B__ and I returned from our mostly lovely vacation in S__ town late last week. There were a few stressful spots, but nothing out of the ordinary — especially when traveling, especially over a long distance, especially with a significant other, especially when you’ve never traveled together before.
By the second-to-last day I was missing my son quite a bit and starting to get nervous about being away from my job. Time was running out and it was clear we wouldn’t have time or money to do a tenth of the things we’d thought of. The reality that vacations are necessarily temporary settled in and brought with it a bit of melancholy. I get this way on vacations near the end. I wonder why I spend the vast majority of my life not doing the things I do on vacation. Then I wonder why I do the things I do on vacation. It’s perfectly me — I try not to be a downer or anything, but I do get quiet.
So I was mostly silent and B__ assumed it was about her. At this point I must confess that part of me had hoped we’d not be nearly so successful traveling together, that there’d be a clear reason to kick this relationship to the curb where I’d kinda, sorta, almost-but-not-really decided it should be a month or two ago.
I didn’t feel like defending myself. Didn’t care if the whole thing went down in flames. I can say I didn’t want that, but I wasn’t going out of my way to avoid it — it just didn’t seem like such a terrible thing. Besides, I knew I had some of it coming, if for vastly different reasons than her assumptions led her to believe. The more grief she gave me, the quieter I got, and the quieter I got, the more she assumed her assumptions were correct (despite me punctuating the conversation with a few sparse points of clarification).
She accused me of not caring, and after having several days to chew on it, realized that’s dead on — I don’t. At least not if you’re talking about the relationship. I don’t really care about the relationship. I do care about her. Caring about the relationship as its own separate and distinct entity feels a bit like corporate personhood — a phenomenon I am already quite comfortable despising entirely.
She asked if I was going to dump her as soon as we got home. Damn, that’s some half-way decent intuition. “No,” I said; technically it wasn’t a lie since I discarded that option the moment she asked. “Are you mad?” “No,” I said feeling completely honest (at least by comparison). She didn’t completely believe me.
We flew home on a red-eye, and I guess she slept well enough not to notice that I didn’t. I got more of the same “you haven’t said five words to me since” speech and again I retreated into wherever it is that I retreat to. She’d manage to escalate the “argument” without my direct participation (an interesting thing to behold actually) and before long had brought my wife into it (as she’d done a few days before).
Ironic, this. It is so totally not at all about my wife. Marriage conceptually perhaps. Relationships in general, yes. But the only time I find myself thinking about K__ in anything resembling the way B__ thinks I’m thinking about her is when I’m noticing things about the two that are similar (or things about the relationships that are similar) and those are, more often than not, highly unflattering.
I could see the corner turning where she was ready to cut me loose. I could see a clear path leading from her driveway back to mine, a few days apart, an uncomfortable conversation or three, and we’d be broken up. Every car accident I’ve ever had things dropped into slow motion; it’d be like that over the course of a week. I relaxed and prepared for impact. Instead, she jerked the wheel at the last minute, apologized, and within moments (ok, a few days) everything was hunky-dory.
And I’m … glad?