I have always been uncomfortable with the idea that love is only light, acceptance, joy, and all those other sugar/spice/unicornbarf type things girls are supposedly made of. I was reminded of this wide-spread, endlessly perpetuated annoyance recently when my forgiveness was asked for, and I realized that somewhere along the way I’d picked up the idea that people think forgiveness means “mulligan” or “do over” or “that never happened”.

I think, among other things, love is the snips and snails and puppydog tails too, just like I think pain, challenge and suffering are necessary and brilliant parts of the totality in the human experience of life, and that forgiveness is a chance, not a free pass. But finding the balance in love has historically been the hard part, for me.

As so eloquently and briefly said in the BBC’s 2007 series “Jekyll”, love is psychotic. People kill for it, die for it, give up their dreams for it, lose themselves in it, spend their entire lives looking for it — the negative connotations of those acts don’t divorce them from their origin. Love is a demon bitch. A hot one.

And the hottest loves I’ve had? All psychotic. All fucking batshit certifiable, and drove me fucking insane. There is a particular, snake-like, eerie hotness to those types of people, and I can smell one from miles away. I know they’re terrible partners, that they turn on people, that they lie and mercilessly emotionally manipulate the people around them, and I don’t get what I want out of those relationships.

All of my significant romantic relationships ping-pong between dark vampiric nutbag and squishy cuddly nice guy who thinks he’s nuts but isn’t. So what the fuck, then? Why do I keep trying the crazies on for size when I know better and could pick one out of a lineup blindfolded? What am I still getting out of it?

I’ve been perplexed, compelled, frustrated, high, experimental, giddy, and everything in between trying to figure out what to make of my attraction to toxic people, and most recently how the fuck I can enjoy it without screwing up my life. I’ve been getting closer and closer to having that, too. Lots of tools in my toolbelt for herding and luring hot psychos.

And then what I thought I was getting, which isn’t what I thought I was supposed to be getting, hit me, as I was watching the second to last episode of Jekyll. A moment of pure epiphany. There is one core element to that seductive, dangerous hotness that made it worth it to me, deep down. The perception of Protection.

He’s nuts, he’s violent, he’s passionate, and I’m his girl. I’m as safe as anyone has ever been. It’s the perfect fantasy to go along with the gaslighting, manipulation and the slow smoldering death of my fragile, scared little soul, which is the cost of being in a relationship with a fucking lunatic. And the fucking shred of hope (also a demon bitch, btw) that his affections for me would win out in the end kept me engaged.

While it was never ideal, when I was with a psycho, part of me thought at the very least I was safe from EVERYONE else. I was also, well: Wrong, and that’s fucking silly as hell, and I’m glad I didn’t end up beaten to death in a fucking ditch or something.

Clearly, at one time, finding an extreme way to ensure my protection was important to me. I did it by growing up on a computer and when it was time to interact with people I continued seeking my parental dynamics, all the while bitching and moaning about what a psychotic, dramatic embarrassment my mother was.

And she was. She was a fucking abusive, selfish, screaming sack of pure raging, yet functional and strangely adaptive, nuts. And apparently among the things she instilled in me, is a deep, powerful, primal urge to fuck people like her, particularly the ones who’ve harnessed it and put an elegant polish on themselves, like an old world vocabulary or a nice 6-pack.

In fact, one ex in particular strikes me as what the product of my mother may have resembled were she raised and living as a male in this society.

So I’ve been out there fucking my mother, basically. I guess this explains why I almost exclusively come to the imagery of owning a cock.

Life is just fucking awesome, isn’t it.