“You hurt me very badly ….”

Last week was a very bad week for D. She is starting a new job (having moved to a new city), and apparently she got off to a very rocky start, making a number of bad mistakes. I’m still not sure of all the details. But when we talked today (over the weekend after it was all over) she described last week as “Easily my worst week in the last five years.”

I was travelling, to one of the suburbs outside of Faraway City. (Same airport, but I ended up at a different office.) So for a couple of days I didn’t have to deal with Wife or the boys, and my evenings were fairly unstructured.

D wanted me to call, to help her through this week, and I didn’t do it. In retrospect she didn’t make it very clear to me that she was having a bad week, though I did hear some bitterness from her on the order of “Don’t feel you have to call or anything, I’ll just sit here alone in the dark.” But for all I could tell that was just because she was generically lonely. She gets lonely easily, and that in turn makes her needy and clingy. She didn’t drop any hints that there was more going on than that.

But when we talked today, I got an earful.

It’s going to take some time to re-establish our relationship after this…. I really needed you and you just weren’t there for me…. You really hurt me very deeply by not calling ….

Of course I apologized for hurting her, saying that was no part of my intention. And then I sat and listened to her tell me about how difficult her week had been and how awful it was of me that I wasn’t there, … for the better part of an hour, until I was fifteen minutes late picking up Son 2 from his morning athletic class. (And if I hadn’t cut her off I’d probably still be on the phone now.) Towards the end she turned philosophical, musing that all of us make terrible mistakes and the only thing that makes any love relationship possible is forgiveness: God’s forgiveness of us, and our forgiveness of each other. And I didn’t really say a lot from my side.

But I was thinking, and my thoughts weren’t terribly pretty. In the first place, I was chewing over her remark that I hurt her deeply. I suppose I did, but I can’t completely get rid of the idea that hurting somebody is rather more active than that, that it involves doing something and not just failing to do something. OK, that’s picking at nits, I realize. When somebody has a right to expect that you will take a hand and you don’t, that’s almost as bad as doing something overt. But all that does is raise a second point: should she reasonably expect that I am there to weather the storm with her? We are not married, after all; and I have told her clearly (if not bluntly) that we never will be. Does our relationship – whatever you call it instead – carry this level of obligation with it?

And then the third thought is maybe the most important: what do I want? What do I want from the relationship? Do I want it to be one where we help each other through these kinds of storms? Or am I looking for something shallower than that? What would it look like if our parts were reversed? If I were the one having the crappy week, would I want her to support me, to help me through it?

Finally a question I can answer: No, I would not. I don’t know what that would look like. If I’m having a crappy week, the last thing I want to do is tell people about it, because then I have to manage their reactions as well as the original problem. It’s just that much more to carry.

Or am I lying to myself about that? After all, D and I started getting closer to each other when I wrote her about my troubles with Wife, because I couldn’t carry that burden by myself any more. (That’s the same reason I started this blog, and began inflicting all my whiny problems on you, my long-suffering readers.) Since that time I have had to carry a lot of D’s emotional reaction to my situation, besides carrying my situation itself. But I did open the door specifically because I needed help.

So maybe now I owe her that same help in return. It sounds fair and logical when I think of it that way. Only just at the moment I can’t feel it that way. Just at the moment, all I can feel is, What do I need this for? This I need like a hole in the head. Enough already!

Of course, at the same time that I’m grousing, Enough already, another part of my head is telling me to slow down. What am I saying -- that I want to break up with her? If that’s what I’m saying, do I really mean it? Have I really thought this through? Or am I just reacting with my own emotional storm? It’s been three years (just about) that she and I have been together; for the last year at least, I have started having moments where I imagine us breaking up. The only times I imagine it are those times when I am frustrated enough with her anyway that the thought is always a vast relief. I wind up thinking, “One down and one to go,” as if my goal were to get rid of all the women in my life. But I don’t trust myself. (Besides, that's crazy, isn't it?)

So let me ask you. You’ve known me for the same three years, most of you; or, if not, all that time is still sitting in the back years waiting to be read. You’ve seen plenty of my faults over those years. Am I just being a selfish prick? Is it just that I want all the benefits (the sex, and any support she has to give me) without giving back to her in exchange? Or is this nuts, and time to call it off?

I’m sure I haven’t given you enough information to make a fair or reasonable choice; and I am sure that I have prejudiced everything I’ve said to make myself sound more honorable and long-suffering than I really am. So if you correct for what I have written by assuming that I am acting worse than I describe and D is acting better, … what’s the verdict? Does it sound like this relationship is still worth it and I’m just overwrought? Or not?

Let me know what it sounds like to you ….