Backtracking

In the immortal words of Britney Spears, oops I did it again. And sadly a lot of the rest of the lyrics that follow. So, I backtracked, by which I mean I slept with a guy that I’m ostensibly not dating anymore. Yeah, the one from the dumping post. The one I said I wouldn’t sleep with. (I’ll explain what’s been going on with dating between then and now in a later post.)

Point of clarification, there’s backtracking (or backsliding) and there’s sleeping with an ex. I’m going to draw a distinction between the two which may be completely false. I’ve never done the sleeping with an ex thing; I have yet to pull off maintaining contact with any guy I’ve had sex with after I’m done having sex with him. My sense of sleeping with an ex is just that you continue to have sex with each other because cold turkey was a bit more than you both could handle. The difference being no need for a redumping when it’s time to stop sleeping together.

Raise your hand if you’ve been redumped. Ok, now those of us who’ve had to do the redumping. The backtrack implies you’re back in the relationship to at least one of the people involved, not just back in each others’ orifices. Redumping is godawful. If I’m bad at dumping, I really suck at redumping. And getting redumped is devastating because you’re usually still processing the original dumping while simultaneously berating yourself for getting your hopes up and dealing with the fact that the person you like kinda likes you back, but not enough.

So how did I end up in this situation? I suspect it’s not a coincidence. The fact is I have backtracked before. A long time ago, and it’s still the worst thing I’ve ever done to a person. Luckily, we’re all adults now. After (during?) the backtrack, I also found out that the guy has been a victim of backtracking before. I can see why because he’s so frickin’ cool to have around. I’m not going to venture into what this says about me.

The end result of this is that because I refuse to talk about relationships, I have no idea where we stand. Somewhere between friends, friends with benefits, and dating. Oh well, I prefer ambiguity to talking about my feelings.