This is a kind of difficult and painful one for me to post but I feel like I need to do it in an attempt to get some clarity for myself on my current situation.
At 18, I met a woman ten years my senior and moved in with her pretty quickly. Looking back, it was mainly because I was incredibly unhappy at home as my dad suffers from severe clinical depression and I couldn't deal with it. Don't get me wrong, my parents are wonderful people but they've got problems of their own which were becoming too much for me, the intrepid young psychonaut who thought he knew better.
At first, as in most relationships, everything was great and we had a great time together although I learned too that my girlfriend also suffers from depression but thought I could handle it as it was nowhere near as bad as my fathers. She fell pregnant when I was 19 and I had the choice to either stay here and be the best father I could be or else to walk away and become another part-time dad which, to me, wasn't an option I could consider. Just after I turned 20 our daughter was born and my partner went into a psychological tailspin with post-natal depression which was horrendously difficult to deal with and heralded the beginning of ten years of stress, depression, aggravation and uncertainty.
To cut a long story short, she effectively lost all desire to be affectionate, emotional, sexual or communicative which has crushed me for years. I do my best to understand, to be there for her and to encourage her to talk to me about how she feels but she's coming to realise that she doesn't know how she feels anyway. It turns out that she's actually been like this for a long time before she met me but didn't tell me and presented herself as a different sort of person. The woman I fell in love with was artistic, creative and affectionate......now I realise that this was all a front and it hurts. I've had years now of having her look through my phone, try to check my emails and generally get paranoid for no reason whatsoever and it drives me MENTAL! I couldn't have female friends (this is something I've found very hard to deal with since I had a lot of platonic female friends my entire life) or even talk about a girl I knew because it led to her bursting into tears and then going crazy again! Right now, she's in therapy but says that she doesn't see why she should change for anyone else, we should all change to suit her which is something I've already tried and realised I can't do. That's an example of what I need to deal with.
As it stands, I stay here for my daughter otherwise I'd be long gone. My daughter, who's nine now, and me have a very close relationship and she talks me to about everything which is something she's less inclined to do with her mother. She's aware of how unstable her mother is and I just know that she's going to grow up resenting this which is something I wish I could change but I know there's only so much I can do.
Since turning 28 I realised that I need to prioritise my own well-being and happiness before I can ever made anyone else happy. Right now, we're literally on the verge of splitting up and I worry about the effect this will have on our daughter because me and her are so close. As it stands, I don't know what to do for the best. It's not good for our daughter to grow up in a house full of tension, I know this because it's how I grew up and the damage it did is something I've only started to repair in the last few years. On the other hand, I know that she'll have her own lessons to learn in life and perhaps the seperation of her parents is an integral part of that. I don't know. All I know is that I'm unhappy, frustrated, and confused.
I do love my partner but it's become more of a close friendship than anything else. I realise how I grabbed onto this relationship when I was younger, for as mature as I was for your average 18 year old I was still as immature as the next man, in the hope that I could be happy being with someone else. It hasn't always been bad, there's been some great times over the years but now I realise that the negative aspects have come to outwieght the positives, and that the stress of being in this relationship has damaged me too.
I don't know where I'm going next, but I know there's more to life than this. Hopefully my rant doesn't sound like self-pity 'cause it's not the way I feel. I feel stronger now than I ever have in my life, and wiser. On one hand, I've got an amazing daughter who I love more than anything in the whole of existence and have learned some valuable lessons in the last ten years that I probably wouldn't otherwise had learnd. On the other hand, I sacrificed my late teens and 20s's for a relationship which has brought me more pain than happiness.
Goddamned it, this life shit is confusing! :lol:
. I am twenty years old engaged to be married ,we both love the spirit molecule and we are in the best love triangle that exists. Pure Bliss Love All
