I rule at avoiding things. It’s a talent.
One of my last entries sort of wandered around and then ultimately admitted that I wasn’t feeling up to talking about what was really consuming my mental energies at that time. I may still not be, but I don’t want to just vanish, so here’s the readers digest version.
Things really haven’t been going well with and me for quite some time. Over the last five months, things have been deteriorating at a rapid pace, and last Monday it finally boiled over. We had The Relationship Talk.
Some background: Kim and I have been together now for twelve and a half years. We are not married. For large parts of that time, we only had half a relationship — all the commitment, but not of the fulfillment, as it were. So in 1997, I broke off our relationship, in large part because I had met someone else who DID seem to care about me. At the time, I thought that this would be a considerable relief to her, to finally be rid of me. This wasn’t necessarily an unreasonable assumption — we had been sleeping in separate rooms for a long time at that point, and were really more roommates than lovers by then. She surprised me by not only reacting very badly to my desire to move out, but insisted that she wanted to save our relationship. After about 2 weeks of discussion, I broke off with the other girl in an effort to salvage the 8 year investment I had with .
For a while, things were much better. But slowly things reverted back to the same rut. The last year has been especially wearing on me, as I had begun to feel like I was really being used — one of the remarks I made on Monday was that it was like having a job without a paycheck — I had all the responsibilities and obligations, but none of the benefits. On the recent trip to Knoxville, I was able to discuss some of this with Kender, but I still had no clear idea what I wanted to do about it. One complication is that I’m the only income earner in our house, and we only have one car (which is hers). If I just walk out, I essentially leave behind a person I do still care about and four cats with no way to pay any bills. If I had it in me not to care about that, it’d be easier, but I don’t. So after the initial fight, she went upstairs to talk to a friend on the phone for a couple of hours, and I sat downstairs and felt miserable. When she came downstairs we talked some more, and I outlined why I was unhappy and what sort of things I’d need to see happening to think it was worth trying again — we’ve “tried to work it out” before, and it always seemed like I put in all of the effort. Never again.
I’m still not convinced it can be worked out. I’m willing to give it some time to see how she wants to play it, but the balls definitely in her court now. Part of me wishes that it was all over and I could just work on being miserable and piecing my life back together. Part of me really wishes I could find in the person I’m with the person I fell in love with over a decade ago. And part of me just wishes I knew how it was going to work out.