WILF-- My Military Relationship

I was in a relationship with a marine (Rick) for 2 years. We broke up and got back together a few times. I dated him during my Sophomore, Junior, and part of my senior year in college. He was one of my best guy friends from the time I was 15-18. I guess you could say he was my first love or my biggest crush that I ever had at 15. He was a smooth talker and he spent a whole summer wooing me only to end up with his ex-girlfriend who lived around the corner from me. He would spend time at her house and then drive over to mine and we would hang out. I was very inexperienced and didn't have the moves I have now..haha, so I never tried to make out with him or anything like that. I just played the role of being his best girl friend and I would hang out with him whenever he made time for me.
Eventually, I got smarter about how he was toying me with and I stopped hanging out with him and met my first awesome boyfriend who I was with for 2 years. Once I went to college, the crush from 15 and I would still e-mail and talk occasionally. Then, he visited my dorm one day (a lot of people from our high school went to the same college)  to see some friends, stopped by my room and we had sex. *This is the really simplified version of a very long story. After that, he told me he was going into the marines. He had a misdemeanor on his record for beating the s*** out of someone, he wasn't in college, and he needed some direction. I told him good luck and that was that.
About a year later, he was sent to Afghanistan, and I was one of the only people to keep in touch with him. I knew he was having a hard time and I wanted to be a good friend. I sent him packages, e-mails, cds etc. I was in a relationship that was always up and down and he would let me vent about it and try to make me feel better. When he came back from the middle east, his first stop was to my dorm with roses and the expectation that now we would be together.
My relationship with my current boyfriend was finally on track and I didn't want to date Rick. I told him straight up that I didn't want to date him, that I really liked my current boyfriend, and that I wasn't interested in a long distance relationship and especially not with someone who was in the Marines. I wasn't trying to be mean; I was just being honest. I always knew that I would never be a good military girlfriend. I never wanted to be in an LDR with someone, because at the young age of 20, I had the very realistic and somewhat harsh idea that if I was actually going to commit myself to one person, I wanted them to be around. If not, I wanted to be on my own. Dating was all about experiencing new people and situations. I was aware of that fact that whoever I was dating at 20 was probably not going to be the same person I married. I was oddly logical and anti-romanticism when I was in college. He eventually admitted to putting me on a pedastool while he was away and told me that he built up this image in his head of what it would be like with us when he got back. It helped him get through the rough times there. I think this kind of "pedastool thinking" is common among military relationships. Soldiers do what they can in order to mentally and physically survive. It is human nature, so I was happy that our relationship could do that for him, but it still didn't change the fact that I didn't want to break up with my boyfriend for him.

Anyway, after his time in the Middle East, he was given a 2 month leave back home and was around my college town for a whole two months, and he spent most of that time wooing me. He came to my dorm room all of the time wanting to replicate our relationship from high school where we would watch movies and snuggle on the couch. I was very attracted to him; we always had great chemistry and my current boyfriend and I (even though things were better...), was still terrible at communicating anything, was never really there for me when I was upset, and just generally wasn't fulfilling my needs. Rick had known me longer and knew exactly what to do and say to push my buttons, make me feel better, make me feel beautiful etc. Eventually, I caved in and I broke up with the college boyfriend for Rick. I told Rick though that our relationship would have to be casual and that I didn't want a title and I didn't want to rush into anything. I was still firmly against being tied down to someone who was far away and who could get deployed at any moment. He said he understood, but he really didn't. Eventually, I gave into that as well. I was now his girlfriend.

Things moved way too fast and they were not on my terms. Rick was a master manipulator and could play me like a fiddle--making me feel guilty, or bad for him etc. I struggled with labeling our relationship for a long time. I was in my junior year of college and working and studying like a crazy person. I had no time for bullshit and I had no time to be sitting on the phone with my boyfriend 4 times a day. Rick, on the other hand, had nothing going on. He would go to work as a marine all day, come home at 4 and call my cell and then my land line and then my cell again if I didn't pick up. He tried to take some classes to busy himself, but he couldn't get into it. His only concern was our relationship. And, the thought of me not staying with him if he got deployed weighed on him heavily and was a constant source of strife for us. He was a lady killer for his whole life and the idea of a girl not falling all over him and telling him that she would wait for him was confusing and astonishing to him.
*Don't want to be too long of a post.. go to next post.