Maybe love and acceptance, in a pure, enduring sense, don't really exist. Maybe I'm a deluded soul for thinking otherwise. Maybe my expectations have been all wrong. Maybe what other people call love is a combination I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you'll-scratch-mine + mutual attraction. (ugh, what an awful idea!)

Maybe they're right.

Maybe the men who have said that all men are like them, that men are inherently not gentle, that they can't help hurting me or being rough....are right. Maybe my expectations for acceptable behavior are way too high. Maybe other women do like to be pounded and handled like a piece of meat and the problem was in me, not in the seemingly brutal men. Maybe all those things are normal. Maybe I am in a state of unreality to think otherwise.

I can't accept that. I don't know anymore how things are supposed to be, what is reasonable of me to expect or want. I don't know. But....I am a stubborn thing. I can't help being this way, being hardheaded. If they are right, then I guess they are....but I cannot bring myself to give up on wanting something different. Maybe I am sick for thinking that when you love someone, you don't give up on them, to think that there should be something lasting and dependable and reliable in life, to think that it can be different. I would have to admit that all the hard evidence supports the other side much better than mine. But I don't want to live in such a world. I can't resign myself to that, to believing that that's the way things really are.