Just a quick one in Book Five: Working Through the Maze 2018

Hope everyone enjoyed their 3 Day Weekends, if you got one!

I just wanted to write a quick entry tonight as my tomorrow may be so busy that I don’t have time to write.

(1) Wife and I did another day of House Hunting. We think we have ONE more day of that and then we’ll make an offer. Fingers crossed as our pre-approval stuff for a mortgage comes through tomorrow at some time.

(2) I spent two days with MBFITWW. We caught up on My Hero Academia and Overlord.

Now for the two things I actually wanted to discuss:

One of the things I really like about the current Marriage Counselor is that she DOESN’T say “Well, all of this is Wife’s fault.” Because that doesn’t facilitate trust nor does it create a supportive environment. Besides… it isn’t true. While wife certainly has issues that she brings to the relationship; the truth of the matter is that so do I. And we looked into those a little bit last week.

(1) Aku. Abusive, controlling, “do as I say or I will hurt you or myself” relationship. SO.... yeah, I felt responsible for her emotions. And I didn’t expect to get my own needs met.
(2) Aoife. Sexual, thrilling, but hollow. I was always told that we “couldn’t be a thing” because she didn’t want to be. So… my own needs not getting met and feeling responsible for her emotions since, as we weren’t dating, she could pull away at the drop of a hate.
(3) Thompson. THAT was certainly a situation involving emotional manipulation, game playing, and the like. I did not expect my emotional needs to be met; and I felt like I had try SO MUCH HARDER in that relationship to keep the emotional connection going.

After that… was Wife. So… I have a long stretch of (1) not expecting my needs to be met; (2) not fighting for my needs to be met; (3) and feeling in some way responsible (co-dependent red flag) for my partner’s emotional state and emotional health.

So that’s something I need to work on. Recognizing my needs, asking for my needs and/or demanding that my needs are valid and have merit, and (the REALLY hard one for me) I have to realize that I am not responsible for my partner’s emotions. I don’t even know what that looks like, frankly!

So that was that thing.

But then… since that conversation was fundamentally about my past relationships and what were some of the problems that repeated… it also made me realize, again, how little experience I’ve had. An abusive relationship that involved nightmare emotional and physical and sexual situations.... an awkward sexual without the sex non-relationship… a relationship in name only… then Wife. Not for the first time, I seriously wonder “What if I’ve missed out?”