Don't Assume Anything

I have tried to kick this. Really I have. I have accepted that a large amount of my mental discord for the past few days has to do with alcohol and lack of sleep.. but try as I might, I can't just chalk it all up to that. I was not drinking during that particular conversation.. if you could call it a conversation. It wasn't really. It was an attempt at a conversation on my part and a smokescreen on his.

I want to know why he doesn't want me to know who he really is. I want to know why he won't talk to me. It's not like I am asking for anything major. I just want him to stop throwing up the force field every time I ask him a personal question.

After a year and some change, maybe there is nothing wrong with me wanting to know his plans for the future, his feelings about.. well pretty much anything. All I asked was whether or not he wanted kids. You know, some time in the distant future, and the question itself was prompted by the roasting we got at the party on Saturday night. You'd have thought I had asked him something ...well something awful. Who knows what? He was certainly defensive enough about it.

And I take that kind of forceful reticence as rejection, and as we all know, I do not handle rejection well.

He pointed out that he does have a plan. And he does. He wants land, and he wants to build his dream house. That's a great plan. All I want to know is whether or not he would prefer to do it by himself.

I have said before that I can't assume that things in this relationship are anything like the one I had before it. But there's another facet to the question of assumptions. I am in no hurry to get my heart ripped out and stomped again either.. I refuse to just assume that he's on the same page with me, because I've done that and it did not turn out well. Then, I had a right to make assumptions. I had the right and the ring to prove it. It didn't stop me from feeling like the world't biggest fool when I realized that not only were we not on the same page, we were reading completely different books.. in different libraries, on completely separate continents.

It would be easy to just believe what I want to believe about the whole thing.. believe that he wants to include me in his plans, that he wants to rings, the 2.5 kids, and all that. But I have been that girl a few too many times to be able to fool myself again. I don't want to believe it, if it's a crock of shit like it was the last time.

Hell, I don't even want to get married again right away. But I want him to want to. Does that make sense? Not even in the near future. Just sometime. And that's probably pretty juvenile of me, but to hell with it, that's the way I feel.

But I've become a believer in the Church of the Painful Truth. The truth is that I can paint a pretty picture for myself, but only if he contributes something to it. The truth is that he says he loves me, but only in response. I can't think of a single time that he has said those words of his own volition. And that makes me feel pretty damn stupid for ever saying it, ever, no matter how I might feel about him.

The truth is that I am afraid that what I want doesn't exist anywhere in the world, and that scares me a little. And good god damn, will you look at that? All this time I have been trying to figure out how in the world someone hadn't snatched him up before this.. and I think I've figured out why. I may have found the Achilles heel I was beginning to think wasn't there..

How can you build a life with someone who won't let you know who they are?