Trouble in paradise, part 3: a late night conversation

Me: I went to bed at 9pm, slept until about midnight before waking up and lying in bed for an hour. My mind has been racing the entire time, preventing me from going back to sleep. I struggle with the idea of telling you these feelings because I don't want you to use them to beat yourself up with. But these feelings overwhelm me sometimes and I have to get them out to someone. I can't think of one friend that I can share our struggles with because I don't want them to take this situation and make lasting, negative assumptions about you. None of my family and friends know you very well if at all. (This may be my fault or it may be the fault of the distance.) They have no frame of reference where you are concerned. They have no positive to weigh against the negative. I don't want the negative to be the only thing they know about you so I keep my mouth shut and suffer in silence. It's a heavy burden. Although the feelings are difficult to shoulder on my own, I don't want to put any unnecessary strain on our relationship. What I want to know is do you feel you are at a place where you can handle hearing my innermost thoughts on us without your psyche taking a hit? If not, that's okay and perfectly understandable. I just need to know.



D: I may be fragile and dealing with stuff, but we've been trying to do things in a way where there's total honesty and communication. So I really need to know what those thoughts and feelings are. I don't think I can beat myself up any more than I have been, so it's not going to hit me too hard, I don't think.



Me: I was just sending you an email telling you that it's not as bad as I made it seem. I journaled about my feelings just now and looked at the words on the screen. I think you can handle it. Do you want to know them now or wait until you've had a good night's sleep?



D: You can send it now.



Me: This is my journal entry:

I want to learn to trust again. I want to love with abandon again. I want to be able to relax in this relationship again. I feel that I have to prepare myself emotionally just in case this relationship should end. This keeps me at a distance from D., I feel. It keeps me from loving him as well and as completely as I should because I'm holding something back, guarding my heart just in case. I don't want to live like that. I don't want to love like that. I don't want to be on guard all the time. Plus, no amount of worrying or self-preservation is going to have any affect on what may actually happen down the road. What will be will be. What will happen will happen. Why not love the best way I can now and deal with the circumstances as they arise later? I worry that this is the beginning of a slow unraveling of us. (There is so much power in this statement that I hate to even look at it on the screen.) It's also just as likely that it is not, that it will be the thing that makes us stronger. The problem is I don't know for sure. I have no guarantees about what is going to happen next and that's a little unnerving to say the least. I want to make this thing work. I want to think positively (but not pollyannaish) about it all so that I can be at peace. I want him here right now. I want to feel his reassuring arms around me. I want to hear him say, "We can do this." So difficult these relationships can be. But this is the part that I've said all along that I was waiting for, the part where I roll up my sleeves and get down to the business of making a relationship work. And not just survive but thrive. He has his issues to work through too, his own emotions. That's okay. We can work through this together. It is possible. I don't have to worry about the what ifs and the what if nots. Why do I resist journaling so? Why, when I am a mess of emotions, do I cringe at the thought of writing those emotions down, especially considering that it helps me? It's the only way I gain perspective. It's the only way that I can sort through my feelings and not feel so overtaken by them. This situation fed into my fears that everything is going to come crashing down around me. It rocked me to my core and I have to find my bearings. This is helping.



D: That is a sobering piece of writing, but I'm not going to beat myself up.

Yes, my actions caused this wave of fear in you that we're slowly breaking apart, but because you hung in there and insisted on conveying the message that gambling with no money is bad judgment, I have ceased my actions and taken a road that won't cause a bigger rift. I don't think I have the words to tell you how much that meant to me, and I'm sure that's a part of the problem, the fact that I haven't communicated with you how much you mean to me and how much your not getting angry meant to me. I think you did the exact right thing for me and for us--you firmly let me know that you couldn't respect and be in a relationship with a man who gambled without money, yet you still loved me and wanted to help me find other solutions for my financial woes. I expected anger and yelling, but I got tough love. Thank you for being the mature one.

Now, that said, I don't know how long I will be able to step away from the gambling, and I don't know if I'm convinced that it's a losing game that I can't succeed in, which is probably why you feel like this is something that will eventually eat away at us. But I love you and I hate putting you through something that clearly hurts you. I also refuse to lie to you, so I'm not going to go through it without letting you know. That leaves me in a situation where, like we talked about, I now have to be accountable to someone else, and I'm not used to that. But I want to be accountable to you. I know you have my best interests in mind, as well as our relationship's. This is rambling, but what I'm trying to say is, I may be shaky with my gambling, and you may be shaky with your fear of what it will do to us, but our love is not shaky. You don't have to worry about that, and you can love me without worrying about that. Just the fact that I'm not gambling right now shows you how much I love you. So try not to have any fear when it comes to that.


Me: I appreciate you being honest with me. I really do. But your email made me cry before I went to bed and here's why:


You wrote:

Now, that said, I don't know how long I will be able to step away from the gambling, and I don't know if I'm convinced that it's a losing game that I can't succeed in, which is probably why you feel like this is something that will eventually eat away at us.

Here's what I found last night on a website for loved ones of compulsive gamblers:

Compulsive gambling brings despair and humiliation into the lives of countless thousands of men, women and children. The compulsive gambler is a person who is dominated by an irresistible urge to gamble. Coupled with this is the obsessive idea that a way will be found not only to control the gambling, but to "make it pay" and enjoy it besides. This disease causes deterioration in almost all areas of the person's life.

I am here to support you and encourage you on your path to quit gambling. And I do think it's very possible to quit gambling. But I also feel strongly that you need help in doing so. There are too many underlying issues that are the basis for your gambling problem that you are just not dealing with or you haven't sought the help that you need to deal with them. That does not bode well for us. And it makes me very sad. But I can't want it more than you do. I absolutely refuse to want it more than you do. I don't think it's healthy to want it more than you do. But that leaves us on very shaky ground, which is unsettling at best.



D: I don't know what to say. I know that it kills me that my gambling hurts you so. But I can't get help because it wouldn't work. I'd have to believe it's a problem for therapy to work, and I continue to believe that the problem occurs only when I lose. I hope you're not thinking that I have to choose between help or you because it's not that I won't get help out of spite of you or because I'd rather gamble than have you. It's because it wouldn't help. I totally understand why you'd be very nervous about us now that you have an idea of how obsessed I am with becoming a successful gambler. And I don't know what to tell you that would make you feel better. But I hate hurting you, so I'm really trying to be responsible and work my way back to financial health instead of going for the quick fix. That's all I can promise you right now, that I'm trying.



Me: For now, I guess that will have to do.