The Love Files No.8 // Middle East Edition Turkey

I know that I am very very inconsistent when it comes to ‘The Love Files’. In theory I have tons of ideas and of course also tons of stories from the past to write about but as soon as I think about all the topics I can cover on my blog, most of the time I just get back to ‘The Wellness Edition’ since this pretty much became the flagship topic of my blog. Even though when I started this blog it was mainly to motivate me to design and to share my design work but since writing has always been so very dear to me I love the combination of designing and writing here.

OK, back to “TLF”. I know it might sound strange but as soon as it comes to sharing about often bizarre and maybe sometimes funny ‘stories’ from my love life, I often become a bit shy - I remember when I was in high school, watching ‘Sex and the City’ every Tuesday night (haha and then Ally McBeal) I always thought, wow this is my dream, once I am an adult I wanna write about love and relationships like Carrie Bradshaw did back in the days.

Relationships were or are a troubling topic for me, so maybe that is why i am a little bit reluctant when it comes about sharing my experiences. Truth is very often I was led by the illusion of being in love while what I thought was love, was pretty much everything apart from love. And that leads us to today’s ‘Middle East Edition’.

I never really felt drawn to German men. Let’s put it this way, the more exotic the guy the more interested I was back in the days. One night when going out with a friend, being at a night club I met this guy from Turkey who was living in Germany for a short time because of work. Truth is even when we met at that night club where I drank several Caipirinhas or Gin Tonics I could still sense all the red flags when meeting him. But at that time I was just very ignorant to that, in general I was very ignorant when it came to listening to my gut and my intuition. Ok, so we met, we talked and I even went home with him. And nothing even happened that night. We just drank some more, we talked and then we fell asleep. That was it.

Then this sort of relationship, affair, fling or however you want to call it started - the next day it stared and so I embarked. I was on board of something that I was not even sure I wanted to be on board on. And it was not a smooth ride, not at all, for being honest it was the extreme opposite. It was a short but very intense relationship. It was one that I still remember very well to this day with all the good and bad emotions I was going through and this was 7 years ago. I still remember it like it was yesterday. My friends told me that he was a nightmare for me, that I should run as quickly as I can from him, but of course I knew it but did not want to get out of it. I thought I fell in love, who knows maybe I really did, but I think I fell in love with feeling miserable, with being treated miserable…because when I met him I was feeling miserable in every aspect. So it is not a surprise you feel drawn to somebody who confirms that feeling to you and who makes you feel even more miserable.

Let’s get real here, if we feel somehow broken we can get addicted to being in pain, we become our worst enemies by choosing our worst enemies in relationships. They reflect how we feel about ourselves and that is exactly what happened with my Turkish man. Of course not everything was bad with him. I loved his intellect, he was intelligent, he had a good sense of humour, there was tons of chemistry between us, I could spend hours of talking and laughing with him and that chemistry totally blew my mind (well my hormones I suppose). So that is why I stayed and I knew he was leaving the country soon anyways, so I was very safe not having to face the kind of intimacy and commitment that I could not deal with anyways. It’s safe to fall for someone if you know he is leaving and there is no mutual future anyways. I won’t go into the details of how a lot of pain was caused at that time, all I am going to say is that it had a lot to do with betrayal, disrespect and humiliation. I was facing relationships issues that I never ever want to go through again in my life. But as bad as all of that was also I realised how toxic relationships can be and what kind of relationship I don’t want to have, what kind of guy completely disqualifies for a relationship. Our story of fights became a long one, even after he left the country, there was a lot of potential to keep on fighting and that’s what we did. Or what I did, then he did it and that is how it went on for quite some time. But now also this episode is over and our ways truly parted. I might write more about this sometime again but for today I am done…