Coming to Terms With Romantic Obsessions
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Coming to Terms With Romantic Obsessions

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I’ve always been in love with make-believe. As a kid, I used to wander around the house, stare into the mirror above the mantle, convinced that there was a portal to Wonderland and I’d find my way in if I just stared hard enough. I’d stand outside my grandmother’s house beneath the roses that towered over my eight-year-old head, imagining I was a shrunken Alice trying to reason with talking flowers.

Part of me still believes in Wonderland, and I certainly believe in other dimensions. Perhaps I’ve watched too many episodes of The Twilight Zone.

I also was always a writer. From the time I was four or five, I’d sit down and write all sorts of fantastical stories, which is still my favorite type of writing. As a chatty and poorly-behaved student in elementary school, I never got awards for best citizenship, and I certainly never got awards for math, but they did give me awards for creative writing.

To this day, the only awards I’ve received for writing have scratch ‘n sniff stickers on them. If you can believe it, 32 years later, they still smell.

So it makes sense, I suppose, that by the time I hit puberty, this rich fantasy life migrated over to boys. Typically, I crushed on the boys I also hated. From the very beginning, I was turned on by the turbulent love/hate phenomenon. Starting at around age 10, I fantasized about the boys that made fun of me.

Maybe that was a sign that something was off.

I convinced myself that these boys were crazy about me. So by the time I was 12 and had the balls to confess my love to this jerk in the 6th grade who I was obsessed with—indirectly, through my best friend, of course—I was shocked to discover he didn’t want to touch me with a 10-foot pole.

It didn’t help that I was an ugly preteen. I had a very ugly hook nose, fried blonde hair and a mouth full of braces. I was flat as a board and was told I had “no body” by one of the cutest boys in my sixth-grade class.

But I was too young to take it seriously and, to some degree, I had a stronger sense of self at 12 than I did at 33. Plus, I had the attention span of a preteen, which meant I could quickly move on to some other problem, like how to convince my mother to buy me Cocoa Puffs instead of Raisin Bran. That or I could move on to another crush.

But by the time I was a freshman in high school, my obsessions started have a grave effect on me. They completely consumed me, threw me into an eating disorder, which I have now outgrown, and interfered with my grades.

Andrew was the worst obsession, a comedy of errors. He was this tall bass player in my church youth group who also went to my Baptist high school. When I was a wallflower at a church social event, he came over and started talking to me, introducing himself. And that was enough to hook me.

I was convinced he was mad for me and I had the balls to ask him to the senior banquet (our school didn’t allow dancing). He told me he wasn’t going. So I was understandably quite shocked to find him at the banquet with a tall beautiful redhead dressed in a sexy, slinky dress.

It would have been fine if I had stopped there, wised up, taken a hint. But I couldn’t. I still obsessed over him. I was still convinced he was enamored of me.

Then the problem got worse. Because he went off to a junior college and I went off to USC, I figured the whole thing would dissipate. It didn’t. A year later, he also transferred to USC, the only boy from my high school and, once again, he’d pass me on campus, and once again, the fantasy returned.

The comedy continued.

My first job out of college was in Woodland Hills. Andrew’s first job also was in Woodland Hillsno, I didn’t orchestrate that. So we’d run into each other during lunch breaks, at Subway, at different spots. And the free gym membership I got from my job just happened to be for the same gym where Andrew worked out.

We started partying together, but he refused to sleep with me. And the obsession continued all the way until I was 24 and he went off to law school and vanished from my world.

Similar situations haunted me throughout my 20s, and I am loath to say even into my 30s. I’ll spare you the details.

And then the opposite started happening. By the time I was 30, a few guys came along who were sexually fixated with me. They couldn’t keep their hands off me, but they didn’t want anything to do with me emotionally. Instead of hating myself because I was ugly, I was devastated that they didn’t care about me. The irony is that Andrew did care about me. And Andrew did confess he didn’t want to fuck me when he was trashed and ruin the friendship.

But I couldn’t hear what my fuck buddies were saying, and I convinced myself they really were falling for me. I would hear “I don’t want a relationship” and twist it around in my head. Then I’d obsess and obsess and obsess and obsess. Then I’d hate their guts, then I’d fantasize some more.

I was 12 again. Trapped in the same cycle but unable to move on.

I audited SLAA, I confessed my obsession to my friends and I even confessed it to the men, hoping that would somehow help the situation. SLAA helped a lot, but I just didn’t have time for another 12-step program, so I bailed.

The obsessions returned.

So here I am, 36 and battling this bullshit. I am aware that I can be totally insane, delusional and unrealistic, and that it’s a pathological problem. This sort of makes the whole thing worse for me, although it makes it easy on the guys. Being aware of my madness, I don’t call them, I don’t persist, I just accept it and go crazy alone.

Thankfully, I’ve had healthy relationships in between and, ironically, my boyfriends are far more attractive than the guys I’ve been obsessed with. They want me, on both a physical and emotional level, and when they want me, there’s no need for fantasy. The charge isn’t there.

I’m still dealing with the problem. But it’s recently occurred to me that I can throw my imagination into something better. After abandoning fiction writing for years since it brought me no income, I’ve taken it up again and I find myself writing stories for hours. I even become so obsessed with them, I forget about men altogether.

I have many other passions too, like traveling. My current obsession is with my upcoming trip to Europe. Although it’s possible I’ll meet a tall dark flamenco dancer in Spain, or a brilliant philosophical Frenchman at a cafe in Paris, I highly doubt I’ll get obsessive when I know I’ll have to leave.

Maybe that will be good for me. Maybe I’ll have the perfect fling.

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About Author

Tracy Chabala is a freelance writer for many publications including the LA Times, LA Weekly, Smashd, VICE and Salon. She writes mostly about food, technology and culture, in addition to addiction and mental health. She holds a Master's in Professional Writing from USC and is finishing up her novel.