ho hum (relationships)
Yeah, I’ve been quiet for a while. I wasn’t intending to write this blog for personal reasons only, but so far it hasn’t attracted much attention from the viewing public and I have been a bit discouraged and in the frame of mind of “why bother?” I am hoping that someone else is getting something out of it, and maybe a few offers to write for publication could come my way – or someone would buy me lunch. It makes me wonder what to write about, and I end up not writing anything. I wonder who is really interested, and if it matters whether I post or not.
On to boyfriend stuff: I have struggled for years in a relationship with my boyfriend, and have grown pretty hopeless recently. We got together on the premise that we shared the same values for communication and the same understanding of what it takes to have an intimate relationship. He said he wasn’t very experienced and would need my help and patience. But over time I have realized that he is more than inexperienced: he has none, and doesn’t pursue any outside of our relationship. There is no one in his life to whom he relates on more than a superficial level, with whom he shares even basic thoughts and feelings. Our relationship is the laboratory for his experiments with intimacy, and he often stumbles if not completely misses the mark, and I am the one who has to deal with the consequences. I am tired of it.
After we left his family’s house in Sao Paulo after our Christmas visit, he made fun of them for crying and hid from them - and then lied to them - about his tears. Huh? Why would he not want his family to know that he was sad about leaving them? What good purpose could that serve? On the way home we talked about how he relates to people with either coldness or aggression, which is exactly what he learned in his family growing up. A few days later when reflecting on the conversation, he spoke about how he only feels emotionally secure in his therapist’s office – the therapy he finally began about a year ago after I had suggested it for a couple of years. Huh? Not with his closest friends? Not with his family? Not with me?
How can I expect anything from him, emotionally speaking? I am having a harder time believing that he wants the kind of relationship that he said he wanted, that he is actively developing the necessary skills, and that he will be capable any time soon of the type of relationship we have supposedly been having for the last six years.
