...in the beginning.

Welcome to my blog.

This is going to be my private thoughts made public.  I want to use this space to share my adventures on life, love, and everything in between.

I'll start with a little back story on who I am and why you may want to follow this blog.

          My name is Steve, and I am one of those guys that was a late bloomer.  I didn't date in high school.  Instead I spent most of my time hanging out with the guys and fantasizing about having a girlfriend.  After high school I went into carpentry and spent too many hours learning the trade to concentrate on a love life, but in 1990 I met a girl.  We dated for only 3-months.  I got my first taste of sexual pleasures, and then I married her.  She and I were married for 17-years before she had finally had enough of me and moved out in 2007.  She and I were not a good match.  We had our good times, but we spent a large majority of those 17-years tearing each other down.  We fought like cats & dogs, so by the end of our relationship there was very little love left between us, if any at all.

          I spent an entire year, after the separation, beating myself up.  I was ashamed of myself for letting my marriage fail.  Early on in our relationship, my wife was the one who gave all to keep our relationship alive, and I was the anchor that was dragging it down.  Eventually she lost respect for me, and the vicious cycle of fighting began.

          During my year of depression I went from self loathing to self healing.  I lost nearly 100 lbs from simply not eating.  I would only leave the house to go to work or go to the store; other than that I was at home playing video games and skipping meals.  Eventually one of my sisters got tired of seeing me punish myself and forced me to rejoin the world.  I hated who I had become over the last 18-years and with her help I found the happy guy that I had been in my 20's, even though now I was in my 40's.  I started going to the gym and toning up my new thin body and my sister began introducing me to friends and forcing me to step outside of my comfort zone.  I learned that forcing myself to intentionally live outside of my comfort zone was a great way to grow as an individual.  I made a few mistakes along the way, but in the end I was completely transformed.

          In 2010 I met another woman and fell in love with her.  At that time in my life I was really into drinking and having a good time, and this new woman was definitely the life of the party.  It was great at first.  She had 3 kids and I took to the roll of father figure like a duck to water.  After less than 2-months as a couple we moved in together.  We lived together for nearly 5-years before she grew tired of me and left.  Once again I had managed to screw up what I thought was a good thing.  This time I wasn't an anchor, as I was in my marriage.  In this relationship I had become so caught up in making my girlfriend happy that I lost myself along the way.  I had become a push-over, and had given up my backbone in the name of love.  As with my ex-wife, my girlfriend lost respect for me, and eventually she lost her spark.  Everything finally came to a head in 2014 after her mom had died.

          2014 has been a really crazy year for me.  Within the first few months of the year I went through a devastating break-up from my 5-year relationship, in which I lost the family that had adopted me as the father figure.  My little family unit had been broken.  My girlfriend had taken her young daughter and moved out of state to live with her brother, and if that wasn't bad enough, I later discovered that the woman that I loved had cheated on me a year prior to leaving me.  I was blindsided, betrayed, and very hurt, but this time I was determined not to beat myself up.  Instead I used the failed relationship as a learning experience.

          I now knew what I wanted in life, and what not to look for.  The problem is that I always seem to be attracted to the wrong women.  I tend to fall for women who like to party; women who come from broken homes, and have serious psychological damage from abusive childhoods; be it physical abuse or mental abuse. I had fallen into another vicious cycle and didn't even realize it.  I needed to break the cycle.

          According to Albert Einstein the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  I couldn't simply go to a bar and search for women.  I'm in my 40's and have grown tired of the bar scene.  That is a younger guys game.  Plus, if I were to meet a woman at a bar, the chances are likely that she is a party girl, and I have already proven to myself that I don't need another party girl.  What I needed was a loving, honest, down to earth woman with a caring and romantic side that could match my own.

          Little did I know that lightening was about to strike me again......