Letters of Love?

Someone emailed me a couple days ago and asked how I ever became such a cynic of love. Ha! If only I had a day to explain it all!
A few years ago, I had written on here about what happened with Aaron (the kids' dad) and I. But I deleted it. I explained in great detail that Aaron had left to go to treatment in Minnesota for a drug abuse problem that I had NO idea about when we were together. I had lived with this man for five years and I had no idea the issues that he had with drugs. I always thought he was just crazy and that I was too weak to leave him. Enter months of al-anon and a weekend at the treatment facility in MN, and I realized that I had been victim to his abuse. I had been manipulated and physically, mentally, and verbally abused by this guy. I FINALLY grew a backbone and I was able to stay away from him, to not let him "back in" and to maintain my independence.  In doing so, I pretty much wrote off every other male in the universe, because surely they would hurt me as deeply as Aaron had.
Almost two years later, I met JM. And you know that story-- it's a perfect love story, with a tragic ending! (okay, maybe that's a bit dramatic!) But the truth is, I wish I had stuck to my gut feeling about relationships. Sometimes I wish I had never gone through everything that I did with JM, good or not, because of how I feel now. It's a terrible, horrible, gut-wrenching feeling to know that I spent ten months with someone, whom I considered my s-s-s-s-soul mate (puke!). I HONESTLY thought JM and I were going to be MARRIED! ME, MARRIED! Gretchen doesn't talk about MARRIAGE! But I found a PERFECT man and I wanted to be with him FOREVER. What. A. Joke.
I wrote last week about how hard it has been to find little love letters from JM all over the place. As much as those letters made me happy in the past, reading them now makes me hurt so badly. I still just DON'T understand.

Here's the reason I am writing this today-- It's not to make myself look like a poor pathetic girl who constantly gets dumped (although that seems to be the looks of it, eh?!). But I feel like I "deserve" to be a cynic! I "deserve" to be bitter about relationships. I feel like I have been through enough CRAP relationships to make me jaded for L-I-F-E. It's SUCH a different level when you have kids. It's not just a matter of me being a negative Nancy! It's me being cautious of who comes around my babies. And I was foolish enough to trust that this person wouldn't disappoint me. I trusted that JM was "the one"...and I was fooled.

Ugh, I guess it's just not in my cards to be in a "happy, healthy relationship." I think I'm okay with that now. I tried. I put EVERYTHING into my relationship with JM. I put myself out there 100000%. And it didn't work. It wasn't enough. But that's okay. I'll be okay. I AM okay. Lesson learned.