Apparently Mom has been talking about C to the rest of the family. Pretty much the whole rest of my family (we are visiting them for Thanksgiving). I told the story about how Stitch (our dog) hated C at first (to illustrate the point that Stitch hated all men, no matter what make or model) and my Aunt said that sometimes dogs just know. My Dad was talking today about how some guys will hold onto a girl for her money. I don’t have money, but I do plan to work. It doesn’t really seem like C is going to get a job in the near future. Or even ever for all I know. He has his online store and he can make a fair amount (for our area) through that.
She has turned them all against him. He is about 8 yrs or so older than me (he is in his early 30s and I am in my mid 20s). If I do bring him here for a holiday (we have been engaged 4 or 5 years and we are waiting until we get financially stable to get married) I don’t think that it would turn out well. They sometimes make me doubt if he really loves me. But I know that he does by his actions. My Dad used to make me suicidal a good number of times a year. Mom never stopped him. She never said anything to him. If she did say something it was after I left crying to go cry somewhere else and think about how I was going to end it. I had uncontrolled major depression almost constantly through out my life up until after a year I had been dating C. She would always come to me later and say how he didn’t mean it and he was just like that. When C started coming around for dinner and such he saw how my Dad was putting me down and riddiculing me right in front of everyone (my Mom and C) and C put a stop to it. He said something. I don’t know what it was, he replied with something that didn’t seem very… moving? I guess you would say?.. but Dad has yet to put me down like that in private or public.
All of the things that he has done for me I can’t talk about. When I was suicidal that first year I was at college (about an hour or two from my hometown) he was the one that I called. 12am, 3am, 5am calls maybe two or three times a week for over a year. And you can’t say that he was in it for the sex. That was months before I started with anything like that with him. He drove to my school on two separate occasions because I wasn’t answering my phone and he was afraid that I had or was trying to kill myself. Both times my phone was dead. He ran all around campus. To my job, the union, the cafeteria, everywhere. Men aren’t allowed in the women’s dorm. I found out he was there because my suite mate knocked on my door (I was asleep, I used to sleep every spare moment I had back then) and told me that some guy was looking for me he had been asking people he was seeing around campus as he looked if they knew me and knew where I was. I went straight out to the parking lot in front of my dorm and he was standing next to his car, looking at it with a sort of “what do I do now” look. He said that he felt really stupid, but it was probably the sweetest thing I have ever seen in my life.
The reason that my family’s venom, or prejudice I’m not sure what to call it (none of them have met him except my Mom, my Dad, and my little sister) bothers me so much is because everyone talks about how they know someone who got married and it went south and how everyone warned her about him. Honestly, if he is with me because he thinks that he is getting some money, he would probably be easier off getting a normal job.
They have no idea the kind of heck I have put him through. I never go to my Mom. Anything I tell my Mom I regret at some later time while it is biting me in the butt. To the point of telling her what my favorite color is seems like (and in actuality probably is) a bad call. It’s like my Aunt told me though. Mothers and daughters have a tough time getting along.
I flipped out a short time ago and thought he was cheating. The suspicion had built and built and built that something was wrong so I checked his phone. He had accidentally called some girl (his case makes his phone bump in a weird way where he accidentally dials people. He has pocket dialed me several times before too) and she text back asking if he meant to call her. He said no. There was a short conversation about how are you doing and such are you still with that guy? Are you still with that girl? ect. She was with some other guy he said he was still with me and we were doing well. This conversation was from a few months ago and there was nothing else there really. I got her number off his phone, left while he was asleep (which is when I had checked his phone) and went home. I called her when I got home and asked her if anything had happened in the most I just need to know sort of way (to encourage her to tell the truth) she said no that she was in the north west now and had been there for a few years. I text his sister and asked her. She said that the girl had left town a few years ago and hadn’t come back. The girl is a real jerk and his sister worked at a restaurant that everyone there hangs around. His sister said that that girl thought that they were friends (when really she had to be polite to her because of her job) and she would have told her if she had come to town.
I did all of this. I showed my Mom their messages and told her that he had cheated (I was absolutely certain) called my Aunt, sent her the messages to ask what she thought, I was planning to give the ring back. After talking to the girl and his sister I saw that he had actually not cheated. I had a relapse of doubt the next day and I was sitting on my bed, looking at my phone, thinking about exactly what to say to him. I was not going to cry or scream. This was unacceptable but he was wonderful to me in every other way and I felt no regret about being with him or loving him. I always thought that if he did something like this I would try to wreck his life. But I thought about it and how happy he had always made me and how he had always put me first, I was content to just part ways with maybe a kiss on the cheek and wish him well in the future with honest sincerity.
And then it hit me. Everything I was thinking- word for word almost- I had seen on here from people who have joined because their significant other had started smoking pot and gone into a paranoid frenzy. The way they described their loved one’s accusations. All of it. It snapped me out of it. I hadn’t realized it but I had been going on a downward slope towards a major meltdown. C said that I had been acting weird. I have never smoked pot, but the suspicions they described their partner going through sounded exactly like what I was thinking. I avoided a major melt down because of this. I have never been more grateful to this community than I was at that moment. If I hadn’t seen these wonderful men and women who get on here trying to bring their partner back from the abyss, I might have sunk into it too.
And do you know what his response to this was? He just said that he thought I was silly. I asked if he was mad, and he said that he had been mad, but he never shows his anger towards me. This is true. We have talked about this before. He avoids showing me any kind of anger or frustration because I get upset. Not I yell that this shouldn’t have bothered you upset but I get mad at myself for doing whatever it was. For example I had bought a game called Tokyo Jungle (it’s a really good game- I never got into the multi player, but it is still really good. You play an animal- carnivore or herbivore- and you live in the ruins of Tokyo city after it has returned to nature and all the humans are gone. You have to find plants to eat if you are a herbivore or find other animals to eat if you are a carnivore) and I was a Pomeranian (one of those little fluffy dogs) and I was just running around and eating rabbits and breeding (your animal self ages like animals do in real life- but much quicker- you should always breed when you get the chance on that game because when you reproduce you are the new puppy now.
Your litter mates are a sort of back up and extra lives combo. If you are attacking or defending yourself from another animal they will fight with you and follow you around and if you die you just control one of the other dogs in your litter instead) and he was getting annoyed by the level up howling. I never picked up that game again because I got so upset with myself. I started crying and I explained that I was just having fun running around being a Pomeranian. I think that I cried that night too. At any rate I swore to myself that I would never play that game again. I’ve never been able to pick it back up.
But after I got paranoid and accused him of cheating, something that- if either of us did it- would be the end of the relationship, no questions asked, and I snapped out of it I wasn’t sure what I should do. I had messed up big time. I didn’t particularly apologize because I wasn’t sure what to do. I felt like I should do something to redeem myself, but I didn’t know what. I thought maybe I could bring him something, like how stereotypically men bring women flowers after they mess up, but I felt like that would be tantamount to me trying to buy forgiveness. So when I finally asked him what I should do after he pointed out that I hadn’t really apologized because I just could come up with a way to redeem myself on my own- he said be there when I wake up.
I don’t think there are a lot of people on this earth who would go through all of these things and still stick around for more.