It's Years Since You've Been There and Now You've Disappeared Somewhere, Like Outer Space You've Found Some Better Place

I need to learn (and probably never will) that internet stalking old boyfriends is a terrible idea that only leads to pain and misery.

I don't know why, but I decided today that I absolutely could not continue with my life not knowing what was going on with my old boyfriend Doug Funny. Doug Funny and I had a brief, fraught relationship in the summer of 2004 when we were summer associates together. He got an offer and returned to the firm; I did not and did not.

Doug Funny was the first and only time I've ever fallen in love with someone at first sight. He had a girlfriend at the time (quelle surprise, given my history), but he ended his relationship with her (after much sturm und drang) to be with me. Then he broke up with me to get back with her and ultimately moved in with her. I told him I was in love with him, and he basically told me he didn't know what to say to that. We have barely spoken since. The last time we corresponded was in 2007. I sent him a Christmas card in the hopes of rekindling a friendship with him (an idea that seemed less stupid to me at the time than it does now in retrospect). He emailed me once, but that was it. I took that to mean that he didn't harbor any ill will toward me but neither did he have any interest in resuming regular contact.

To be clear, I loved Doug Funny very much. However, I think a lot of my ongoing attachment to him and my great difficulty in getting over him stemmed from the fact that his rejection of me occurred at virtually the exact instant as our summer employer's rejection of me. As any lawyer can tell you, failing to get an offer from the firm where you summer means that you are pretty much fucked. It's not an exaggeration to say that the course of my whole life would have been different if I had received that offer. If I had gotten an offer, I would not have returned to the firm to torture myself with continued contact with someone I loved who didn't want me. I would have leveraged that offer into an offer of employment at one of many other firms that would have welcomed a graduate of my top-ranked law school. Not having an offer branded me as defective. I was never told why I didn't get the offer, and most employers would not have cared anyway. Law firms are notoriously risk averse, and hiring someone whose summer firm didn't want her is a risky proposition. From this calamity, I went on to a clerkship that was, frankly, beneath me to a law firm that was also beneath me (though not as far beneath me as the clerkship). I escaped from that law firm to a very well-respected firm that ultimately laid me off for not having enough experience -- experience that I would most likely have had if I had progressed straight to a firm from law school as I expected to do.

I have probably gotten over the employment situation as much as I'm ever going to. It's not something I think about on a daily basis, but I haven't forgiven (and don't intend to forgive) the people I consider responsible for causing me not to get an offer. (I don't consider myself to be one of those people. I worked hard that summer, and I got good evaluations, and I deserved the offer.) I also can't deny the fact that my life would have been different (though arguably not necessarily better) if I had received the offer. I believe that not getting that offer was more disastrous to my career than my subsequent misfortune of being laid off and thus was the single biggest event in my career thus far.

All that boring career stuff is my way of saying that when Doug Funny broke my heart, his actions combined with another major disappointment and completely shattered me. It was like a giant meteoric impact, leaving an ugly, empty crater in my soul. It changed me -- in some ways for the worse and perhaps in some ways for the better, but it changed me.

I never thought our relationship changed Doug Funny. He was a self-confessed hater of change, which he proved by rejecting the change he made to the romantic landscape of his life and going back to the familiar, broken relationship with his old girlfriend. (I say their relationship was broken because although they had been together for four years, they had never had sex. This was not for religious reasons. It was basically because they didn't want to. That's not normal.) She apparently forgave him for his summer fling, and they resumed their relationship like I never happened. My response to this was to send her all the emails he sent me over the summer, which I'm ashamed of. I don't think she ever got them though because otherwise, he probably wouldn't have been so cordial when we emailed in 2007. So, that was lucky. It wasn't her fault, and I shouldn't have done it, but I wanted to get his attention.

Anyway, despite that, I still thought that I meant something to Doug Funny. I was convinced that he would contact me when he and his girlfriend broke up. I thought that I must be some unanswered question in his life or maybe even the one that got away.

Well, thanks a lot, Google, for showing me how wrong I was. Doug Funny got married last summer. His wife is a very attractive woman with two best friends who post their entire lives on the internet, including photos. I was able to view several photos of their wedding thanks to the two big-mouths his wife is best friends with. (The big-mouths are scrapbookers, so they probably view their blogs as internet scrapbooks. I'm trying not to be judgmental about the scrapbooking, but I'm mostly not succeeding.) Now I feel like he purged the memory of me from his life as easily as he might clear his throat. I'm not someone he was once in love with. I'm someone he probably never even thinks about anymore. I feel like a giant idiot both for having once loved him so much, for still caring about him at all, and for being stone-stupid enough to go looking for things to upset myself with on the internet. God. Fuck you, Google. My sole consolation here is that his new wife looks quite a bit like me. It's a very small consolation.

I agree with Doug Funny's unstated assertion that he and I would not have worked out in the long run. I know nothing about the specific woman he chose, but he was right to marry someone else. I hope she's a cool lady. That said, I consider Doug Funny to be one of the great loves of my life, right up there with Goose, who I consider to be my soul mate. Since he and I split up, I have kissed only one other person (The New Guy), and that wasn't even until February 2009. It is so hurtful to think that he probably barely remembers me at all.