I don’t know why he does these things…
Originally published at Morbid Romantic. You can comment here or there.
It’s barely 8am and Alfred starts a fight with me.
There’s a rule here that the lights have to be off during the day to save power. This is a rule I just not not familiar with, or entirely comfortable with. But, I keep it to myself. The one window in this room brings in very little light since there are so many trees in the backyard. Also, low light gives me a headache. Sitting around this room all day long in the dark is miserable and ends up making me feel quiet dizzy and sick after a while. My eyes strain and strain and give me a pounding headache.
I try not to complain. I know that I can’t just complain for the sake of complaining to Alfred because he takes it personally and would turn it into a fight. I keep it all in so that I don’t have to fight with him. For what it’s worth, he’s a good boyfriend. He’s just a shitty partner. He’s not here for me emotionally and it’s starting to wear down on me. Right now is when I really need someone to be here for me. My mother is gone, I’m miles away from my sister, I have no friends, I have no outlet, I have no escape. I just have one stress after another and a world of change to adapt to, which isn’t easy. But instead of realizing how hard this is and how lonely I am, he takes every particle of my unhappiness and turns it around on me and calls me ungrateful and rude and silly.
I just want to be free to complain about something without it being a big deal. I’m only human. Sometimes I want to be able to sigh and be sad without him coming back in here to pick a fight about how ungrateful and rude I am. I don’t mean it to be, I just get… sad. He sure as hell doesn’t make the sadness any better by yelling at me. It only makes it worse. A million times worse because I’m just stuck.
So, this morning, out the lights went. I have the GREs coming up and I would have liked to study during the day. But, it’s so dark in here that I can’t see the pages or my notecards. I can’t study. All I can do is sleep. I mention this to him, not to complain, but to let him know that I have important things in my life that I need to get done and that I am going to sleep very soon. I NEED to do well on these GREs. I NEED to be able to get into grad school. Studying and taking this test is about the most important thing in my life right now and I can’t even study. I can’t maximize my time to study and soak up the most in the short time that I have before the test date.
I guess my test, grad school and our future isn’t important to him. I don’t even know if ‘we’ have a future anymore. It’s something I am going to have to think long and hard on.
So, of course, he decides that since I say that I am just going to sleep instead of study, which I said to let him know I will be going to bed soon, I was being rude and ungrateful.
So, he does what he always does. What is that? He leaves for about 15 second and then comes back with a, “You know what…” with finger pointing. Of course, he proceeds to tell me just what a bitch I am, how rude I am, how much I don’t appreciate what everyone is doing for me, etc, etc. Essentially, he takes one side conversational comment that I made and turns it into a massive fight. I try to tell him that he’s reading too much into what I said, something he ALWAYS does to me, but he insists that he could read it on my face. The thing is that he loves to ‘read things’ on my face, he loves to interpret what I say and mean and turn it around on me. No matter what I say or do to tell him what I truly meant, it doesn’t matter. Alfred believes what Alfred wants to believe and I end up getting ripped a new one for all of his assumptions.
It continues to amaze me how a normal, conversational moment can turn into a huge fight with me getting yelled at for meaning things I didn’t mean. And it’s frustrating that I can’t defend myself and dissolve the situation by telling what I did mean because he doesn’t listen, he doesn’t believe me. What he thinks is what he believes no matter what I say. It’s so… bizarre the way he flips out over nothing. I can’t help but wonder how things play out in his head that me acting normal can come across to him as so threatening.
I just don’t want to do this anymore.
What this does, though, is give me an idea of what a future with him would be like. Because he doesn’t see that he has an anger problem, he doesn’t have any incentive or thought to work on it. He truly does not see how he is just being cruel to me. I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering when he is going to flip out on me over something he thinks he is seeing or hearing. I just can’t live that way. I won’t. I refuse to. I want to live a happy, calm, loving life. If he is never going to try to improve himself and his problems, I won’t be in this relationship forever. I will not be abused. I am going to try to talk to him about it and I hope I can make him see what he’s doing. If I come to him in a calm and non threatening way, maybe he won’t turn it around on me and we can come to an understanding of some sort.
It probably won’t work, but I’ll try.