I have been dating her for almost 8 months. I love her, and she loves me. She claims to have loved me for much longer and much more than I do, her. I am indifferent about this claim, but contest it, nevertheless, with “No, honey, I love you way more”.
I had a crush on her for a long while and had always felt as if she were my better half, even before the relationship; But, why then, do I feel as if I had to “learn to love” her? I thought the feeling would come so naturally, but it took longer than I had anticipated. I have my intense moments of passion and love for her, I also have my natural times where it’s just her and I hanging out and in perfect sync and happiness just to be in each other’s presence (true love), and at other times, I worriedly feel as if I’m forcing myself.
These times I feel as though I force myself, are due to my ever-thinking brain. I take one thing and turn it into one thousand things in a matter of minutes. I jump to conclusions based on how I’ve been hurt in past relationships and also based on my most mild or wild scenarios that I create so vividly, so gruesomely, and so despicably. My outrageous, yet somewhat realistic (to me, at least), fears and paranoia’s when it comes to her is the fact that her love will crumble before me in the presence of someone she finds more fit to who she is, what she likes or finds attractive at the time, and who is able to make her smile like I did every day before we began to date. I continue to bring a smile to her face every day, but sometimes, I feel as though its not the same smile that shone many times before. And it makes my blood congest my veins when I see her connect her ears with the corners of her mouth after some whispered or inside joke that she shares with the other guy across the room.
We work together. I’ve worked there for 2 years and she has for a little less than that. She dated a boy there that treated her like s***. I didn’t care for him, and neither did she. While she dated him, I dated somebody who I didn’t give a care in the world for either. At work, we would talk and joke all the time, and whenever he would come around, he would always be the jealous-type and interrupt and talk to her in front of me. If we would spot him coming, it would get quiet. Not that we were talking about anything inappropriate or doing anything wrong, but that we both knew how close we were getting to each other each day, and it felt so good that it felt wrong all at the same time. They broke up, and I broke up with my girlfriend at the time. We then got together after that and have been a very close, loving, passionate, romantic, realistic, truely best-friends type of couple. It has been great, it truly has.
The relationship has had its benefits and take-backs. The benefits are that I am more focused on who I’m going to be and my future and that I’m getting my head out of the gutter and really trying to better myself.
The downfalls are that in all of her negative views of almost everybody and everything, I have developed many of my own. Many that I wouldn’t bat an eye to a year ago. But now she’s made me more irritable to other peoples’ BS. Which is good in the sense that I am not being walked on anymore. But it has also made me extremely critical of the people around me and the friends that I had (or still have; I don’t have the faintest idea to where I stand with any of them anymore). I have really distanced myself from my previous group of friends. They are all very heavily into partying, being stupid, doing a lot of drugs and drinking all the time, being on their phones, “balling”, and talking about themselves and how cool it is to be, “them”. After taking a step back and analyzing what each and every person had to offer to me and the development of my life, I found that the only use or lesson I could get from them is how to roll a blunt. I do truly believe I need to surround myself with those that help me better myself and that like me for me, and not just because I was one of their fellow party’ers. I see them from time to time, but not for extended periods whatsoever. After realizing who these people really are and what it is they stand for and live for, I have become indiscreetly disgusted with all of them but one. That one, is my best friend. Well, my most recent best friend. -Within the post-mentioned analysis of my friends, I have done my best to rid myself of my former best friend who has been the ropes that have been holding me back; the most terrible influence on my life.- My most recent, is like me in every single way except for his skin and age. I love him to death and can discuss anything and everything with him. The only thing is, he is still young. Physically, not mentally. But the fact that he continues to hang out with those fore-mentioned friends, he is not able to realize and expand his mental age and capabilities. He told me a few weeks ago: “Man, I love our friends. They’re just all so loving, and caring, and always willing to smoke with ya… etc.”. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t agree with him. But I didn’t want to shatter his perception on his friendships. I was the stupid stoner who got him high for the first time at a local park down by the river with another friend of ours. From then on, he became a heavier and heavier user; Again, exactly like me. I saw what he had become, what I had turned him into. I hate to see how he is so stuck in this phase. But I am envious that he can still enjoy his blissful ignorance. I remember not knowing how stupid I looked and acted, how stupid my decisions were, how I truly didn’t care about my consequences. Without him escaping their clutches, I will be without consolation, other than this website.
Back to my misconceptions about my girlfriend: I bring up the fact that we work together because I dated her after she broke up with one of our coworkers. We recently hired someone we both went to High School with and that I was sort of friends with and that she was friends with in, like, Kindergarten. At first, I never thought anything of him. But more and more, I’ve found that she mentions him more often, talks to him more often when I’m off doing something else at work, and talks about things to me that she’s talked to him about. And what hurts the worst, is that today, I noticed the faint, quick conversation they had before they would risk the vibrations hitting my ears. Now, I did not catch any of the words, but the fact that I couldn’t hear it, is what released my paranoid madness. My head rushed with the thought of her texting him when she’s not with me, or secretly hanging out with him on days when I can’t see her or on her breaks. Some of these, most even, may seem very far-fetched and damn well could be. But to me, they are completely legitimate until proven incorrect. It’s horrible how my brain is functioning this way, but it’s what I live with every single day. I feel as if I see and hear employees whispering to each other about her and him, and gossiping about how stupid and clueless I must be. How unsatisfying it must be to lay with me. How horrible of a guy I could be if she has to find joy, or something else, in somebody else. I begin to deteriorate myself from within. Tearing apart at who I am, what I am, what I’ll never be, what I’ll never gain, what I’ll always suffer with, what would have been, what may unfortunately be…. the list does not ever end. In this moment of complete paranoia, she approached me after she noticed that I wasn’t all there. And instead of asking me what’s wrong and what I’m thinking, she just began to ramble incoherently about this and that, even seemed very nervous, quick-paced, and defensive in her speech. She never does this to soothe my nerves so I found this abnormality very unsettling. Extremely, in fact. After not giving her as much back as she was earlier in the evening (but not in an extremely noticeably depressed/angry kind of way), she began to seem hopeless and upset out of the blue so I decided to humor her and give her the benefit of the doubt; the “I know I can be quite insane sometimes” benefit. I joked with her a little and asked what was wrong and she said it was her back. Now, her back may have been a huge part of the problem, but my mind told me repeatedly that there was more to it.
My problem is that, no matter what that “more” is in the problem, I never have the stones to address it. I bottle every little thing up, stir it up into crazy concoctions, and either spew it out or brew up some more. The thing is though, even though I know I can be paranoid at times, the delusions still seem completely logical to me. And when I see behaviors that are abnormal to me and that are subsequent to the feelings I would suspect her to feel/hide, it just proves my fear that much more.
I can’t tell her that I think she’s cheating on me because I don’t think she is. But I really can’t ask her if she has a crush on somebody else, because I know she’ll be brutally honest with me; and that is something that I know I could not handle. And even if I’m wrong and she tells me that she doesn’t, my brain has such a difficult time accepting it and labels it as a lie that is just trying to get her out of this confrontation, which continues this vicious cycle.
I wish I could trust better.