Apart from huge differences in our mental health, the two of us were on a completely different wavelength in every way. Although I might be ‘unusual’ (as one of my exes once described me), at least I am not insane. I am a strong-willed person, and I like men who are equally as strong-willed and who are unusual, but I am not into deranged freaks. I am also not a morning person, but Dr. Freak would usually wake up around 5 a.m. to go running or biking, even if the temperature outside is far below zero. Obviously he didn’t go running when I spent the night at his place, but he was hyperactive way too early, which drove me up the wall. But even though I might be a bit grumpy in the morning, I am polite enough to reply to a “Good morning”. He remarked once that I was so sweet to reply to his morning greeting, his ex would usually only order a coffee and light a cigarette without replying to his morning greeting. And why would I want to know that? Would you tell something like this to a person you basically just met?
But the best announcement was yet to come (and this is still the morning after the champagne and voice incidents), when he proudly announced that he was ready to have a relationship with me! That certainly woke me up, and I told him straight to his face that I didn’t want a relationship. At first he was quiet, then he said it was alright, we could just get together here and there and have sex, plus we could travel together, or as he defined it later on in a text message, we could be ‘fuck bodies’. Perfect! Little did I know that his hurt ego could not handle my rejection of a relationship so generously offered to me on his part.
So we started our ‘fuck bodies’ relationship, and slowly his behavior started to change, he became less attentive and extremely cold. I brought up his cold behavior once and he replied that I simply couldn’t expect all the goodies since we were merely fuck buddies. And if that statement wasn’t already pathetic enough, he added that I was such a nice person that he felt sorry for hurting me deliberately!?! Basically he was punishing me for not wanting a relationship by treating me like a cheap whore. He was probably hoping that I would change my mind and run into his arms, begging him to become his official girlfriend. Well, he can wait for all eternity, for all I’m concerned.
But the freak show was far from over yet. At one point I had a friend in town and Dr. Freak invited us out for dinner one night. Since my friend was here on business, she brought along a Greek colleague, and when I asked the Austrian nutter whether he would mind if her colleague joined us for dinner, he joked that he had no problems with financially supporting Greece (Greece was experiencing a huge financial crisis at that point). Huh? I was still trying to make sense of his very odd sense of humor, but obviously we don’t live on the same plane.
The evening went fine, despite the fact that Dr. Freak immediately told the Greek guy in detail how we’d met, basically claiming his stake so the Greek guy wouldn’t get any ideas. I found this extremely annoying considering that we were not in a relationship, but I was still trying to stay positive and not make a fuss. As I’ve been getting older, I have learned to control my temper and to give people a second chance, so I was really holding onto myself during the dinner not to kick him in the ribs during the dinner. Dr. Freak insisted that he pay for the dinner. Great. But like the champagne bottle, this was not the last I was to hear about the fact that he had paid for the dinner. How stingy can you be? Don’t pretend to be some big shot by paying the bill and then rub it in a dozen times. If you’re stingy, fine, but don’t pretend to be generous.
The first week after our initial sexual encounter, while he probably still believed that we would end up in a relationship, Dr. Freak had proposed a weekend at the coast, to which I agreed and which I looked forward to. The weekend before the scheduled trip we spent a whole afternoon together, which included lots of sex (because that was the only department where we got along very well), but also lots of talk, including references to the dinner with my friend. I told him straight-out that he shouldn’t have insisted on paying if he didn’t want to and that he should stop going on about it. This shut him up, but a bit later he began a monologue about his ex, how he had bought her two Louis Vuitton purses (although the number varied from two to four in his subsequent story-telling), how he had gone to Cyprus with her and how she had drunk 1,500 euros worth of champagne in five days and that it was just ridiculous, that she was a golddigger, bla, bla, bla... So? Why would I want to hear about that?
He went on and on, and after a while I asked him whether he had finished with his monologue. I told him that I didn’t want to hear any more about his ex, nor did I want him to compare me to her constantly. He started apologizing immediately, telling me that I was right and that I was incomparable. Yes, I know, you moron. By that point I already had the feeling that everything I said was being weighed and compared to his ex, which is quite an annoying feeling. He had issues with Balkan women in general, to him they are all golddiggers and whores, and inwardly he kept comparing our time together to all of his negative experiences with his exes from this region.
Now you might be wondering how I know what went on inside his head. Well, he didn’t hide the fact that he was comparing me to his negative Balkan experiences, he did it openly, telling me how great I was, that I was different and so on. I won’t go into more details here, because it’s simply stupid. At one point I got so fed up that I told him that if I were a golddigger, I certainly wouldn’t have chosen him. Yes, this was harsh, but he deserved it and somebody had to bring him back down to earth. He replied to my statement with his favorite calf stare.
Above monologue also included the remark “Man ist ja sparsam aufgewachsen”, which basically means that his family was very frugal, careful with money and all about saving money, proper German/Austrian attributes, of course. But the whole phrase itself is extremely annoying to me because of the subject “man”. There is no equivalent for it in English, in French it would probably be ‘on’, it’s the third person singular not denoting anyone in particular, an empty phrase, as empty as the things he was saying. To me, the mere use of this empty ‘man’ showed his narrow-mindedness and limited world-view. It’s difficult to explain this, but for me his statement simply brought back many negative memories linked to my childhood as an immigrant in Germany and it reminded me why I had left the country many years ago. This, however, would be a good topic for an entirely different book, so let’s move on.
The following morning I felt sick, like a truck had run over me, which might have been a psychosomatic reaction to his bourgeois bullshit or simply a cold. We merely exchanged a couple of text messages that day since I had cut the use of this communication channel as I found it quite boring. Given his excessive texting he obviously doesn’t have much work to do during the day and sexual fantasies seem to be his favorite topic, preferably described in coarse slang. What a stark contrast to his proper, square appearance and attire. He frequently fantasized about threesomes with another woman, he kept searching the web for escort girls all over Europe and kept sending me pictures of them, describing in graphic details what he would do to them. It never became reality, of course, despite the freezing temperatures. You find this last remark strange? How odd would you find it if a guy told you that he could not get a hard-on if the outside temperature is above +25C? That’s exactly what he told me at one point and I almost fell off my chair laughing, but I suppose he was serious. Luckily my Austrian experience came to an end before the summer.
We didn’t communicate until the next day (so it’s Tuesday and we’re supposed to leave for the coast on Friday), when he asked me whether I was feeling better. I told him that I still felt like hell, and he immediately asked whether we should cancel our trip to the coast, which I found a bit odd. But at this point everything in relation to him had become odd. I told him that it was up to him if we should cancel the trip, to which he replied that he had just cancelled our hotel. I answered that it was fine with me if that’s what he wanted, and the melodrama began.
He asked me why I was so upset with him (once again I wasn’t upset, but annoyed) and that he hoped that I’d tell him the reason one day, but that he was annoyed now. He went on and on, until I asked him what had possessed him to come up with this imaginary scenario in his head. His only reply was “It doesn’t matter. Forget it”. Which is what I did. He had probably expected that I would start running after him, declaring