Showing scars: what are your relationship fears?

[WheatToast]

Originally Posted by SirenManda

My biggest relationship fear is feeling like I have to tone down my natural personality. I can come off stuck up if people can't realize I'm being sarcastic. I don't want to bottle all my comments and hold back how I feel because someone is overly sensitive. Needless to say, I can be hard to deal with.

Seems like you'd be easy to deal with because you're so direct. I like that!
Anyway...
I've had a hell of a time trying not to overthink relationship issues.
I've had to overcome a lot of fixed beliefs and behaviors, like people pleasing, codependency, and erring on the side of being more reserved than I actually am.
I also had to learn that disputes happen, and if I don't advocate for my own position, she's not going to, either.
Also, I've had to release the belief that I was forever doomed to attract cheaters, users and liars.
Each time that's happened, I worried more and more that I would never find a woman whose values more closely matched my own.
To find my part in attracting some of these shady ladies, it took dragging myself back to early childhood and seeing how I learned to take on the role of the schlimazel (mom), because the schlamiel (dad) was a cheater and liar, which to me always seemed far more obnoxious, and even villainous.
I finally figured out I didn't have to choose either role, so I was free to give up my martyr's crown of thorns, and the lofty opinion I held of myself as being more moral than most. Ugh.
What fun it was to admit to myself that sometimes all I really want is to hit it and quit it. Turns out it's not scandalous; it's called being single.

I finally decided to turn all the complicated bits over to my higher power because I was exhausted trying to sort things out with women, romance and my bumbling assumptions.

Like a lot of butches, I'm often drawn to beautiful femme 'bad girls,' because they're usually sexy as all get-out and so much fun (until either my self esteem collapses because I think I'm not in her league, or one night she comes home late with rug burn on her back, smelling like some butch's Right Guard and Aqua Velva).

Even now, I'm slightly worried that someone will be offended by something I wrote, and lecture me about how I come off seeming too this or not enough that...but please don't.