Overdue Confessions, Part II…

I don’t blame Joe one bit for his change.  I really did a number on him by just up and leaving without any real explaination.  I know I hurt him bad and perhaps that caused him to be so guarded and stand-offish.  But three years after we got back together, things were really starting to get bad.

We would go days without even speaking.  Not because we were mad at each other, we just didn’t speak.  We shared a bed, but that was basically it.  I kept my computer in the spare bedroom so I could watch my tv shows and he had his in the dining room so he could watch his shows.  We had seperate banking accounts.  We paid our own bills and split the ones we shared.  We ate seperately.  And we went 11 months without sex.

After we didn’t even say hello to each other for 2 weeks, I had thought he was mad at me.  I would ask him something trivial and would get one worded answers.  He wouldn’t even look away from the computer or tv to answer me.  (He says that I did the same thing, but I honestly don’t remember, but then again, I could have…)  I thought he was still pissed at me for leaving before, but I couldn’t see how he could be holding a grudge for 3 years and not even say a single word about it. 

So one night I decided to see if he was mad at me or not.  My plan was to spend the night in the spare room and see if he notices.  I thought that if he weren’t mad at me, he’d come and find out why I hadn’t come to bed yet.  If he were, he’d just let me stay there.  At 7am, he comes into the room and says, "You’re gonna be late" and then he left for work.  That was it.  I had my answer.  Apparently I had done something to seriously piss him off, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I had done.  I had no clue.  We dealt with my reasons for leaving.  He said he was over it.  Could he seriously be pissed at me all these years??

One evening, I decided to muster up the courage and just ask him why he’s pissed and I did just that.

"Are you pissed at me?"
"Nope."  (still watching tv)
"You act like you are."
"Well, I’m not.  Can we talk later?  I’m trying to watch this."

I was devistated.  Even though he said he wasn’t mad, his toned said that he was furious with me and I had no idea why!  For the next 4 or 5 weeks, I had tried to do whatever I thought would make him happy.  I clean the house.  And not just straightend up, I cleaned it like it was a fucking hotel and some VIPs were coming over.  I made dinner every night and it was always stuff he really liked.  I started paying all the bills so he wouldn’t have to worry about them any more.  He didn’t seem to take notice in anything I did.

He continued to leave his clothes all over the house.  He’d eat his dinner and leave the plate in the living room or next to his computer.  Since I was paying the bills, he had more money to go out and buy himself stuff for his computer or for his truck.  One night I went to bed and he had his laptop and a bunch of books from work spread out all on my side, so I just started sleeping in the spare room full time.  He never asked me why I did.

That’s when I realized that nothing I did would change how he now felt about me, so there was only one thing to do.  I had to leave again.  But this time I didn’t want to go.  I thought that if maybe I started acting like I was going to leave he’d try and stop me and we’d make up and everything would be back to normal and we’d be happy again.  So I printed out some brochures on apartments in the area and leaving them out.  He never said anything.  I started going out without telling him I was leaving and coming home late at night (I would stay over at my sister’s).  He never said anything.

After a month of this, I got an IM from a guy I knew back before I met Joe in my wild years.  Michael.  Michael was definately not what you would call "relationship material" but damn if he wasn’t fun to be with.  He told me that he had been trying to look me up for years and how he had missed me and wanted to know if I was up for dinner.  He said he wanted to just hang out but if we "wanted to relive the old days", that’d be alright with him as well.  We IM’d back and forth that night for about 5 hours.  We laughed and talked about the crazy things we did and reminiced on how much fun we had together.  It felt so good to have someone to talk to and to have someone who wanted to talk to me.  I told him about the troubles Joe and I were having and he offered to let me stay with him if I needed to.  He kept asking me to meet in person so we could talk, but I kept turning him down.  I knew if we met there would be little talking going on.  In the end, he gave me his number and I gave him mine so that we could keep in touch.  Since I didn’t have a pen anywhere around me, I printed out the IM and put it away.

The next day, I found the IM in a different place than where I had thought I had left it.  I immediately thought that Joe had read it.  And I wasn’t upset by this.  I had hoped that if he had read it, he’d get jealous and try to win me back and we could be back to normal, but instead, he was just as oblivious to me as usual.

Now, I was starting to get pissed.  He was spending a lot of time on his laptop in the bedroom and now he started keeping the door shut.  One night he went out (and didn’t tell me he was leaving), so I went and got his laptop to see what he had been up to.  Turns out he had been talking to a guy he met online and they were making plans to meet up…..that evening! 

In my mind, the only thing to do was simple.  I called Michael up and told him we had to meet up right then.  And we did.  After not having sex for nearly a year, that night was one of the best I had ever had.  We were together until nearly 4am.  When I went back home, Joe was not there.  About 10 minutes after I got there, he arrived.  I was already in my room and I heard him come in, put his keys down, and go to his room.  We never said a word. 

The next day I started looking through the various listings of apartments I had printed out.  I was determined to just get one and move out without so much as a good-bye.  But I couldn’t.  As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t do it.  I had to talk to him.  I had to get him to at the very least tell me what I did wrong to make him hate me so much.

Trembling, I went and sat down next to him on the couch.  He didn’t even act like he noticed.  I started to tear up a bit and managed to squeek out a feeble, "Why don’t you love me any more?"  He said he didn’t know what I was talking about.  I told him I knew he was mad.  I could tell.  He denied it, but every time he spoke, it was like he was biting his tongue to keep from saying something mean or spiteful.  I wanted him to explain to me what I did wrong to upset him so much.  He said it was

because I had moved my computer into the other room.  And that I had started spending all my time in there and never once coming out to see him.  I was also spending all my time making new friends online and never once asked him about his day or how he was doing.  He was really mad because apparently he had gone to the hospital and I never even asked him about it.

And he was right.

I had been spending all my time on the computer.  I had been neglecting him.  And by the time I tried to make it up, it was too late.  He then told me that he had seen all the apartment papers and when he read the IM with Michael, he had figured I was practically out the door.  I told him that there was nothing between me and Michael and that he was just someone I knew long before I had ever met him.  And then I told him about the IMs I read from him and about what I knew he did.  He kept telling me that nothing ever happened.  He just went to meet the guy and they went to Denny’s and talked all night long.  So I never told him I went to see Michael.  I didn’t want to cause another issue when we were starting to finally talk.

I asked him about what he went to the hospital for and he told me that he had been feeling really bad all day at work so he went to the emergency room.  That was when he found out he was diabetic (type 2) and the docs gave him some pills to help him control his sugar until he learned how to eat right and control it on his own.  Well, they also gave him some other pills, because when they ran his blood, they also saw his cholesterol was almost through the roof.  The combination of these pills caused him to become extremely irratable, moody, and seriously lowered his sex drive.  He told me that he was never really upset with me, but that the pills always made things look worse than they really were.  By the time he quit taking them, we weren’t speaking and I was sleeping in another room.  When he saw the fliers for the apartments, he figured it was too late to fix anything and he didn’t want to make me stay if I was unhappy so he stayed out of my way.

By this time, I’m crying like a 2-year-old girl.  All this misery and unhappiness because of stupid little things we both did.  We nearly broke up because we didn’t communicate with each other.  That night, he asked me if I wanted to stay with him instead of sleeping in the spare room.  And I said yes.  There was no sex, but he did hold me all night long and it was heavenly.  In the morning, he gave me a kiss before he left for work and said he loved me.

Not everything went back to the way it was, though.  I continued to pay all the monthly bills, but he took over the house note and water bill.  In turn, he bought all the groceries and paid for any of our outtings and pet bills.  We continued to have seperate accounts just because we were used to it and it was easier for us to keep track of how much money we had.  But we were happy again.  And it was great!

But a pattern started to show.  Three years later and there were some major issues again…

(to be continued…)