I Wanted Someone to Love Me. I Didn't Know How to Let Them.

By my early twenties, I thought I knew what I wanted. I wanted somebody to love me.

Not use me, leave me, hurt me. Just love me.

The problem was that I had absolutely no idea how to receive it. By then, relationships had become another form of pain management. Being pursued gave me an intoxicating sense of value. If a man wanted me, for a little while I could believe I mattered. When that feeling disappeared, I needed it again. I became very good at attracting men. I was attractive, confident on the surface and knew how to use sexuality. What I didn't know was how to build the thing I was actually searching for.

Love.

There was a man during those years whom I genuinely loved. He asked me to marry him.

And I laughed at him. I gave him a couldn't-care-less attitude even though I did care.

That memory says something about me at that age that took years to understand. When somebody finally offered me something resembling what I had been desperately searching for, I didn't know what to do with it.

I knew how to seduce, how to pursue and be pursued, I knew how to protect myself.

And I had become very good at leaving emotionally before somebody else had the opportunity to leave me. But love required something else. Vunerability. But vulnerability was dangerous.

So the very strategies I was using to find love were taking me further away from it.

Alcohol made that contradiction bearable. By then I was drinking every day. It dulled the ache sufficiently for me to continue living in ways that created more pain, which then gave me another reason to drink. It was a vicious circle. And eventually my search for control took me somewhere I could never have imagined.

Through friends I met a local businessman who knew my father's business. We developed a friendship and he became interested in employing me. It started innocently enough. Then he began explaining how a woman could use a man's ego to her advantage in business.

Eventually, the proposition became much clearer. I would be provided with a penthouse. I could maintain my own career and independence. I could keep whatever gifts I received. In return, I would develop relationships with particular men and provide information about them and their business dealings.

I agreed.

That is difficult to write, but it is part of my story. By that stage of my life, my thinking was brutally simple.

If I was going to sleep with men anyway, I might as well get something out of it.

In a strange way, the arrangement made me feel more powerful. For once, I wouldn't be the woman being used. I would be the one in control. I was taught how to behave, how to conduct myself and what would be expected of me. Eventually a meeting was arranged with the man they wanted me to develop a relationship with.

I met him at a hotel and we had a drink. He was eloquent and easy company. I had been instructed not to stay long, not even to finish my drink. The intention was simply to create enough interest for him to want another meeting.

It worked.

A few days later I was told he wanted to proceed and another meeting was arranged.

Then something happened that I still cannot fully explain.

I didn't go.

I changed my mind, broke contact with both men and walked away from the whole arrangement. The businessman was furious. I simply refused.

Years later, I learned that he had been working undercover for the government in the CID and had groomed other women in similar ways. When I look back at that young woman now, I see something I couldn't possibly have understood then.I thought control would protect me.

If I chose the man, I was safe.

If I left first, I was safe.

If I turned sex into a transaction, perhaps I was safe.

If I didn't care, nobody could hurt me.

Except I did care.

Desperately.

Underneath all that apparent independence was someone still longing for exactly the same thing she had been searching for all along. To be loved. One of the most painful truths I eventually had to face was that wanting love and being able to receive love are not the same thing.

I have learned the protections we build against rejection eventually prevent us from receiving the very thing we're trying so hard to find. I didn't understand any of that then.

My actions were those of a child trying to survive in a very adult world.

It would take many years and a God who was willing to go far deeper than my behaviour before I began to understand what I was really searching for.

That journey is part of the story I tell in Standing on the Edge: A Fight for Freedom.

And there is considerably more to the story than the woman everyone thought they knew.

To read the book now click the link Standing on the Edge: A Fight for Freedom.

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