I feel too much like a whining retard to admit this, but I think I´m getting bored in Spain. Things are humming along this Spring quite nicely, I have nothing to complain about, and yet somehow I´m full of unrest. My mind races at night when I´m trying to sleep, about things I must get done before the summer gets here, about activities I´d like to start up, about what this summer is actually going to be like once I get everything finalized.
Lots of things are up in the air (i.e. my summer work, my summer trip to the U.S., my next academic year...wherever (most likely in Granada)), but that makes this Spring no different from any other since I´ve started teaching EFL. I think the problem is more on the relationship front than I´m willing to admit.
Since moving in together, things with P* have been good...and bad. Ups and Downs, right? Isn´t that what it´s always like? The first few weeks I was in homemaking bliss, happy to discover that my cleanliness and his, though they are thankfully both quite high-standard, are also complementary - I care about where things go, everything in its place, while he actually cares about dust and dirt and streaks on the glass/mirrors. I was happy thinking we were in near-perfect balance with housekeeping, when suddenly one night P* exploded on me without warning. He´d come home from work tired, and because I hadn´t started cooking dinner yet when he arrived, he threw himself into doing it while giving me the cold shoulder. When I got up the guts to ask what was wrong, it came to light that he didn´t think I was cleaning enough! Can you imagine?! ME!!! This was the first time in my life anyone had EVER found fault with me not cleaning enough. (In case you don´t know me very well, I´m quite well-known for being a cleaning control freak and thus a pain in the ass to live with, for most people.) I´ve clearly made too much progress in letting go of my cleanliness control, something I´ve been working on since moving to Spain.
Anyway, after about 2 hrs of struggling to understand one another, I gave up and fled outside to the terrace, where I dropped into a fit of sobbing, gut-wrenching tears more intense that any in a long, long time. I felt like a failure. I felt like all the hopes I´d been building up for my new life here, for this new relationship, this new living situation...all of it is ridiculous and pointless if I keep making mistakes without realizing it. And that´s what this argument was - a list of things that P* had piled up all week long, things that I was doing wrong or simply not doing. I felt like the typical man in the argument, while P* was playing the typical woman - pummelling me with a long list he´d unfairly been storing up. I had to explain to him - I can´t avoid doing something he doesn´t like, or do things that he does like, if he doesn´t TELL ME he wants me to (not) do them! I´m not an effing mind reader! And he was frustrated too, the whole ¨I shouldn´t have to TELL you what I want! I ¨just want you to think about ME and just be considerate!¨And then I´m thinking, ¨Yeah, YOUR idea of what a considerate person is must be different from my idea. That´s why you have to COMMUNICATE!¨ Oh god, and it went on and on like that for another couple of hours, and we didn´t really make any progress.
The whole time I was crying, I kept thinking about the dream I´d had the night before - it was about my ex-b/f, I*. It was the first time in a loooong time I´d dreamt about him, and I wasn´t sure why I had. In the heat of the argument, I realized why: maybe it´s residual guilt feelings from the way that relationship ended, but I´m starting to see myself in this relationship with P*, except I´m seeing me as I*, and P* as me. I feel like all of a sudden I can understand a lot of the things I* used to complain about, the way he used to react when I got upset - he always tried to please me, to do what he thought I wanted, but most of the time I was never very clear about what I wanted and I expected him to somehow just sense, or magically know, what I wanted. Looking back, I wasn´t very fair during these arguments. It was my failure to communicate what I wanted, not his inability to give me what I wanted, that was the problem. I had this epiphany during my crying spell on the terrace, and I wanted to vomit from feeling so guilty. Karma is a bitch, eh? At least the realization of all this helped me to communicate to P*, as if I was talking to myself. I think he learned a bit about me, and maybe I figured some stuff out. It ended well, at least.
Of course there have been lots of other arguments since we moved in together in March, but none so mind-fucking as that one. I think we´ve more or less recovered, but the future will always bring further challenges - many of which to me feel like looming storm clouds which will inevitably burst when I´m not paying attention. But of course that´s only today´s perspective. Tomorrow´s forecast is sunny; gotta hope for the best, eh?
