization that she was not the person she seemed--or rather, the person that I wanted her to be. She didn't have the potential to become what I wanted her to be and she wasn't anywhere near the kind of person I wanted to be anyway.
I kept up with the magic for a couple months, thinking that eventually I could cast my greatest spell and that everything would be fixed magically.--there were things I could have done, I'm not an innocent twit, I know how to manipulate people, how to brainwash people, how to control people. But I'm not like that. I would never do that. Besides, is it worth it? Is it worth it to waste away your energy fighting a war just to win, or is it better to make peace, cut your losses, and save yourself from your bad decisions? --I would much rather correct myself, lick my wounds, and grow into a bigger person with a gorgeous wife than tame a young shrew who could never be anything more than a shrew. Taming a shrew is only worth it if she has mountains of gold tied to her name...and I don't need to repeat what I said earlier. If anything, I have the right to be a shrew, not her!

After several trials of my patience, the time wound down to where I knew I would be moving further way from her and that would bring more problems. T is about 2.5 hrs from Logan. If I thought it was bad being 45 min away, or being 1.5hrs away, I could imagine what it would be like 2.5 hours away. I knew things were only going to get worse, especially since I was taking a maxed out school schedule and probably wouldn't have time for anything. Lack of time and excessive distance really harmed our relationship.
Knowing that things were only going to get worse for us, and realizing that she was only being what I wanted her to be and not what she really was, I knew I needed to change our relationship. She was false--as false as an actor is not a real person. It hurt me to think that I had created the mess I was in. It hurt me more that she went along with it. I realized I couldn't marry her, and yet I stuck with her because I kept telling myself a lot of evil thoughts like "all relationships are that way for you and you'll just have to get used to forcing people to act around you" or "you're poor and stupid right now, but now is your only chance to get married because when you're older you won't be as interested in marriage because you'll be smarter and richer," and all other sorts of evil thoughts that would have only led me to unhappiness.
Things happened just as I thought they would. I watched our relationship fall apart because she wasn't real. The girl I knew and wanted to marry was no the girl I was engaged to. The girl I was engaged to, I learned, was more interested in getting married than she was in me. The fact that I had money encouraged her; and now we return to my initial statement: I could have been married this day. Hah! What a sick joke.

What is love? Why do young girls want love so badly that they will give up everything for what they think is love, only to realize it is passion? Why do young men want love so badly that they will ignore their gut feelings and proceed to be cuckold?

My life will continue. It always does. I'm not ready to be married... not until I can fully support myself. Not until I'm living on my own entirely. Marriage is for wimps who have given up on the real world and all they want is a woman to take care of them. No, I'm not getting married until I meet someone smarter than I am. I'll be in good hands at that point and I can finally give up--the world will be in good hands. ;D