Oh, well, after 28 years, who am I kidding???

I will be involved with my Sig. Other until one of us is gone. He is 18 years older than me and in failing health, so I know what the odds are. I sometimes think I am cruel in taking offense at how he responds to things. However, I have been his caretaker through all manner of big deal health crises, while he is terribly intolerant toward depression. I won't fault myself for looking for some credit and feeling hurt at his tough words to me.

Soon after we met, I discovered that he was not employed, as he had told me he was. He had come into some money, which he blew. Some he blew my way. I was so flattered that he took me out to nice places to eat and he was quite handsome. Less than four months after we met, his little fortune was blown away and he was skidding toward . . . well, the skids. He was a drinker who would drink himself, literally, into the streets. Ten months after I had first met him, I discovered him homeless, very underweight, ill-clouthed and freezing in the street, and I called a cab and put him in a motel room and then found him a place to rent (or rather that I could rent for him.) I paid his rent and brought him groceries. I gave him bus fare to look for work. He got a job. But the drinking continued and he called me up saying he was homeless again. I said, "I will pray for you. I've done everything humanly possible. I leave you to God now." (I had gone to a few Al-Anon meetings by this time.) Well, God, working through the Salvation Army, was much better able to look after him than I was. I can not speak highly enough of what the "Sally" did for him. As long as he could pass the sobriety test at check-in time, he had a very decent place to dwell, and eat, and work, and receive a bit of income, and acquire a nice wardrobe of clothes, and not be alone. And they even liked him very much. And we resumed doing nice things together.

Then he fled off to some other corner of the country with the dream of finding the pot at the end of the rainbow. In a few months, he called me saying he was on the streets again. I arranged for him to pick up a bus ticket and travel back from where he would have unlikely survived. Same story, as above. Eventually, he was back under the very wise and prudent care of the S.A. This time, he followed the program, and I became hopeful that he was turning his life around. (I became excessively hopeful.)

In a year, I was traveling to where I wanted to settle down, and he would never drink again and be so happy if we could be together. So we left and got settled in together. Seven years later, I was about crazy from living with alcoholic abuse. I walked out and found that living alone was infinitely preferable to what I had been in. For a week or two, I was hysterical with loneliness and broken dreams. Inside of a month, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Three years down the line, he became very ill, and I helped care for him. The illness did motivate him to embrace sobriety, as a way to survive. After he was sober two years, I resumed a close relationship with him. That was one of the worst decisions I ever made. Then again, I had never stopped loving him, and I did believe he loved me. And I do believe he does love me. He just has some real unloving ways of expressing himself, now and then.

When we got back together, his drinking was over, but I was beginning to have more serious problems with depression/anxiety. He was now holding jobs more steadily and I was holding jobs less steadily. We were living together, and whenever I was between jobs, or insecure on a new job, he was brutal in his denigration of me. Then he became very sick repeatedly with major health issues. My employment had stabilized and I was able to keep us going. I nursed him out of horrendous illness, and I decided that when his health stabilized, we would split up again.

He improved and I helped him get situated in a nice place to live and found myself a place to live, alone, again. Five years later, we are still close friends. He became the happiest he ever was, and I have had bad problems with recurrent depression fueled mostly by loneliness. The loss of my employment has me in pretty rough shape. My anxiety about my own ability to keep a roof over my head is intense. We kind of switched places. So when he said the mean things he said that I put in post #1, I felt like it was a bitter way to feel treated, given our history together. He never was overly big on gratitude. I accepted that. But to kick me when I am down. I can't accept that.

Now he is sick again, and will be needing my care. I tell him, "You have to leave me enough love to last me, if you should be gone one day." I was a young woman when I met him. Now, it is near 30 years later, and I am an over-the-hill broad. He has nothing to leave me, but warm memories. I tell him, he must at least leave me those. We must make more, while he has time. Just the showing of affection, the saying of kind things. That's all he can give, and that's all I would hope for from him.

I told him that, if he would tell me that he thinks I am wonderful, he could make me feel like a queen. That could go a long way in enabling me to recover and solve the very serious problems that I have to solve myself. I have spent all these years telling him, whenever I could, that I thought he was wonderful. And so often I did think that, and I still find times when I think that, and I tell him. It's time he told me.