Kinda maybe probably not too smart

So after I sent my first text message ever to the sweet lad I spent time with during the weekend that I ran away with the rock-and-roll circus (a 25-year-old man, by the way, lest you had taken me for the Mary Kay Letourneau type), I went out to dinner with The Ex. He wanted to celebrate my birthday in some way, so this was the birthday dinner.

Trouble is, he treated it as a date and kept trying to make an entire night of it with drinks, a movie, etc. I kept it to a quiet, casual, and early dinner. Now, why, you ask, did I not decline the dinner invitation in the first place? Why didn't I tell him that we needed some time before we could hang out as friends? Well, I did. But The Ex is one persistent boy and, after he made me feel like a fool for being so stubborn about "just going to dinner," I caved.

I am good friends with a few of my ex-boyfriends, and in my experience the significant-other-to-friend process takes a good amount of time--first apart, then through talking and seeing each other occasionally, and then having a more steady and substantial social relationship ONLY AFTER you have really separated your lives and have developed a rapport as friends. Rather than being a matter of following a set of rules, though, becoming friends after a (no matter how nasty) breakup has, when it happens, happened naturally and with some deviations from the above pattern. In these instances both of us just kind of felt our way through how to do it and there was a silently shared sense of how to do it, because it was important to both us to stay close in the best or only way that we could stay close.

It is too soon to be friends with The Ex. I knew this. He wants to get back together. I knew this. Dinner was a bad idea. I knew this. Everything I feared would happen happened. It was awkward. It was sad. We did not really have much to talk about. I expected this. But then . . .the madness. The evening ended with him declaring his undying love and revealing his plans for getting back together, buying a house together, and getting married. And, of course, he is "not giving up on this."

Wait? What is that faint sound I hear in the echo chamber of my own personal relationship psychopathology? Nar . . .ciss . . .ist. Yeah, for sure, and of the most friendly, least arrogant, and most dangerously sincere kind. This is why breaking up with him has been like breaking up with a brick wall. He has his ideas of how it is supposed to go and anything I feel, do, or say to the contrary is some kind of anomaly. His ability to propose all he did last night proves that he has a) not listened to a word I have said; or b) completed discounted it.

So, yeah, definitely not so smart to see him and now I doubt we can be friends at all.

Is this too harsh? Is my growing anger justified? Am I a monster? Well, I know I am technically a monster, but . . .