baserinstincts

A Room of One's Own – Part 1

I said this before, after my fluke of an engagement.

I took it back once and now I’ll say it again.

I’m not into the shacking up thing.

I’m serious.

Even if some miracle occurred and I did get married (Rhett Butler said it best in Gone With the Wind when he quipped “I’m not the marrying kind.”), I’d seriously make a case for my husband and I to have two separate apartments.

Cohabitation disaster number one- I wasn’t even 20 the first time I left the house. My childhood sweetheart and I convinced ourselves that we were ready for a commitment larger than we could even fully comprehend at the time (what’s that they say about hindsight?).

Combine that with the fact that my mother and I had convinced ourselves that we hated one another (ditto him and his mom) and you get two well meaning but unbelievably naive kids who left home too early and had absolutely no business moving in together.

The honeymoon was over quickly and soon we were arguing and he was cheating and I was foolishly and desperately trying to keep things from falling apart.

And just how do you keep things from falling apart when:

A. Several different women are calling your home (some of them at all kinds of ungodly hours) and they sound surprised to hear a female voice on the other end. Or you come home one night from school and see another woman leaving your apartment. Or your sweetie’s little brother is helping him do his dirt by erasing numbers off of the caller ID.

B. When it’s time to pay the rent you hear “Just put in my half baby and I’ll pay you back” month after month.

C. Your sweetheart is prone to fits of rage. The kind that have you cowering in a corner so you can stay out of his way until it’s over.

I was working full time and going to school full time. I needed peace at home and all I was getting was more stress.

The way I saw it, there were only two choices. It was either suck it up and try to make it work or admit defeat and go back home to Mommy. For a long time, I didn’t consider the latter an option. No matter how bad the relationship got (and it got really bad), it couldn’t be worse than the prospect of a lifetime of “I told you so’s ” from mother. And Grandma too.

I think that was when I learned one of the biggest relationship lessons of my life: one person can’t be the only one working on a relationship. One day I accepted that the shit just wasn’t going to work because I was the only one working, both literally and figuratively.

We broke up briefly and then got back together briefly, just long enough for me to see that he was up to his old tricks and then we broke up again for good. I went home but only for about a month until I got my own apartment.

I eventually got over my ex (funny how we think we never will but somehow we always do), and I continued to live alone. And let me tell you it was the best time of my life. I could do what I wanted to do and didn’t constantly have to consider another person. Most importantly, I learned to enjoy my own company.

It was then, during all the time I had to reflect, that I realized it wasn’t that I didn’t like my ex, it was that I didn’t like who I was when I was with him.