I was talking to A’s brother about dominoes and was thinking about the last time I played being at the old place. It feels funny calling the “old” place. I still think of it as being home, like I should drive up there for the night and tuck in with her for the night, but that’s a million miles away now.
The worst part is that to be honest with myself I have to realize that being together was not really happy for either of us. I think we were definitely in love and that carried us through a great many things. I’m not sure if that makes it worse that I have no moral ground on which to stand and say, “We were wonderful together all the time.” I can’t say that, and yet I wish I could. My wishes aren’t enough to change anything, certainly not the past.
First, I probably have to be honest and say that I was a rotten boyfriend. I was variously moody, clingy, grumpy, distant, cynical, sarcastic, hurtful, angry, needy and, last but certainly not all, difficult. I want to ignore all that, but I can’t. I’m definitely the co-creator of the present lack of us.
I think we also had many times where we were happy and definitely in love, but I also did my part in creating hurt. I felt uncomfortable when a comment was made that she’s the only one that seems to be getting hurt. That wasn’t true of our relationship. We’ve both come out of this hurt, but she seems to have a strategy to deal with it, in a way, or something.
Anyhow, I hurt her by being overly critical. I hurt her by being demanding. For several months, I hurt her by having difficulty dealing with her desire for sex. (that’s a long one to explain.) I hurt her by being distant when I was depressed and feeling helpless about my job. I hurt her by being grumpy when doing activities like hiking or taking walks, finding something to be upset about in almost any situation. I hurt her by putting the kibosh on her when she came home from school full of joy. I hurt her by making her feel guilty for spending time away from me.
For all of this, I feel like it was mostly due to outside issues. Of course, it’s completely natural that she feel that all of that was due to my inherent personality. The truth, I’m sure, is somewhere in between.
We were great in public, but we tended to argue when alone. We’d argue about the dumb stuff, and get snippy at eachother over little things. There were, it turns out, quite a few times that she would complain to her mom or step-mother that she loved me, but I was an ass.
When we first started to argue, we were delighted to see, for example, other couples argue because we realized that the arguments were the same, and so felt okay, or at least not abnormal. But we never really managed to avoid the tension, and stop arguing. It wasn’t constant, but it was consistant, if you know what I mean.
Well, for each thing that I did to create hurt in the relationship, there’s at least two stories about why and how, but it’s important for me to make sure her family knows that I don’t think I’m without blame, or that somehow I’m the martyr. It’s not so.
I have issues I need to deal with. I’m quite certain that I’ve been for many years able to answer yes to almost all, if not all, of the questions used to identify the symptoms of depression. Turns out that my mother, my uncle and my grandmother are all on medication to help with seratonin levels. It also turns out that alcoholism, which runs on both sides of the family, can be a contributing factor to problems with seratonin levels in the brain.
I have issues about self-worth. I have issues about an inability to believe myself worth of love or capable of giving it. I have issues with my sexuality and sex drive. I have learned pessimism and helplessness.
Anyhow, the list goes on.
So, while I, irrationally perhaps, cling to the idea that A. might harbor enough love for me to overcome my faults and miraculously want to be with me, I have to realistically say that she’s probably right when she said that the only chance we have of a future together would be if we started completely over fresh.
Of course, there’s the further hurdle of her anger and the inevitable identification of what happened with what had previously happened with her and Jay … to the point that only a total goober like myself would imagine in a million years that there was a chance for real.
So, we are apart because we both have issues, in spite of my fervent wish that what we had was enough and that we somehow be able to find happiness together.
Which brings me to what she’s doing … or what I think she’s doing. She had met the guy she’s hanging out with at Wow’s one night when she and the girls were out. They had talked for a while and at the end of the night he gave the other girls hugs, but when she wouldn’t, he kissed her hand and gave her his number saying something like, “I know you’re involved, but give me a call if you want to have coffe or something.”
A. had mentioned this incident to me, and we’d talked about it a little. I missed the point, I suppose, that she was feeling odd because she was finding someone else interesting which would perhaps be a sign that she wasn’t getting what she wanted from the relationship.
I found out that they’d started to hang out more, her and that guy, because I screwed up and read her diary one night when she was out, supposedly with the girls. She got home that morning at 10am, and I had been up all night moving stuff, including a 3am run with a load to my mom’s, mainly because I was going nuts.
Anyhow, I confronted her by admitting that I had read the diary, so she then really started to talk to me about all the anger that she’d been building up. It’s like she finally felt she could bring up the things that she’d not felt like she could talk about before. (This would in part be due to her feeling that I bit her head off on small stuff, so how could she be comfortable dealing with big stuff, but I’m sure that there’s also a part that has to do with not being able to accept that such anger had a place in a working relationship, and not being able to express or allow herself to feel anger.)
I pointed out that this was a continuation of a pattern: finding a guy to replace a guy. She acknowledged this. Her fear was that it meant she was becoming like her mother, but I expressed that it wasn’t that she was her mother, but that she was human. (I’d previously been dealing with my fear of becoming my failure father, and she helped me by trying to make me understand that I wasn’t my father, so this was a nice reciprocation. Even when dysfunctional, we supported each other.)
She thinks that she is not going after a serious relationship. She thinks that she’s found someone that’s interesting and that she is going to take time to get to know, instead of diving in. She claimed that she didn’t love him, and that it wasn’t anything like how she felt for me when we got together. She had said at the time that she made it clear that she was still planning on dating me too.
When we talked about her having space, one of the things that she stated at the beginning was that she was planning on dating other people while this was going on. At various points I thought we’d made progress or something in staying committed to eachtoher at least enough to keep dating, and at one point I thought we’d agreed that I would be the one that she’d be intimate with during this period, but our two understandings appear to have not been the same through the various conversations we had.
She thought that she is going to remain single for at least through the rest of her college, but she’s clearly intending on dating and being with people. One idea she said that she wanted to do was to only have one day a week for another person, but that the rest of the time would be her own, but I don’t know if that is still true.
She was going to take her retreat to think about things and come back to an idea of whether she still wanted “us” to work out, like she did for at least some part of december, but I think that’s gotten all bent out of shape. She doesn’t think she can be my anything, and she at least said to me that she didn’t think she could be anyone elses anything either. The idea of us dating occasionally appears to be a dead issue, and I am in denial about whether she’s stopped missing me or not.
She basically took the break over holiday as a time when she could be completely free to go out every night and hang out, since she didn’t really have a place that’s what she was doing anyway. So, she’s been intentionally wild.
When we last spoke, on thursday of last week, she said that she still loved me, but she thought that our relationship had run its course. That she had been thinking the night before that dating would be like trying to put bandaids on something that was fundimentally flawed. That she felt drained when we were together, and she dreaded the approach of that time when she knew it was going to happen.
One of her family said they didn’t think she knows what she wants. What she wants is to be happy and she’s trying her best to be happy. I tried to be that for her, but it got all messed up. I wish with every bit of myself that she and I could be happy together, but it seems that I will have to settle for each of us finding happiness for ourselves.
She’s a beautiful, loving, vibrant person. She may make mistakes but she’s doing her best to make the best decisions she can. I have no doubt in my mind that she will manage to find that happiness eventually.
Clearly, I wish we could continue making those mistakes together and find that eventual happiness with each other, but I have yet to really accept where I am.
I had this idea of contacting the man she was with previous to me, but I’m too confused on whether that’s even remotely a good idea. I thought that maybe he and I would be able to share stories and maybe it would help us analyse what happened, to compare insider notes and maybe come to a better understanding of how much of what was not necessarily our faults. It’s probably a bad idea.
M. said she’s moved in to her new place with the cats, which I didn’t know. That’s how far out of the loop I am now, I guess. I want to call her and invite her to go x-country skiing, but that’s probably futile since she probably wouldn’t want to go and she’s probably got plans already for the whole weekend even if she did.
Hey, it’s snowing!