I had this dream last night. I was sleeping with this pretty little white girl, pixish, short cropped hair. She looked like a prettier, nicer version of a girl I used to sleep with. I was fucking her behind my girlfriend's back, lavishing her with compliments in my bed, when suddenly I was aware my girlfriend was coming home. She came into the room as me and the other girl were buttoning up our clothes, and she seemed totally oblivious. I thought, "Really? Am I really getting away with this?" I told my girlfriend that we were just hanging out, and she reacted plainly. I couldn't believe it, in the dream, that my girlfriend would be so stupid as not see what was clearly in front of her. The dream ended just about there, with my unending shock at my girlfriend's obliviousness waking me from the dream.

After I woke up I signed on to Twitter, and in the process of seeing what my girlfriend was up to on it, I saw a series of tweets in which this guy was flirting with her, and then offering coyly to buy her a $100 purse she tweeted about, and her all too obligingly flirting back at him about it. I thought: what the fuck is going on here? Is she really leading on some internet dude?

So I called her out on it. She was apologetic at first, but then it started to turn into this: "You're leading this guy on, and that's not cool, not to him or me." "No I'm not, I don't use people!" "Then what is getting a $100 purse from some guy on the internet who'll never sleep with you?" "It was just an friendly exchange between friends!" "No it's a guy who wants to fuck you trying to buy you things to win your affection." "He knows we're just friends and we only ever will be." "If he knew that then he wouldn't be trying to buy you things."

And so on and on it goes. I've been over this with my girlfriend before. The last time I got upset at her was because she passed out until 3 a.m. at her ex-boyfriends house after getting too drunk at a party. Yes, that sentence is for real. Of course, she thought that I should just be OK with it. "There were friends of ours there!" OK, like that prevents two people from fucking each other when they want to. "Nothing would ever happen, I love you!" Yeah, and I've heard that one minutes before I found one of my ex-girlfriends with the fingers of another guy buried in her vagina.

Then this always comes up: "You should just trust me!"

Ah, yes, trust. It's that thing people like to say: "You can't have a relationship without trust!" When on the defending end of a situation like this, people hurl it usually in this sort of tone: "Don't you love me? If you loved me, then you'd trust me!" Actually, love and trust have just about nothing in common. I can love someone I don't trust, someone who has broken my trust so many times that I can't possibly ever let myself trust them ever again. Not trusting someone to not be an asshole doesn't mean I don't love them. There are people who used to be in my life that I wouldn't trust alone with my chapstick, but I stupidly still love them.

But that aside, what this points out is something altogether more troubling: if your partner forces you to fall back on trust in order to excuse their behavior, does that person really love you? Should you really be forced to quell what your life experiences tell you, and bottle up all that dread, worry, and anguish, just because your partner tells you that you should trust them and give them a get out of jail free card for all suspicious behavior?

Every single time in my life I have said to myself: "Don't worry, Stuy, she loves you, you should trust her!" in order to calm myself down because of women who are doing things that are clearly suspicious it's turned out that I've been wrong. I shouldn't have trusted her. I shouldn't have trusted the girl who'd go and hang out with her ex-boyfriend late at night and sometimes wake up there in the mornings. Definitely shouldn't have trusted her, and should have broken up with her immediately, the very second she told me that I "should trust her". Turns out she was fucking him for months before we broke up, all because I kept telling myself that I should trust her, that I shouldn't worry.

I try to explain this to my girlfriend. It's my humble opinion that if you love someone you shouldn't make them fall back on trust in order to excuse your behavior. I actually live this rule as fully as I possibly can because I haven't always been the best boyfriend. I don't flirt with women, through the internet or otherwise. I don't stay out late with or hang out one-on-one with women, and if I do it's especially not women I used to sleep with. (I certainly wouldn't let other women buy me expensive presents, but that's not exactly a situation a guy finds himself in ever, if at all.) If I am out with people, I message her every hour or two letting her know I'm thinking about her and that I'm OK. In a long distance relationship, communication like this is incredibly important. I try very hard to make sure my girlfriend is never concerned about or suspicious of me, but it seems like she makes no attempt to do the same for me.

It breaks my heart how many times I've tried to explain this to my girlfriend. It's not about trust, it's not even really about love, but it's about respecting the other person in your life enough to not give them any reason to be suspicious. I'm not unreasonable, go out with your friends, have a good time, but be home at a decent hour, and especially don't stay out until 3 in the morning without checking in with me for four hours.

Situations like that just make me wonder if I'm as big of a chump as my girlfriend was in that dream I had last night. I have to wonder: "Am I really stupid enough to fall for this shit again? How many women have to tell me that I should trust them only to find out they're fucking someone else behind my back until I fucking learn?"

All my experiences tell me that the answer is right in front of my face. The tyranny of "you should trust" is telling me to wait it out. My experiences tell me that waiting it out only makes it hurt worse when you find out the truth. "You should trust" is telling me that there is no truth to find. However my girlfriend's behavior, and generally unapologetic nature about it, tells me that there's probably a lot to find.

Who do I listen to? Myself, or another person... and lord knows people have proven to me over and over again that when someone is doing clearly suspicious shit like passing out til 3 a.m. at an ex's house, or leading other people on through the internet and letting them buy them things, that there is something going on that isn't deserving of my trust.

Who do you listen to? Who do you trust? Should you really trust the person you tell over and over again that they shouldn't make you unhappy, but then they never actively try to keep you happy because it'll impact their carefree lifestyle? Is that wise?

How big of a chump are you comfortable with being? That is how much you "should" trust another person. Me? I don't want to be a chump, so I don't think it's reasonable to ask me to trust clearly suspicious, bullshit behavior, and good lord I am tired of talking until I'm blue in the face about it. I have no idea what the fuck I should do anymore. If you're tired of crying, then you should do something about it, but there's nothing I can do. I don't want to stop loving. I don't want to protect myself. I just want someone to stop hurting me.

I'm breaking my repeat rules, because recently I have fallen deeply in love with Okkervil River and this song is probably one of the most splendid thing I've ever had the pleasure of listening to live. Also, since there was a mild Beach Boys theme earlier in the month, it's appropriate that I continue the trend and use a song that utilizes Sloop John B in a similar way. It's also the end of the month, so what better way to end this one by saying:

Live and love.

John Berryman (orig. John Allyn Smith) was an American poet who threw himself off a bridge in 1972. His biological father shot himself early on in Smith's life and his mother remarried, making him a Berryman. I'm not a fan of poetry so I can't really comment on Berryman's poetry except to say that it looks like you can read his Dream Songs for relatively free as far as I can tell.

I like this one:

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
'You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry's dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast ... The slob beside her feasts ... What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
—Mr. Bones: there is.

Sloop John B is, of course, that marvelous Beach Boys song inspired by a folk tune about a bunch of unhappy sailors. I wish there was more to say about it, except that it's one of the earliest tunes I remember getting stuck in my head for years and years, as on one 'vacation' across the United States with my parents (when I was 9 years old) we ended up seeing Forest Gump about six times in various different states. I'm pretty sure Forest Gump is to blame for my taste in music.

How does it all come together? I don't know. It just does.

I met my girlfriend for the first time at an Okkervil River show. I had heard of them, but had never really listened to them (and when I did, years ago, it didn't leave much of an impression on me). My girlfriend, then just a girl curious as to whether my demeanor on the phone could be matched by my demeanor in reality, had never heard them at all. They impressed us both, though on later listens only two songs of theirs would end up in my collection, and this is one of them.

I'm sure we've all loved stones (whether it be an inaccessible guy or gal, or a dead one, as people on SongMeanings postulate), and equally sure that we've all loved people who have been in love with stones. Will Sheff--a "poet and a student of literature" according to a commenter on SongMeanings--crafts something slow and beautiful, but not necessarily sad, about the dilemma of such a situation, and then carries it into the realm of fantasy only to really nail down the hopelessness of the situation.

Good stuff. I am glad that while Will Sheff was singing the words--all skinny, sweaty, and suited--to a song that summed up quite a few of my relationships (you can hold me and cry with me later if you so choose), I was putting my arms around someone who wasn't a stone, who wasn't in love with a stone, for the first time.