Questions

So many questions fill my mind: Was this even the right decision? Did I make a poor choice out of hast, out of what I thought was necessity, out of comfort in habits? Am I second-guessing myself for the wrong reasons, for fear of self-sabotage (which I could do professionally), for fear of not being good enough, for fear of 'inevitable' abandonment?

I wonder if I've made the wrong decision... or even, perhaps I made the right decision at the time and it's no longer right anymore. Things have been hard lately. And, of course, marriage IS hard. I knew this from the beginning. But I worry about a lack of growth in our relationship. I worry that we will remain stagnant, never growing, never changing... remaining children that think that playing house is what society expects of us. I worry that finances will always be hard (but that's the case whether or not a person is married). I worry that I will always feel like I'm never doing enough, that we will always argue over "who has it worse," instead of helping each other and relying on each other and wanting to be there for each other. I hate that game that we play....
"My back hurts."
"Well .. why? You didn't do anything today."
"Um .. I did dishes AND laundry."
"And?? I worked my ass off all day. I do manual labor all day, every day. And I don't bitch about my back."
"That may be true, but I have a SPINAL DISEASE. How would like me to fix that, so I don't bitch anymore?"

This game becomes very old, very quickly. Friends tell me that you and I should communicate better. How is that possible though? Surprisingly, we are awesome communicators ... we just never solve anything. Communicating is talking, listening, and making sure that you understand what the other person is saying. We do that, pretty damn well actually. But just because we understand doesn't mean that we're willing to change. I can tell you over and over that I have anxiety issues and hate being at home by myself. You can repeat in your own words what I've said and have apparently understood it. But you don't care. Communicating doesn't mean that you give a shit. And that bothers me. So many times, you're not willing to compromise. More than once, you have given me the speech of "well, I'm sorry, but that's just the way I am" and tell me that I need to learn to deal with it. And at one time, I thought I could deal with it ... but maybe, just maybe, I can't after all. Maybe I can't deal with everything being on your terms. Maybe I can't deal with the fact that I always worry that telling you about me having a 'bad day' with mental illness will scare you off. Maybe I can't deal with your financial anal retentiveness. Maybe I can't deal with you telling me to just "deal with it" ... no matter what "it" is - my depression, my anger, my anxiety, whatever. Maybe I just can't fucking deal with it.

But then I think about why I married you to begin with. Sure, I'm pretty sure that some it had to do with not wanting to be alone and needing health insurance and carrying your child. But there was more to it than that. I've always loved you. I fell in love with you the day that I met you. You've ultimately been a good man to me, even when you, yourself, thought that you would give up. You've been there for me through virtually everything, even when you weren't sure how to be there for me. You'd ask questions, give advice, and just hold me. You've been such a good friend to me. And I did love you once. I was madly, deeply in love with you. And I still love you, in some regard. I love you as someone who has given up a lot for me. I love you as someone who has loved me with everything you have, giving unconditional love. I have this strong feeling, though, that my fear of being alone, my desperate desire to be loved, and my comfort in knowing you were driving factors in my acceptance of your proposal. It was comfortable. I've known you since high school and you, essentially, haven't changed much since then. I'm not sure that I have either. You were my fall back ... someone that I knew would love me no matter what. I mean, we were each other's first loves, after all. How could that not be 'right?' I always told myself that I could never fall out of love with you. But now I fear that I was in love with the idea of love. I do truly believe that I loved you, perhaps even was in love with you. And I feel like such a hypocrite because I've always said that if you truly love someone, you can't just fall out of love. "It doesn't happen like that," I would say. "You either love them or you never did to begin with." And that's what I'm struggling with right now. Did I ever love you to begin with? I think I did. I think that I grew to love you deeply ... but as we got older, I was in love with this idea of the couple we used to be. I dreamed of having you fall in love with me all over again, of spending my life with my high school sweetheart, the one that I kept going back to. But I never looked at why we had to keep going back to each other. Why would we break up to begin with? I know it feels like it's way too late to be thinking about this, but I guess better late than never. I've worried about this for a while now, even before we married, but I convinced myself that it was purely pre-wedding jitters. Now, I realize that pre-wedding jitters are more basic concerns: What if it doesn't work out? What he finds someone new? What if I'm not a good wife? But my concerns were much more concentrated. They had meaning behind them, true reason for concern. What if he doesn't grow up? Can I live with things the way they are now? What if things don't change? ... I worry that I expected things to change. I've always consciously said that a person should NEVER go into a relationship thinking that they can change the other. Have I done this anyway? No ... I didn't. I did think these things through, and I did tell myself that we were meant for each other and could get through anything, and that I could live with these things. I think I just may have been wrong.

I'm not sure what to do about all of this .. but at least I know what I truly think, believe, and feel now. Hopefully that will lead in the right direction.