The worst part of the longest relationship of my life (Part 1 of 3)
Well, this is going to be fun :/
For those that don't know, the longest relationship of my life lasted 5.5 years, ending at the start of 2012. After talking with other people and reflecting on this a lot, I found a desire to want to pen out my story again - or at least, as I see it now, some five-ish years on.
I feel like I've already written considerably about this stuff - perhaps profusely... but those writings coming in the form of letters to friends, letters to my ex-, songs, 'years in review' blog posts, pieces of animation and art, poems, journal posts, even facebook posts. But it occurred to me the other day that perhaps I never had actually penned it all down in one foul monolithic swoop: a roots-and-all cameo in the jigsaw of memory, to appear plain and for all to see, like a pantone-chart. More importantly, sometimes I think that it can be good for us to re-visit our emotional wounds and their effects on our psyche - to get right on down to that really deep, mucky stuff that makes us really uncomfortable. Flesh it all out, lift up the bandages, and check on how it's healing.
No, it's not going to be a short post. Nor do I expect that it's going to be a prevailingly morose one. It'll be sad, in bits, and it may become the most personal / raw / exposed thing I've ever written. Still, I've my pot of tea and I've got my motivation - so you go grab yours and lets get started.
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CONTENTS
(Edit: it turns out that I had to post this in three parts - which was not my intent, apparently livejournal can only post 64kb of text in one hit. The more you know..)
Part 1 of 3:
Chapter 1: In the beginning...
Chapter 2: Little things
Chapter 3: the decline
Chapter 4: We got engaged
Chapter 5: More pressures: the engagement itself
Part 2 of 3:
Chapter 6: what holidays were like.
Chapter 7: Weddings, properties, and parent's houses.
Chapter 8: When things get really bad, and your partner won't seek help.
Chapter 9: We moved out.
Chapter 10: The break up.
Part 3 of 3:
Chapter 11: Some of the things that helped.
Chapter 12: A plot twist.
Chapter 13: On telling other people.
Chapter 14: Where we are now.
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Chapter 1: In the beginning...
There'd be no way that I could go about writing this post without at least mentioning some of the good stuff. One of the things that I liked the most about Joy was her sense of fun. There was an innocent quality about her approach to things. In other words, Joy was a fantastic activity partner (despite leading a life that was generally overloaded). In those early years, I do remember thinking regularly that Joy was typically at her best when she was playing some kind of game... or trying her hand at something that was a new experience. I guess that for someone who was so concerned with the seriousness and the details of life, it was incredibly rewarding to see herself let go and explore being new and nothing-if-not-novice at something (for example, bits of different sports - we started off by trying many).
At the time, I think I also really liked that she tried very hard, cared very deeply about things - at least she did in the start. I guess that after a few years of being continually frustrated by Natasha (my previous -ex) and her whimsical hedonism / lack of consideration of anything beyond the short term; I enjoyed being around someone who paid attention to detail - someone who would consider, evaluate, and put thought into things. I guess that I associated security (and perhaps maturity) with someone who was aware and who gave thought to things for considerably longer spans of time than 48 hours. I considered myself a pretty mature sort of an adult, and I guess I appreciated the idea of dating another adult, which was new for me - for Tasha never really was.
Strange how I don't desire those two qualities much anymore! Gosh, today I can't even imagine wanting those sorts of qualities in a partner. Perhaps it was just that Joy was indeed an incredibly different person to Tasha - "the opposite" and Joy would say. It always made Joy uncomfortable (and sometimes a bit defensive) whenever I tried to talk about my past experiences with Tash to her; I think Joy felt threatened.
The other thing that I really liked about Joy was a simple demographic quality: she was Buddhist. I met Joy not long after I had just discovered Buddhism (well, Zen at least), and I was devouring material about the east with fervor. I really wanted to learn as much as I could about Buddhism, including Joy's Mahayana denomination - which later I would discover wasn't at all for me. {Mahayana is perhaps the most common denomination of Buddhism, with Mahayana ideals encompassing about 60-70% of the faith}. I wanted to explore talking about religion with someone - which was a new and potentially a strong, binding feeling for me... even if I wasn't sure why, at the time. (edit: recently - after a few years of unprecedented spiritual growth, I've come to realise that my formative childhood years did actually contain a fair amount of spiritual abuse. This helps to explain why I felt so connected to Joy when I met her: at the same time, I was just beginning to explore the very exciting possibilities of redefining the term 'religion' to perhaps some positive qualities for me).
{Aside: While thinking about this passage earlier tonight, I again replay some of the traumatic scenes in my head from not only my childhood, but my adult life. I felt significant spiritual abuse / trauma at the hands of Tasha and her shitty evangelical-pagan friends. These are the hurtful, painful, memories that still haunt me whenever I hear a hymn or song of praise, reticent from a time when I already had social awkwardness / especially low self worth, and a very strong desire to be liked.}
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Chapter 2: Little things
2a) anger
It wasn't until a few years ago that I discovered the psychology of personality types (especially using the Myers-Briggs model, but also others), and I haven't looked back. It's fair to say that MBTI personality type definition has changed my life - as there's few things that I identify more with than the research done on the MBTI personas (For those that don't know, I am INFP. Joy was ISTJ, so almost entirely opposite...)
Whilst nothing is impossible, pretty much all of the psychology warns heavily against TJ (Thinking, Judging) and NF (iNtuitive, Feeling) people dating each other, mainly because of some very different value systems... which in turn result in a lot of conflict. Nowadays, It's easy to say with the power of beautiful hindsight - but basically Joy and I were just really, really different, incompatible people, and I was unhappy a lot. Not always, of course - and especially not in the beginning - but whenever I think of that relationship at all, the prevailing emotion that I feel is basically that of emotional pain, of having to deal with unnecessary and frequent unexpected anger, and feelings of not being loved. In case you're not aware, I'm big on both optimism and loyalty - and so I gave it my best shot. For a huge proportion of that relationship (pretty much all of it?) I just assumed that the waves of emotional duress were just a normal part of every relationship: maybe all relationships were supposed to be largely sad, and largely insular. After all, everyone tells you that they are hard work... yet they rarely go into details about how the logistics should and shouldn't look (less so, if you're a guy). I still remember our first fight, about 3 months into the relationship: I don't remember what it was about, but I certainly remember how it made me feel. I was essentially shocked: for I couldn't believe that someone would get so upset about a circumstance, and raise their voice and slam doors and refuse to talk things through or negotiate to find a middle ground. Although something in the very back of my brain did register a warning bell that maybe things were going to get worse, I guess I hadn't received nearly enough love to know that it was healthy to listen to those gut instincts. What I do know is that if I were half... nay... one tenth, one TWENTIETH of the man that I am today, I would have walked away there and then. In a way, I regret not doing so. I regret not have having enough experience or a high enough sense of self-worth to have seen the value in biting the bullet. Not that times were always bad, but still.
As I learned more and more about my ex, I progressively started negating her anger as things went on. Simultaneously, the short-handed anger got progressively worse. It's hard to explain, but when I learned more about her story - especially her family - who were sometimes nice but very-two faced with emotional, verbal and sometimes physical abuse which they dished out for one another (emotional is always the worst)... and the more I learned about her mum's poor mental health and about how my -ex basically had to save her mum's life at age eight, and hence had to fulfill all of her mum's duties from age nine ... and about the push-and-shout-to-compete culture that emerges and is apparently tolerated whenever you have any large group of Vietnamese.... after all of this, I guess I stopped directly blaming my ex for it. Her family weren't terrible people - and they were great towards me - but there were a LOT of terrible, long-term issues.
Was this a mild form of Stockholm syndrome?
After we'd fight, we would always make up... usually after a period of her calming down and me wavering somewhere between me 'trying to shrug it off' and me 'being in another room with my head between my knees thinking "oh god" on repeat'. Sometimes, my ex's stubborn side would flare up (as 'stubborn' is by far, head-and-shoulders the most definitive adjective for her) and we would fight again, but usually she would be genuinely sorry and would apologize after the event.
So that combined with my very low self-esteem (largely brought on from a few years of being helplessly single), continued to be the modus operandi for a long time. A bit like a terrible novel that starts off bad and doesn't get any better - but you continue picking it up and going back to it every time, because you have no idea what it was like to read an actually good one.
So that was the anger thing.
2b) competitiveness
Another point of contention which I really struggled with was my -ex's inexorable competitiveness, compared to the lack of my own. Joy was fiercely competitive, and didn't really understand the concept of the 'just a game' mentality - which frequently made me feel sad, given my own extreme (and probably unusual) dislike of competition... especially given my few years surviving a composition degree at a ferociously competitive arts college and my disinclination towards male macho ideals on the soccer field. I remember at least one games night that concluded with me getting yelled at a lot, for doing something wrong that I had absolutely no idea was wrong: namely, being friendly and making my friends feel comfortable at the games evening that we'd hosted. (apparently I wasn't 'representing the relationship enough...' whatever that means).
Scrabble was especially bad. Maybe it was just performance anxiety that such outbursts induced, but there's just something about the game that I found incredibly, incomprehensibly difficult. I'm a pretty wordy person, but maybe my brain's just not cut out for scrabble. I remember finding it mentally excruciating every time that I was asked to play - I just could never work out good combinations about how to fit letters into meaningful words, and then have them work with what was already on the board... let alone do all of this strategically. (Seriously, I suck at scrabble. Like, it'd take me 20-30mins to fashion a turn). So, when you're dating someone who fucking loves scrabble, and who is always competitive and usually angry... well, you can guess how that passtime turned out. I avoid Scrabble now - I hate it (and I don't hate many things) because of those awful memories, and I haven't played since.
2c) a culture of doing.
Worst of all (or perhaps not 'worst', maybe just another bad thing) was that Joy was always asking me to *DO* things. Little things in the beginning, but by the middle of the relationship it was usually complex, difficult, and big things. Tasks to help her day be less cluttered, errands around the house, things for her work (SO MANY things for her work), things for parents and for relatives, things for people she knew. It wasn't all Joy's fault that I'd undertake these things for her - in hindsight it was partly my own fault as well (for not having boundaries and for not saying "no" to her requests for help); but Joy did know that I had a servant's heart at my centre, and honestly I think she exploited it - perhaps without stopping to consciously think about it. Some of the worst times I had in that relationship were when I was trying to give when I had very little left of me: after a run of successive task-doing without any 'me' time in the middle, I'd try and give myself away some more - usually by trying to complete mathematical or direct-logic tasks that I FELT were complex and difficult and stressful, basically because my brain isn't wired to do those sorts of things. I'm basically awful when it comes to mathematical theories or impersonal judgment, and so I'd almost have a breakdown by trying desperately to do some of the things that she would find easy, only to be berated by her because I wasn't doing it 'her way', which was apparently the correct way. Granted, she was one of the most logically efficient people on the planet, but so often she'd tell me that "I was wrong", so much so that by the end of the relationship, I really had very little confidence in making my own decisions... I was almost scared to. I have no idea how many times I heard the phrase "you were wrong" in that relationship, but it was probably in the thousands.
Ironically, Joy never suggested to me (or rarely encouraged me) to do self-nourishing things. She'd never encourage me to take time out to find space in life, or to find something creative, or to sit and think, or to go at my own pace. I've recently had the experience of having a partner support and advocate the values in life that I actually find nourishing, and it's one of the biggest gifts that I have ever been given. But life wasn't like that back then with Joy. Life with her was almost always fast: way too fast (with a few nice, odd exceptions - ie. usually on holidays - but even then, there was always inevitably be something that upset her or some point of contention that we'd end up fighting about). Usually, there was very little space.
All of this meant that we became very INSULAR. Joy wouldn't see her friends very often, and I'd see mine less. We became not so much bound by romantic interest, as bound by a culture of facilitation. Sometimes when I did see certain friends, it was always accompanied by Joy. Time and time again, and her presence and assertive-by-nature demeanor meant that I was on edge/stressed, and less able to be myself than normal. Some of my friends (notably Josh) dropped right out of the picture. I also didn't see my family much, mostly because I was doing things. Constantly busy and frequently overtired, Joy and I continued to try and do life together in our own little silo of a world: which usually didn't involve anyone else much - outside of Joy's parents/relatives and the inordinately disorganized boss at Joy's work, who we were invariably trying to do extra things for.
It wasn't all bad. We had some good times, and I still had my soccer teams. I found myself really relishing in my beautiful Wednesday night team, as I longed seeing them and spending time with them. I became especially close with Sam - because we always got along, plus he and Jodie moved out to Sunbury, (which was three train stops from my house) so Sam and I shared a lot of quality time during our catch-up drives into and out of soccer. I was also really enjoying my Friday lunchtime soccer team at work - again just because it was regular and social, even if I didn't really forge any strong friendships from that group. I remember one day in late 2008 where I was asked to play in an exhibition soccer match for the University, up against a visiting team from Africa who were participants in the Homeless World Cup. I'd never officially represented the University in Soccer before, and it was one of the biggest matches that I'd played in a decade - ever since a former life where I was somewhat serious about playing soccer, back in 2001-2003. The exhibition match kicked off at 2pm, and included photos, interviews, even anthems. By 6pm that evening I was back in the silence of my Parkville house, and trying to help Joy with a work thing she needed completing urgently, when I burst into tears in the middle of the loungeroom floor. Joy asked me what was wrong, but I did a terrible job of articulating it (for I'd effectively stopped writing - and hence stopped being able to practice different ways of processing things). I wrote almost nothing in 2008, and literally nothing between 2009 and 2012. In hindsight I think I was just desperately craving some words of affirmation/validation - not to mention physical touch - and the void of having zero of these for some time was killing me inside. I only stayed another four years...
Joy's parents looked after us. Well, we looked after them too - for both of them had their slightly and more-than-slightly shitty qualities, but then... who doesn't? In the end I had a lot of time for both of Joy's parents, for they were altruistic, accommodating, quiet people - and they were really nice to me (especially nice when I started learning Vietnamese). It was a strange dualism because although I liked them both, I wholeheartedly disagree with many of the ways that they would treat Joy. Not only did they treat Joy poorly, they would allow other relatives to treat her terribly. I guess there was a lot of biting my tongue for the greater good - which I guess was largely a cultural idiom (they were both sometimes furiously stubborn, and her dad had an infamously short temper), and I didn't want to start a feud). I guess you just can't choose your family.
More specifically, I really enjoyed getting to know Joy's mum. Her mum was quite different to my former partner - or rather, she exuded the qualities of Joy that rarely shone and which I desperately liked. Joy's mum was a soft-spoken, good humoured, simple soul with a playful streak, and she spoke very few words. Xuan was incredibly spiritual (having become heavily involved with her local temple after her breakdown and attempted suicide many years ago), and I was really interested to learn about Mahayana Buddhism through the perspectives of her mum. I knew that Joy's mum really loved me, and could tell that she thought I was really good for Joy - at the very least least, her parents saw that I was forever doing acts of service for her. Joy also deeply, deeply loved her mum - the pair of them had an enormously strong bond, and being in her mum's presence was enough to instantly relax Joy - it was really nice to see. With Joy's mum, we'd play cards and share hours of not doing much... it was lovely.
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Chapter 3: the decline
One day, Joy's mum got diagnosed with colon cancer. Everyone basically took this as badly as you would expect. The diagnosis was grim - discovered late when Joy's mum had already hit Stage 3. There's only four stages.
Joy and I did the what all family members in this situation do. We banded together, and we spent tonnes of time over at her parent's place. The extended family also pitched in over the next 18 months, and - in a way - we put aside all of our differences in order to spend a bit more time together, and function better as a unit. Hereby we discovered a side effect of the prognosis - everyone started getting along a bit better.
In the midst of all of this, Joy's dad (Son, or Sean, if you will) came to dealing with this as best he could. He did a great job, actually - of doing everything in his power to make sure that Sue (Xuan) was looked after accordingly. He backed off his work, and made do with less money in order to spend more time with Xuan. Sometimes, he also got pretty comprehensively stressed out by the situation, and plunged himself into the mindful things that he knew in order to try and help himself. During this time, Son got really into his exercise, his spirituality, his occasional drinking with friends (which became quickly more than occasional, and far more heavy than we'd seen before), and - but most of all - his cooking, where he'd strive for hours to give Xuan the best of every dietary nourishment that he could think of, sourcing almost nothing but dietary foods that had been reported to have had some anti-cancer properties. Later on, as the cancer progressed, Joy and I found ourselves in the middle of an unforeseen difficult struggle: Sean didn't know when to stop. As Sean became more desperate to maximize his wife's chances, he became obsessed with her diet, and refused to let her eat foods that didn't carry have some glimmer of hope attached to some recent science article or other. Glimmers of hope are great and all, but Joy and I saw that her mum was becoming very malnourished (and sad) in the meantime.
A strange, silent period of solitude occurred, where Sean would cook and Sue would eat a little, and then after Sean would go to bed for his morning shifts, Joy and I would cook again for her mum, and we'd share a late supper together - usually over cards, TV, and each burying our heads in books and/or computers.
It was a somber time, but you know... we made the most of it. It took a huge amount of strength, be we made these days as neutral and even happy as we could. Now, they comprise some of the better memories of that relationship - of the two of us working towards a common good, rather than being at one other's throats. For what it's worth, Joy's mum was remarkably serene - and through a tremendous display of subtle strength, Xuan remained at peace and in good humor that she was being looked after - by all of us, as much as by the gods of her faith.
At this point, Joy and I felt like we were managing OK. This was probably the high of the relationship (mid-2009), feeling content that we were achieving something altruistic and meaningful - (namely, by being the glue of the family), and I remember feeling like this common activity of caring attributed to a love language which I never highly valued at any real personal level, but I never disregarded it either. It was OK, and life was OK. We even got away - once, maybe twice... and these were a happy couple of holidays. One was to Adelaide, and another to a tiny town called Cobden. Just nice little breaks where we didn't seem to fight a great deal or strangle or negate one another.
Like everyone with late-stage cancer, Joy's mum suddenly got a lot worse very quickly, and then picked up marginally. There were a couple of trips to hospital which became frequent visits to hospital; where we'd sit and play cards until all hours, greeting relatives but mostly just passing the time. Nobody spoke, nor wanted to speak, of the sad reality of Joy's mum - we were incontrovertibly losing her. Thinking about that December even now makes me very sad, not at all because of the relationship stuff, but because losing Joy's mum was probably the closest experience that I've ever had with death, and it was really painful to deal with. I guess I was always putting on a brave face for the family ('be the supportive boyfriend'), but in the last days of Joy's mum in that January, it became hard to lose someone so benevolent that I had become close to.
For the final fortnight, Joy's mum was moved to palliative care, and it became a marathon to be by Xuan's side at all hours. It was a fortnight of almost living at the hospital, playing countless hands of Chinese 13-card poker and chanting with Buddhist monks from the temple for hours on end. We must have chanted the 'Nam o a-i da phut' ('I pray to the Buddha') at least 20,000 or 30,000 times. Above all, we put everything resembling life (except for work) on hold. Joy desperately wanted to be there at her mum's passing, and my heart ached for her when I had to make the decision to coerce Joy into spending an evening at home after three nights of hospital chair sleep, and four days of complete self-neglect. We got her (Joy) home for about eight hours: enough for the poor, exhausted daughter to have half a night of turbulent sleep... suffice to say that we had a call at about 6am to say that Joy's mum had passed away during that night.
One of the toughest moments for me was when I called my parents the next day from the hospital, to tell them. I was just really overcome with emotion (and probably exhaustion), for it had been such a sad and slow and difficult ride... and although I hadn't cried much much in front of Joy's relatives/family, but I cried a whole bunch after talking with mine. I maintain that there's something uniquely difficult and decidedly awful about telling other people about illness (either your own, or other people's) - it's as though the act of verbalising instantly makes it real for you; for hearing the words come out of your mouth cements a certain reality that you can't avoid, and that most people don't want. The wave had crashed, and I was swirling around in the groundswell.
There was a lot of initial grieving. We (Joy, her brother, and I) killed the time by staying especially busy: taking care of her dad, making a video of Joy's mum for the funeral, organizing a fundraiser for Bowel Cancer Research Australia, and burying ourselves in our work. The funeral was sombre and also a bit contorted - many people who were not really close to Joy's mum at all gave speeches, in place of people who were actually close to her.
In sticking with some antiquated Viet tradition of not officially celebrating life for 100 days after someone passes, Sean locked up his house, and didn't go out much at a time when he badly needed community more than ever before. This is a terrible, awful tradition that harms and damages individuals more than I can say. Fortunately some of his family members saw past this (particularly uncle Duc), and all vowed to pop in regularly. Duc popped in every day, and that was unspeakably good. (Duc is such a sweet, innocent guy - it was such a pity to see him in any sort of pain). Sean's drinking became a lot worse, and it probably continues to do so.
I often see Joy's mum's passing as 'the beginning of the end'; because this was when Joy started to change as a person, fundamentally and irrevocably. In the short term, she was very angry - but it was a different kind of anger than one I'd ever seen before. An internal-facing anger, where she was angry at circumstance, or a concept or maybe an idea - and she couldn't do much with it. Without any single person to lash out at, she'd sometimes be very mad, but only in that silent way that's almost imperceptible unless you touch someone and feel the instant snake-like constrictions of their muscles; the unexpected shudder of their overdriven ligaments and tendons. I knew that her new anger was only part of the grieving cycle - and for that I don't blame her in the slightest. Amongst other things, I think she was furious at herself for not being at the hospital at the hour when her mum passed... angry at her dad for stubbornly forcing such a contorted diet upon her mum... angry at a subconscious level for not being able to find a way to save her mum, this time around.
It's so sad.
In time, this futile anger (which I didn't mind so much) subsided, but it was replaced with a wretched, extreme internalization that consumed her and eventually our relationship. After Joy's mum passed away, Joy became a lot less angry by default - but also worlds harder to communicate with. She had lost the ability to trust the world. My partner had stopped (well, almost) being the boiling pot of nominal anger that everyone had come to know and expect, but instead became a closed door with which it was almost impossible to open up in any real way. My girlfriend was essentially becoming a stranger, and I didn't know why.
It wasn't a sudden change, but one that happened gradually, over time. It was most evident in what was left of love languages (Joy had stopped wanting to share very much or do things together), although she continued with planning and plotting grandiose gifts... perhaps as a guilt-ridden bandage for her general disassociation. For Joy's birthday that year, I bought her a Samsung Galaxy S tablet (back when tablets were a new thing): she had hinted that she really wanted one for a while, and I thought it was kind of good that she'd be able to indulge in the escapism of some scrabble app or other, considering she loved the game (I was still woeful at it) and she had more than enough going on at that time. I thought the escapism would be good for her - and I didn't think too much about it. In reality we weren't nearly meeting each other's love languages at all really - indeed less than ever, and it was achey to deal with.
Occasionally, me or one of her friends got through to the underneath-Joy, and some much-needed tears of bottled grieving were shed. In amongst everything that you go through in the first few months after your mum dies, I think that Joy was genuinely thankful that I provided so much support for her (even if to me it felt like mostly logistics?), and Joy's mood brightened up slightly, bit by bit, as time rolled on.
We both also poured ourselves into our jobs after the passing, and although that's usually a terrible idea for lots of reasons (hello, lack of life balance), there also was something therapeutic about it. At this time in my life, I was getting pretty good at the whole moonlighting thing, so I was literally a clandestine worker with two mutually exclusive employers. At the one which I cared about more (the music academy, because it was more fun and it paid a bunch more), this was my busiest period. Over the next two years, I took it upon myself to design and deploy an enterprise-class Linux server (namely because I knew absolutely zero about Linux, and I wanted to learn) and this ridiculously steep knowledge curve ended up changing my professional life. (For example, I now know more about email than any normal person should ever want to know). I am so, so proud of building that dovecot/postfix box and it's 16x odd dependencies with very little help, and I believe that it remains one of my finest technical accomplishments to date). The money was honestly really good too, and it helped clear a bundle of debt + pay for certain things below (like my engagement and house deposit).
Time continued, life continued, and being pre-occupied helped (even if in the wrong ways; ie. neither of us were exactly seeking community). But we were together, if distant and habitual. above all - insular. That was life.
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Chapter 4: We got engaged
I'm not proud of this. It should never have happened. Which therefore begs the most obvious of questions: "why did I get engaged in the first place?".
Although there's a few factors that contribute to my explanation of this, none of them seem like a good idea whatsoever, with the power of sweet, sparkling hindsight. A couple of reasons.
The first one is especially lame:
4a) Pressure.
In the past few months before I'd committed to getting engaged, Joy started hinting about engagement more and more. She'd make jokes about it, she'd "coincidentally" take me past jewelers more and more. I think that this notable shift in her actions was probably a combination of a lack of self-worth, coupled with her finally getting worn down from the pressures of her friends and society (I think a lot of her friends were getting engaged at the time, and I think her family/work circles had stepped up the nagging and inquiring about us). I feel terrible (in a cowardly way) for admitting that this was one of the biggest reasons - but what it boils down to is that I was scared that if I didn't propose, Joy would equate that with me not wanting any relationship at all, and she would break up with me.
Told you it was lame.
4b) I thought that this was "it".
Throughout that relationship, I didn't necessarily feel like I was happy - and it'd be fair to say that I felt like something was amiss, even during the 'good times'. (Perhaps this is evidenced by the numerous self-help books of varying quality which I took it upon myself to collect and read, under assumption that I was responsible for all of the shortcomings that were failing to make my long-term relationship as happy as I had imaged one to be). I'm sure that a bit of effort / courage / guidance / reflection would have helped us to uncover some fundamental differences in our characters (ie. value systems and in love languages), but... such is hindsight.
So, my needs were not being met (nor probably hers), and I felt disconnected from my partner. But, I guess I firmly believed that this is what all long-term relationships were meant to be. I was convinced of this because of society's rhetoric: "well, relationships take hard work", and "there's always going to be some tough times", and "it's normal for them to get tougher over time". I therefore concluded that relationships basically mean a lot of unhappiness by definition... and I thought that getting married was just something that you had to do, if you wanted to keep your relationship beyond a certain duration in time.
In other words, I simply I didn't know any better.
4c) I thought it was expected of me.
I'd become a functioning member of a Viet family, and the local Vietnamese society. Most days, my name was more frequently pronounced with a colloquial "dấu sắc" (ie. 'upward slant', with a sudden stop - "Scót") than without. I knew lots of people in the Viet community, and I guess I felt close to them because my own family were kind of distant and far away at this point. I spent a LOT of time with my 'ex's family, and their communities... towards the end I could very comfortably buy groceries and go to temples and order from restaurants in Vietnamese, helping people with their written English exchange for politeness and small favours for the family if we ever needed them. (I was also called "cậu bé trắng" a lot - meaning 'that white boy', in a jovial / semi-mocking, semi-pet-name sort of tone).
So rather than stopping and asking big questions (lie 'why?', and 'am I really happy with this?'), I just accepted that this was how things were going to be. Again, a lot of the above probably comes back to self-confidence issues, ie. not thinking I was worth much more = not having the backbone to stand up and talk about ideals that I really valued. Those were eroding bit by bit, and life would have been a nightmare if the wedding had actually gone ahead. Still, I didn't exactly do much to prevent it.
4d) I was scared of how more impending deaths might further take my partner away from me.
This one placed a certain urgency upon my decision as to whether or not to propose. Essentially, Joy's grandmother - and also her adopted grandparents ("Jack and Jill", two sweet, old Australians who did a huge amount to adopt and settle Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s, including Joy's parents) were all very ill. Last of all, Joy's dad wasn't particularly healthy. I'd already seen how the passing of Joy's mum irrevocably changed her, and I was worried that if one of the above people passed away in the short term future, then they also wouldn't have had the honour of being there for our engagement/wedding ceremony. Joy would sometimes talk about the futility she felt in knowing that her mum would never see the two of us officially engaged... just one of the many thorns in the underlying blanket of grief that enshrouded my former partner. Nobody wanted any more sadness, the above ill-health of our immediate family suggested that the engagement just might be an avenue away from the melancholy effecting us. How unthinkably wrong that was.
So, the decision to become engaged was all of the above, and none of the good stuff... the right stuff... the stuff that's missing. You know, I don't even think that I ever really asked myself whether I actually wanted to spend the rest of my life with Joy! (That's such a poor investment!). The engagement decision became a calculation on a poorly-contrived spreadsheet, rather than a spiritual and philosophical conclusion founded after a lot of reflection. Life was already filled with so much work and errands that there was no space for self-reflection, for asking what I really wanted, for big-picture thinking. No time for that.
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So, yeah. I don't feel great about the above reasons... actually I'm pretty ashamed of them. I wasn't nearly considerate enough of myself, and I didn't nearly stick to my morals. But I guess I didn't really have enough of a sense of self-worth at that time to do any different. It's just how it was. But nevertheless, Joy and I took off on a short holiday to Tasmania, and after staying in a cute bnb place in Huonville with lots of ducks (where Joy proceeded to crack the royal shits with the owners because they didn't have a gas oven in their place)... I still proposed on the Huon River. Even then, Joy wouldn't accept my ring because it wasn't the right shape/style of ring that she was expecting (I was seriously hurt by this - I couldn't see how anyone in that situation could place more importance on their own wedding-ring-preconceptions than the fact that it was actually a symbolic gift of a lifetime...). I still returned the ring and got her another one.
Wow. So, so misguided and terrible. Anyway...
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Chapter 5: More pressures: the engagement itself.
For those that don't know, getting engaged in Viet culture isn't like getting engaged in the west. In the old country, engagements are hailed as the couple's penultimate ceremony event, with the wedding being a much smaller formality of an affair. In modern Australian culture (and presumably in other cultures such as the USA, where there are large communities of Vietnamese immigrants), weddings still certainly trump the engagement ceremony as "the most important event" (and thank god for that!!!)... but it's important to note that Viet engagements are still traditionally/historically significant.
Like most Vietnamese (asian?) cultural events, even the watered-down / westernized version is still... elaborate, to say the least. Nay, elaborate doesn't remotely begin to cut it. "Mind-bendingly extensive"? "Unnecessarily and unthinkably complicated"? I mean, when I first got engaged, I knew that I'd have to do some organizing to make the engagement happen... but really, I had no idea of the extent of it. Even thinking about it today makes my head hurt.
There's a few reasons for this... no... actually, there's a shiteload. Lets look at them one-by-one:
First, a traditional Vietnamese engagement ceremony is an overt affair. In traditional / conservative families, the bride-to-be nominates some 10x friends to join her as engagement bridesmaids, all paired up with 10x engagement-groomsmen. Ten. Ten each. Fortunately, my -ex's parents were modernized enough to see this as excessive, and so we cut down the crew-of-twenty to a crew-of-eight, four each. Still, it even four seems excessive to me. Hm.
For the format of the engagement, the idea is that the groomsmen approach the house with a different set of gifts. Each groomsman knocks on the front door of the father-of-the-bride-to-be's house, and pass on a gift to him. The father accepts, the groomsman enters the house, and then the next groomsman comes along. After the final groomsman is inside, the bridesmaids appear, one at a time, and enter the house. Finally, the Groomsman appears (he may or may not be presenting a whole pig to the father, if you're really conservative), and the father accepts the animal, before bringing his daughter to the door and inviting the groomsman inside. Finally, everyone offers their various gifts to an alter inside (the alter has both statues representing various Buddhist gods, and also photographs of ancestors), all of the guests light incense, some speeches are given in the incense-clad room, and then everybody eats a lunchtime feast. We had neither pig nor 20-fold-posse, but we did have gifts, suits, traditional dress for the bridesmaids (matching in colour with the men, of course), wine, fruit, tea, flowers, pillows, photographers, 20x or so of my rather lost-and-confused family, and 40x or so of Joy's family and friends.
That was the first half of the engagement.
The other half of the engagement would be an evening party - a more stereotypical 'western' party, for our peers and friends. Initial numbers were about 50x guests for this (25x friends each), but really we ended up with about 70 or so folks. Somehow, we decided upon a casino theme for this party for the night. (um, I'm not sure why I haven't mentioned it until now, but one of Joy's preferred passtimes was to visit the local casino and to try her luck at beating the odds at blackjack or some other and character-wasting and almost soul-destroying pursuit). Casinos are - always have been, and always will be - one of my most loathed places on earth - I hate what they stand for, and how they destroy the vulnerable... but I spent a LOT of hours at Casinos during my 5.5 years with her - mostly just looking over her shoulder, standing up for hours, and wanting to leave and to drive her home. Casinos frequently featured in the various holidays that we took - I can think of at least seven that I've been to in the past decade - and I remember having a huge fight with Joy during one of our holidays to Sydney, because it was a picturesque day at the start of a well-earned break {we were both highly-strung}, and the first thing that she wanted to do upon arrival was to check out how the city's Star City Casino was laid out. I..... must have been ridiculously desensitized to Casino environments, as to allow my engagement to be along the lines of a casino-themed one... but in hindsight, I think that it was kind of, well, a fitting symbol of the kind of relationship that we had. My engagement wasn't "me", the relationship wasn't really "me", and I was ultimately very insecure and basically didn't know any better.
Preparing for the engagement wasn't all bad. One side-effect of continually skyrocketing pending engagement costs was that we got to spend more time alone, and this meant that I really got to engage with my freelance job work - where I learned CentOS and learned a bucketload about corporate email systems. As I worked somewhat geographically close to Chris, I'd occasionally catch up with him during late weeknight hours (it wasn't uncommon for me to work from 9am-8pm'ish, and then to grab some dinner on the way home - usually alone but sometimes in the company of Chris, where we'd talk enthusiastically about Syntax, music and the demoscene from the comforts of some South Melbourne restaurants). Plus, I got to spend lots of time with Allie - who was about 1yo at this point.
As long as the network kept growing and nobody lost any data (and as long as I had my books in order), then I made a LOT of by-the-hour subcontracting dollars - and that helped pay for said engagement, plus earn just enough to clear off some student debts and to help put down a deposit for my house). Joy always found great ways to find us to spend more money on 'the big day' - and between venues, mini bus hire, gifts, the casino setup, bands, costumes, magicians, hotel accommodation, an event manager, and so on... the engagement ended up costing just shy of $13k. Prior to putting on the event, life became even even more of a 'to do list' than normality - but somehow, it wasn't all terribly bad. If my eyes had've been more well-adjusted, then I would have paid more attention to my slipping lack of music-making, socialising, exercising, and writing... but in the culture of feeling pressured to work, I wasn't particularly aware that I was losing myself. We took a weekend off - a short holiday with some other people (two of joy's friends) to Ocean Grove - and that wasn't half bad.
One of the worst memories of the entire relationship was the night where we decided to make the invitations. This could have been a simple job (and it would have been a straightforward task), but instead of doing it in solitude, I agreed to try doing this late one night from Joy's work, with her running on little sleep and continually peering over my shoulder and berating me savagely every time I printed an imperfect test print. I... don't think I've ever been yelled at as much... ever... in one day, as I have on that particular night. I was verbally belted to a pulp... completely crushed emotionally, because I didn't "just listen" and "do it the right way" and "why do I always have to do things wrong" and "couldn't I just fucking get it done?". That night was the first night that I had some sort of an inkling that this relationship might just be a complete disaster, but I didn't retaliate - partly because I had gone into shutdown mode, and partly because I was hollow and pretty-much empty in all of the important ways, and I feared loneliness more than I feared the ramifications of doing something daring like calling the whole damn thing off. And, apparently relationships are supposed to be hard. That night was terrible.
But somehow (i don't even know how...), we made it to the big day. My family appeared - all of them made their way to Joy's dad's house, and they were kind of great. All of my groomsmen got there - even Chris, who is always-late-for-everything, but he still managed to be on time for this (12 hours earlier, he was stuck at Sydney airport, and was considering calling upon a pilot mate of his to help him hire a private plane, and fly him down from NSW.... but he was there). And I was there: groomed, robotic, concerned that everything ran to plan, worried about ensuring that everything time. Strangely enough, I don't really recall 'enjoying' my engagement day so much, at all - for I didn't really get to talk to anyone very much (besides, there were a bunch of people, and I kind of hated crowds). I certainly didn't feel very close to Joy at all. But I did feel like I was giving something different... something nice... to the important people in my life, and that meant something. I think that my favourite part of that day was having a long chat with my Uncle Keith and Aunty Jeanne over lunch - I hadn't seen them nearly as much as I had hoped to in recent years.
The evening was extravagant, and everyone seemed to love the casino party thing. To be fair, we didn't cut corners, so it was a very impressive setup. My favourite part of the evening was sitting in a corner booth, listening to the jazz quartet play - and talking to Chris and Duncan about jazz (Brad - the trumpet player - and his band were astoundingly good. Joy being joy, ended up getting her knickers in a knot and yelling at the band because they finished earlier than she the time that she thought they should have finished. I'm... pretty sure that Brad hates me now).
So in short, everyone else enjoyed the day, and it was memorable for them. For me, the day was: fancy, ceremonial, loud (just so loud), uncomfortable, proper, significant, draining, exhausting, almost completely-unlike me, and I felt like it was emotionally isolating. At the end of the day, Joy passed out from exhaustion and alcohol; and I was sober, a bit depressed, yet happy that my friends had had a good time. At some incredibly early hour, we both collapsed into separate beds.
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Continued in Part 2...