Though I Won’t Mean To, I Will Push You Away When We First Start Dating

You don’t know me yet, but you will, and when you do, as I do with countless others, I will push you away, and I want to explain why.

I will push you away not because I don’t want to be with you, but because wanting to be with you means me giving all of me, and that’s a concept too hard for me to fathom.


Many things have happened to me in my life which have caused me to put up walls. Not just little building block walls, but sky-scraping, barbed wire-covered, impenetrable walls. These walls are hard for a regular man to break through at once, but little by little, with a bit of hard work, rope and wire cutters, it can be overcome. And that’s what I want: someone to overcome my walls; to prove to me that I am worth the effort, worth the fight.

You may find, once the first meter or two of the wall has been climbed, that we should stumble upon the topic of sex, and as a subtopic, the ‘magic number’. You may find that my ‘number’ is slightly larger than yours. This is not because I’m a slut, or easy or even because I really enjoy sex, truthfully, it’s because baring my body to a stranger is easier than sharing my soul with a lover. But if I share my soul with you, if I let you in, just a tiny bit, please know that that is more important to me than any sexual partner in the history of my life, because by showing you that piece of me, I’m letting you hurt more than my body, I’m letting you hurt my spirit, that innate energy that makes me me. Scars on the body fade, but scars to the psyche become so deeply ingrained, they become truths to their owner.


I will make fun of and laugh your compliments away – it’s not because I want you to keep going, it’s because I don’t believe them. Make me believe.


I want you to try. Know that although it will be a difficult journey, I’m trying, too. I am always trying to keep you close enough that you don’t give up but far enough away that you can’t hurt me. But once you pass that, once the wall has been conquered and my heart gives in, the amount of love you will receive will be crushing in a good way. I will love every single millimeter of your body, mind, and soul. I will devote myself to making your heart feel just a morsel of the amount of love mine feels. There is a lifetime of love in my heart, but it’s just protected by a wall.

Climb that wall.