Gut Check

A couple of years ago I dated a woman who wanted to be a BIG STAR!
I have a theory that you find out the things that will define your realtionships with people in the first five minutes you meet someone. It's just a theory and not proven by any means, but so far it's held true for me. So in the first five minutes of meeting this woman I knew the following:

I was never going to be more important than her career.
She would always be the biggest personality in the room, no matter how big the room.
We were going to have hot sex very soon.
Her vices were more important in her life than they appeared to be.
She believed she was being sincere when she spoke.

That's a lot to pick up on, right?
As it turned out, she always spoke sincerely, but she acted insincerely. In fact, she cheated on me at least once. She gave me a ring as a sign of her commitment to me and then walked out on me. She welcomed me into her life, but blamed me for holding her back. And ultimately, despite her genuine desire not to be a Hollywood cliché, she ended up breaking up withme and moving in with her manager.
Her main vice was smoking, which she claimed not to do with any regularity, but which she did more and more throughout the entire time we were together. She liked coke, but didn't indulge in it around me. Although we never got into it, I know she resented my holding her back from certain kinds of fun and the manager she subsequently shacked up with has been described to me as "a Hoover." Drinking to excess was often a problem. It was a big problem.
We did, indeed have hot sex.
As someone in a Broadway show, she had a huge persona. But after meeting a plethora of other Broadway people, I found out that they're not all like that. In fact, most of them aren't. There are a lot of lushes and extroverts, but she was more than that. She was the kind of woman who needed to be adored...or to think she was adored...BY EVERYONE. She would often drown out more intelligent, thoughtful, sincere, more creative and talented people.
In fact, her career was job one. She left me high and dry in the middle of vacations for it. Ultimately she left me entirely for it.

A friend of mine, who is a director, said she was impossible to be around because even in a relaxed, social setting she was always auditioning.

Looking back on it, I made some mistakes. I should've seen the signs. I shouldn't have been taken in by her superficial beauty.
In the first five minutes, I also knew one more thing...she was not going to be a star. Her personality, despite its glamour, was painfully ugly...a little like looking at any woman in Orange County, just desperately trying to fit into a hideous mold of "perfection." She will be the woman who gets botox and a facelift that makes her look like she's been through a wind tunnel recently. She will get her ass tucked or lifted or whatever they do to your ass when it loses its tone. She will get the boob job when the manager gets bored of her and younger men stop looking. Although it's terribly hard for me to say these things because I spent four and a half years trying to see the positive aspects in her, the truth is that she has a dark hole in her heart that no one will ever be able to fill.

So yesterday when I met a real woman who is honest and entirely without pretense, who is positive and kind and exudes warmth ...and well, love... I was able to savor the moment a little more than I may have been able to once upon a time.

You gots to know the bitta to tastes the sweet!!