I wanted to share Living Life’s most recent blog post with you guys.  I always appreciate the raw honesty she shows in her blog, discussing her post-divorce life as a single woman just trying to do her thang. This week’s entry is no exception as she examines why we let certain people treat us badly (read: men) when, intellectually, we totally know better.  If you’ve been hurt once (or twice, or three times) how do you proceed in life, maintaining your faith in people without leaving yourself vulnerable to disaster and heartbreak?  It’s a good question.  I think it’s a very delicate dance we must perform, being open and willing to explore new relationships, but at the same time not forgetting who we are and what our value is.  Remember that as women, we have the option of saying, “no,” and we have to exercise that right, even when it’s uncomfortable or awkward.  Make “No” a phrase your comfortable with and use it when your gut tells you to.  Because if there’s anything the readers of this blog know, it’s that there’s nothing more awkward than dealing with bad relationship issues later rather than sooner.  

 ”In one particular relationship I found myself constantly going against what I knew had to be the truth and falling for his lies. He twisted the truth, and a lot of times straight lied to me, but somehow he always managed to make me feel like I was going crazy for questioning him and not blindly believing what he was saying. I allowed this to go on for a very long time, almost the entire three and a half years that we were together.”

“For the life of me, I can’t come up with a great reason that I allowed him to do that to me. Was it simply because I wanted to believe that he was a good honest person who loved me and wouldn’t hurt me? Maybe. Was it because my insecurities about being alone made me fear him leaving me? Possibly. My guess is that it was probably because of a combination of these things along with some others that I haven’t come to realize yet.”

How many of you can relate?  Read the rest of the entry here.

I found this blog today and thought that surfergrrrl had some pretty good first-hand knowledge of an Extremely Difficult BreakUp (XDB).  She’s writing at the dawn of the one year anniversary of her break-up with Mr. Wrong:

“I’m sure some of you are aware of my story, and the heartbreak and devastation that followed. As many of you have felt with your exes, this was supposed to be the person I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with. This was the person I trusted, who made me feel at “home,” who made me laugh, and who I loved deeply. But it is not what I got back. That, was the hardest pill to swallow.”

Check out her full post at:

http://theambienchronicles.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html