Love Stinks!

thanks again. i can still feel her physically, every time i get into bed, cook food, go for a bike ride, sit at my desk (even though i'm living in a new place). she suffused my life. at least she's in austin right now for a bike race -- though her BF is in reno -- nah, that just means she has the run of the men's field in austin.

ddt

I do not agree with the "Bad For You Food" route... I went the same way, and now weigh 330 after being down to 250. My asthma is worse, my knees and ankles hurt all the time, I wake up with muscle strains in my arms, and now I have sleep apnia. Therapy is better than food, esp. when you get a therapist who clicks with you... been going for a few months now. Eating still isn't under control, but the motivational/depression stuff is a lot better. (Also, she diagnosed me with ADD - I was like "Bullshit. ADD's just a code word for lazy slacker" and then she said, "How much caffeine do you drink at work each night? A 2-liter's worth of diet Mtn. Dew? And do you have problems getting to sleep when you get home? No? That's a pretty big indicator. Your body needs the stimulant to make your brain work right, so you don't get irritable or hyper or sleepless after drinking enough caffeine to kill the Bulgarian Army."

Baha -

I think your affair may have put your life and your relationship into perspective a bit - it's one thing to say, "I'll leave her and find someone else." When faced with the reality of that, I can see how you might discover you don't want to leave after all, and that love isn't flowers-and-candlelight romance, and that stuff's overrated anyhow

Umm. Relationships are tricky, and require a lot of work... you seem to be on the right track. When the tough times come, that's when the work's the hardest. My Fiancé has hard-core PTSD after a miscarriage, we lost a daughter at around the six month mark, and it was basically a floodgate that opened and allowed lifetime's worth of emotional and physical abuse coming home to roost. Things have been really, really hard.

Most of the time it's like she's not who she was, and I'm standing sentinel, waiting for the woman I love to come back to me. We almost split up because she didn't want to see the doctor, and then she didn't want to see the counselor, and then she didn't want to take pills, and then she stopped taking the pills without telling me and, metaphorically, fell off a fucking cliff.

But, then there are the good days, when she seems more like her usual self, where we go see a cheesy horror movie and watch cartoons and try cooking something new. The good times are coming more and more often, now... but there are still the bad days, when she can't stop crying, and she still wakes up screaming at night, and when my brother's kid was born, that was some really bad mojo. Really bad. It's been years of hard fucking work, but she's worth it, and we're worth it together. I'm 35, and I get the feeling that this is it, this is my one big chance, and I'll again never meet a girl as funny or smart or geeky who'll be into me just for who I am. I have faith in her, and I know she'll be on the other side of this some day, and that's why I'm marrying her. (Which is stupid and overconfident and more pie-in-the-sky than reality, but that's me in a nutshell.)

I can't really judge you, nor do I even want to try. I don't know how my own life is going to turn out - she may wake up and see that she's marrying a 330lb slob who hits the bottle a little too hard, or she might decide I remind her too much of the bad times, or she might decide she doesn't need the counselor or the drugs again, and after the last time, I think that might well be the end of the line for me. Or it might not. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, I'm just dealing with it as it comes, as best I can.

~ Soop

Quote
SoupIsGood Food
I'm just dealing with it as it comes, as best I can.

That's all any of us can do most of the time. It's hard to be proactive with the random unknown that is life.

Good luck to you, ddt, and to you Soup.

Holy crap Soup, sorry to hear about the miscarriage at six months- that sucks.

I can sorta relate as we found out after the last scan that my gestating s.o. has an incompetent cervix and had an emergency cerclage. There was absolutely no warning of anything wrong, no cramps, pain, nothing. We just hope that the stitch holds until term (a 50-60% chance hopefully). My gestating s.o. has not been happy with all the enforced rest as it does not come to her easily. Oh, and I won't be getting lucky 'til 2009. Fun times...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2008 06:37PM by Tony Leggett.

oye--Hang in there guys.

Soup, et. al... ya it did put things in perspective. Strangely it actually brought back the romance a bit too (this was a big complaint for both of us). I think it's exactly the reality of that—frankly I think she suspects but it's not like we're going to talk about it unless she really really wants to—and that we both know that we BOTH made a choice. So things have been really good lately. I've definitely changed in my ideas about all this love shit however, no question about it. One of the things that changed is that after I got back together with my wife, it became clear that the other woman was way less stable than I thought and so I am realizing how easily gullible I was with respect to emotions.

Re: you fiancé, Soup... that sucks. I am so sorry to hear that. It'll take some putting back together, that's for sure, but you're strong enough to stick by a good thing, I'm sure of that .

An argument this evening, at the end of a week when I've taken approximately half my supposed workweek to watch the kids while she did errands, had a doctor's appointment, and had her hair done, and after she was an hour and a half late getting home from a party (meaning that I had the kids to myself for six hours today). A week in which I did not have a single kid-free minute while at home betwee the hours of 7:30 a.m. (when they wake up) and 9:30 p.m. (when they go to sleep). In the course of said argument, I mentioned that this had been my second-worst week, symptom-wise, since I was diagnosed with MS, and yet I had still done the kid-watching. Her reply: "I don't remember you complaining about having problems when you were in Thailand."

Excuse me, but did she just accuse me of faking my MS symptoms? Or is it that if I'm not actually blind or paralyzed in a full-scale relapse it doesn't count?

I'm holding back from the full-scale rant, but I'm furious. If it wouldn't be calamitous for the kids and financially ruinous for me, I'd be out of here tomorrow.

So sorry, Jeff.

There are three choices.

The first is, let it ride, let it slide. Take a deep breath, and understand that even those who know us and love us the best can forget sometimes how much they love us, and how deeply they should know us.

The second is, confrontation. Not big, hair-pulling, chest-beating, outside-voice-inside confrontation, but a simple clarification of facts: "Do you think I'm faking my symptoms?" - "Do you understand that Thailand is as good as it is ever, ever going to get? That it is the last hurrah before the curtain falls?" - "Do you understand that the curtain is falling now?"

The third is synthesis. She is not you, and you are not she. You may both be dealing in the agony of existence as best you both can, in separate ways. The challenge is in how to keep you both together. Screw the kids, screw the money... do you love her? Do you think she loves you?

If yes, negotiate. Talk. Express. Honesty is strength, and strength is sexy to most women. So, confront, but don't condemn or accuse. This is life with a woman, it's hard, but it's worth it.

SoupStillHasNoClueSoFindYourOwn Way

Go with the second for sure.

sorry Jeff

Um, I'm trying to think of the best way to put this but could your wife be subconciously angry with you for "getting" MS?

Working in peer support I'd sometimes come across couples where the non-disabled (god that's a crappy word) partner would be acting all weird and it was because they had unexpressed feelings of anger/fear/grief etc about their partner's illness/impairment/disability coupled with feelings of guilt because it's not really the done thing to be angry at someone for something that's not their fault.

So instead they act out and go all passive-aggressive. Mind you, I've seen some just bluntly start blaming their partners which is even less pretty.

I guess you'd probably already know this based on whether things have always been like this or if they've only surfaced since getting ill. If it's the latter perhaps she's having some issues adjusting to the diagnosis. Would she be receptive to talking to people in similar situations or does she not want be be um, "confronted" by that?

But yeah, what Soup said.

any such issue is hard on everyone, and people can find, to their own surprise, that resentment at a sense of giving and not getting care can well up and explode before it's even acknowledged. just one guess.

hope it resolves well... too many heartbreaks lately for us all. can we institute a quota system?

ddt

That's commie talk.

That's commie talk.

no, Commie Talk's my cousin. runs the bait stand down by the river.

ddt

It is incredibly difficult to be in a long term relationship under the best circumstances, toss in hardships and the difficulties grow exponentially. The alternative is not much better either, especially for thinking, caring people.

I am sure that I will come off as elitist, but sitting around the house and working my connections only consumes about half to two-thirds of my day. That leaves a lot of time to check-out everything from Maury and Cheaters on TV to the various porn sites and even listen in on the conversations of the divorces moms at the community pool. People that are not real bright and have even less of an ability to contemplate longer term consequences manage to mess-up their lives with amazing ease. People who think things through even a little bit tend to spend a lot more time gritting their teeth and putting up with the hardship.

Everybody could probably benefit from talking with professionals and/or peers a lot more than they do...

Like we do, here?

elitist! go work for obama!

yeah, but love makes us all "not real bright" (at best).

ddt

dpbd: bet we all have something to contribute: http://niceguybut.blogspot.com/

ddt

Last week I had to get in the middle of a fight between two girls who are my friends. I am not sleeping with either of them, so I am not sure how I suddenly got the responsibility of it all. I'm still doing damage control today.