One thing recently that has me questioning everything is finding out a friend has been lying to protect my feelings and it’s failing miserably.  Finding out I’ve been lied to hurts worse than if I was just told the truth.  I’m not one to turn my back and walk away from anyone no matter what.  It’s not in my nature, I can’t do it.  I still think of this person as a friend.   And now I wonder if I am such a bad judge of people that I would allow myself to be friends with people who will hurt me or take advantage of me on purpose.  Or I just hope that I can touch that small amount of good in a person in a way that they won’t treat me badly.  Maybe I’m not safe outside the castle, I should just stay put, happiness be damned and just be safe from the outside world.  Maybe it’s time to add a new monster to the moat and raise the drawbridge. 

But how is what this friend has done to me any different than what I am doing to the Prince?  I am lying about my feelings, my desires and my wants to make it easier for him to live day to day.  And when I let him know a little of the truth I see the hurt in him that I feel now about my friend.  How is what I’m doing not a thousand times worse?  I’m lying to man I stood at an altar with and made promises to, promises I don’t believe in anymore.

So I will be wearing my Princess smile and waving to the crowds for now.

As I look at the mess my marriage has become and I think about calling it quits fears jump out at me when I least expect it.  I could be enjoying the day then out of nowhere one hits.  I start to panic and dwell on it, I start to wonder if maybe I am all wrong and this is as good as it gets… or as good as I deserve.

I fear that I will be forever single.  I remember back before I reconnected with the Prince and I had a long string of failed relationships.  I was too clingy, too distance, too demanding, too self-sufficent, too something that either made them leave or made me leave.

I fear that he will forever be single.  Yes, I worry about him and his feelings.  I don’t have kids to worry after, all I have is him and even though he doesn’t make me happy, I want him to be happy.  I know I am hurting him.  The last time I tried to leave I backed down, he was crying, he was saying I was everything he ever wanted, I agreed to give it another try.  I can’t back down again, we tried and I am more unhappy than I ever was.

I fear that the failure is all mine.  I know that it takes two to make things work and for 12 years I was doing it all for both of us.  When I needed that shoulder to cry on, that person there to take care of me, he wasn’t there.  I can’t let that go.  The marriage counsellor said I need to forget the past and move on.  I can’t.  Things happened that can’t be fixed.  I will never have children.  He can’t make up for the fact that I don’t feel like I can rely on him to remember to do the simplest things.  This is something that has bothered me from the start.  I would ask him to do something, let’s say take out the garbage, he would nod and say he would, then a day goes by, I ask again, later that day I ask a third time and I get yelled at for nagging him and I end up out at the dumpster myself.  Because of this I learned not to rely on him for anything so I take care of everything.  Which leads to…

I fear I’m too self-sufficent to really need anyone else in my life.  I know that sounds silly, but I want to need someone.  I want to feel like I need another person to make it through the day and I want them to need me too.  Isn’t that what a relationship is?  Isn’t part of it being able to show the other person the part of you that needs them? 

I fear that I have unreason expectations.  I’m not a 20 year old not sure of who I want or what about them would attract me.  I’m in my 40′s, I know what I want and while I will be flexible on somethings, there are other things I won’t bend on.  Will this lead me to start rejecting would be suitors left and right and not giving any of them a chance?  I have a long past of doing that before, hence all the failed relationships.  I don’t want to be that girl again, the one that was once described by an ex-boyfriend as “She’s fun to play with but not the type you marry”

I fear I’m giving up everything for nothing.  That’s the big one.  Going into the unknown, starting over from scratch.  All I know is I only have myself to fall back on.  And in the end I could be doing the one thing to find my happiness again, or the biggest mistake ever.

When I look back on it now, I wonder if I got married for the wrong reasons.  Maybe I shouldn’t have forced the issue, maybe I should have let him make the decision on his own.  I know I was feeling pressure.  6 months after renewing the romance my father asked if there was going anywhere permanent.  A year later my brother asked if we were ever getting married or if we were going to wait to be 35 to have our first kid.  My mother reminded me at my 26th Birthday “I was your age when you were born”.  All my friends were married or engaged, some were having babies.  I was living at home at 26 after boomeranging back there.  I spent 2 years out of my parents house only to have my father ask me to move back home, but in doing so I gave up so many freedoms.  Did I just miss the freedoms?  Did I just feel the peer pressure to do what everyone else was doing?

In the private session before the marriage counselling started the Doctor asked “Why did you get married?”  18 months later and I still don’t know.

I look at him now and I wonder maybe we were right to break up in high school.  He once said “I couldn’t marry the girl from high school”  but on several occassions he mentions how I looked back then or acted back then that he found attractive.  If he couldn’t marry her and 8 years later I was the person he could marry, then why remember that girl at all?  Yes, she was skinnier, had smaller breasts and was painfully shy.  The woman he married could use to lose a few pounds, needs a bra with double letters and hasn’t been accused of being shy in 20+ years.

On the subject of being shy, my shyness turned into submission.  I don’t mean the kinky kind of submission, that’s for another post, I mean the kind of submission that allowed me to give up things I wanted to make the man I married happy.  I know we are supposed to do that to some level but it got to the point where I resent him for making me or letting me do that.  The big one is we don’t have children.

I asked almost every month for 8 years “Are you sure you don’t want kids?” he said either “Where would we put them? Hang them from the ceiling?” or “We’re comfortable.  Let’s not mess that up.” or “I like being selfish and doing what we want when we want.”  The kicker was when I was 35 and I asked because that was by personal cut off, after 35 I would be an “older mother” and while I didn’t want either of us to do anything permanent I was going to do something to get off the hormones, specifically get an IUD if he was sure.  His answer “I have seen what motherhood has does to my friends’ wives and I don’t want you to change like that.  I love you the way you are.”  He didn’t mean the physical changes, he meant the mental.  He heard enough of my tales about going to “Girl’s Day Out”s only to spend the time hearing stories about childbirth, potty training or first days of schools as the years progressed.  I complained that they never talk about anything else and I never had anything to add to the conversation.  I felt left out.  I always smiled and said “We don’t want kids.” My close friends knew I was lying.  But my submission and desire to make him happy won out and we didn’t have kids.

Once we were in couples counselling, the first meeting she asked about the kid issue and I was in tears for 45 minutes.  She said “How was he to know you wanted kids if you never told him?”  It was all my own fault.  All my friends, and some who I wouldn’t call close, knew I wanted kids or have uttered the killer line “You would make a wonderful mother”.  How come the guy I married couldn’t see that?  What could every other person on this planet see in me that he could not?  I wasn’t expecting mind-reading but I was expecting he knew me a little before marrying me.

Do I blame myself for not being assertive and saying “But I do want them!”? A little.  But in my mind if the person you want to spend forever with says he doesn’t want something, that gives you little wiggle room.  I wasn’t going to “oops” a baby only to have him being a father in genetics only.  If a man doesn’t want to be a father, he doesn’t want to be a father.  And I believe a baby needs parents who both want to be parents.