Tuesday, July 11th 2017 (Relationships Scotland Part Two: Love and Sex)
There was a guy on the old Ryver forum, back when it was called WQD and was designed in the very same way as the My Way Out forum, and he's on the new Ryver WQD site still, who we once upon a time were very sensitive towards and supportive of. He was sober for two years at the time and was on the lookout for a partner. Thoughts of being completed and his sobriety perfected seemed to be thrown into ideas of romantic love. If sobriety itself couldn't fix him then it appeared that he felt as though a relationship would. He spent some time on the dating circuit without much luck. He complained about being ugly and needed constant emotional support throughout. He told us all about his experiences which I absolutely loved as it was and is still incredibly rare and difficult to find on forums such as this.
Then one time he seemed to hit it off with a girl and before you knew it he was engaged to be married and then disappeared from the forum only coming back every now and then, once in a blue moon, to let us know that he was married, that she was pregnant, and, just the other day, update us on how his daughter is via pictures and photographs. The whole story is one you might call beautiful, a true success story. One of the reasons we get sober in the first place. It's living life on life's terms. It's what it's all about. The whole thing did for me, however, come across as being a story written by someone very immature and insecure – someone who was ready to just jump into a relationship with the first woman he met that liked him; was, as Bob Dylan said (and this is my first Bob Dylan quote of this new journal even though it's now into the second half of the year) ''Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet.'' He came across as desperate and it was quite embarrassing reading about his experiences. There were times when I wanted to message him and ask him to slow down a bit, not invest so heavily so quickly.
I will say again though that this is what the honest writer risks when he writes as he does on forums – he leaves himself open to judgement as others feel that they know more about him just because he reveals a little (or a lot) more than the average poster.
Lindsay and I have been going out now for a while now. I say it's around ten months; she says it's ''almost a year''. We're sitting in our second relationship counselling session and the counsellor is trying to gather how it is that each of us view our situation. I seem to think of it as still early days. We're still working things out and we're living just for today, as we are taught in AA and suchlike. Lindsay seems to have this projected belief that things are perhaps a day at a time but that this doesn't stop us from thinking ahead. We have a holiday booked together for instance. True. When we booked and paid for that last months there were fifteen weeks before our flight leaves the runway. This is a forward-thinking commitment. The counsellor begins to take things down the route of how we feel about each other. Lindsay comments that she had been thinking this past week while I've been staying at my cave for the usual few days midweek that she was thinking about telling me those three little words that seem to mean so much but that she backed down when the chance didn't really come up.
It makes me think a little about how I view love and the importance of saying it. At the time as I sat in the session my Detached Protector was having a field day (I think I'm actually becoming really good at spotting which mode I'm in and when – something that will please Dr. Bacon when I see him again on the twentieth) but now that I am sitting in the comfortable couch while Lindsay is out working and I am doing housework since the weather is back to being wet meaning that Barry the Bullet and I will live to fight another day I can do a little online research. When is it time to say tell the other person that you love them?
It's no surprise that there are loads of websites dedicated to the question (and that most of them are pretty lame) but what was quite surprising was the amount of people who happily confess that they first said those words early in the relationship. I mean REALLY early. In fact – to not have said it by this time into it (ten months) almost puts Lindsay and me into some kind of record-breaking territory. Some people say the magic words the same day they meet the person; some say within a week; but most seem to have said it by three months. It makes me really wonder.
Could it be a case of my past plaguing my thoughts on this subject. Due to my active drinking and drug taking over the past few years I probably spent more time on my own than most others did outside of prison. I spent two consecutive Christmas days all by myself with the blinds shut and the phone battery removed. It was a dark time admittedly but in a strange way it kind of worked out. It has now left me with this ability to be able to tolerate isolation. I don't mind being on my own for a full day, even two or three. I tend to find something to do when many people resort to television and checking their phones every thirty seconds in the hope that someone feels them important enough to have left them a message, a little slice of love and approval. After a few days I'll admit that I can start pulling my hair out (metaphorically) but for a couple of days I'm good. I've accepted that sometimes I'm gonna be on my own and that's just inevitable. I'm comfortable with it now too.
I don't think that this is the case with a lot of people. I think for many of them their greatest fear is being alone, perhaps second only to being seen as being alone by others. I was thinking about Captain G on Saturday night. He was telling me last week that he's been dating Marie from AA for around seven months but that I'll never see them in the same meeting together. They agreed a long time ago to ''do different meetings!'' I think that a bit of this was probably to do with his guilt (she's a relative newcomer who was only two months sober when they began dating while he his sober date is way back January of 2011 – the whole thing will be very much frowned upon by old timers and sponsors). Marie was there this week and my brain started to do its little time-line thing. Marie got out of that psychiatric ward around the middle of March. She was there for three months which would take her back into last year. I remember Lindsay telling me that she had seen on Facebook that Marie had been committed. They've been going out for around months from last week. This would mean that Captain G had only been going out with her for maybe a couple of weeks, a month at the most, when she went into the hospital.
It's no wonder his sponsor was asking him to reconsider dating someone who had been committed into a psychiatric ward less than a months after they had started dating and who had just joined the fellowship. To be honest I would have told me to stay the hell away from Jenna when I first joined AA, something that Stu and others advised me to do but which I largely ignored up to a point. It is evidence to support my theory that we are terrified of being alone. Captain G seems a little like the guy I mentioned at the top of the post in that he'll do anything not to be alone, or seen as being alone. Maybe they are stronger through it all now but I have to say that if Lindsay was committed within a month of us dating I would hope that I'd be strong enough to realise that the timing wasn't right for either party and that the best thing would be for us both to continue working through our individual problems first and then who knows further down the line.
We mention to our counsellor the influence that AA can have on the relationships that start up between its members. I think that by the way we talk about how ''it takes an alkie to know and alkie'' and all the rest that there's a part of every AA member that wants another AA alkie to be by their side. Our counsellor asks us if we see the fact that we are so similar as a positive or negative feature of our relationship. Again our answers differ with Lindsay saying that she sees it as positive while I argue that while we may be similar in some ways we are completely different in other ways. In this respect I feel us to be the same as any other couple. She likes the television; I can't stand it. I am told that television preference does not change the fact that we are similar but I disagree. Hours spent in front of a television tells a lot about a person. Lindsay likes to ''chill out'' as so many of us do and this will start tonight from the moment she gets back from work. Switch off and relax. Fair enough – it's a twelve hour shift on a hospital ward. Me – I like to stay turned on. When I would come home after working shifts on the window cleaning my way of relaxing was often to post on the forums and then write and record some music. It's a very different way of decompressing. Lindsay and I aren't as similar as some might think.
I can imagine Dr. Bacon smiling to himself. Perhaps he'd accuse me of diverting the conversation away from the subject so that I don't have to emotionally connect with it. This is a tactic that my Detached Protector does. It's that mode I'm in again. It's good that I'm spotting it though.
Regarding the length that this post is turning out to be I think I'll cut it here and post this next section as tomorrow's post. It'll be the first time I've cheated but it'll be nice to have a day off from writing tomorrow.
Who knows? I might even get used to it.
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Stevie
Gets tomorrow off from writing.
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