Every so often Noah goes through and rereads my archive. I think this is a bit frightening as I know how much I have written. When I notice that he is doing this I tend to copycat. Honestly, I shouldn’t. I should simply smile and nod and let him read because he gets something out of it. I don’t get good things out of it. I get weird and insecure. I find things he said years ago and I want to point at them and say, “See! You said that! That’s why I get upset!” But that is an awful thing to do. Noah is allowed to change his mind and grow as a person and do different things now. I don’t need to take previous statements about “poly is non-negotiable” (dude has actually said it. I could point at dates.) and treat them as currently true. Because it isn’t currently true. Noah doesn’t feel that way at this point. Given how his life worked then I can see why it wasn’t negotiable then, but a lot has changed. I need to trust him.
Not quite two years ago Noah and I went through a rough patch. I was really awful to him. I did some things I’m not very proud of. If a good friend of mine came to me and said they were being treated the way I was treating Noah I would tell them to run, not walk, to get out of the relationship. But he trusted me and he let me try to change things. He trusted that I loved him enough to work through what I was doing and stop hurting him. I hope his trust was well placed, I have certainly worked very hard at stopping that behavior. He trusts me.
Trust is hard and scary. In a relationship it’s so multilayered. I have to trust him and he has to trust me and we both have to be able to trust ourselves. Noah has certainly done everything possible to earn my trust. I don’t know that I have done as much to earn his trust, but he gives it anyway. I think the hardest part is trusting myself. Part of being able to trust myself has to come from knowing myself well. Right now in order to behave in the way that Noah deserves I’m going to stop reading his old lj stuff. There is nothing wrong with anything he wrote and I’m glad that record of his life exists. But I internalize things that are not about me and then create problems around that. That is something that *I* do that is not his fault or really about anything he has said. I’m not going to do it this time. I’m going to trust that I made the right decision in having a relationship with him and that he is completely telling me the truth because that is what he does. He tells me the truth when it will make me angry, when it hurts me, and when I would really rather he lie. So I have every reason to trust him and to trust my faith in him.
I picked a good man. I picked a man who is willing to work through just about any level of hardness to stay with me. It doesn’t matter what was said five years ago or three years ago. What matters is what he has said consistently since the day we got married. He has lived up to his promises. Ok. Breathe. And no being a buggy weird bitch when he gets home.
What about the friendslocked/private entries?
When I was 18, my boyfriend and I were having a VERY nasty series of arguments and I couldn’t come to the bottom of them. He wasn’t talking to me, not meaningfully, so I decided to do a very bad thing. I read his journal – and read some things about myself that I wasn’t so happy with. It soured our relationship.
These days, I try to remember that something said in a moment is true for THAT moment, but not necessarily for ALL moments.
I consider Noah’s lj something that isn’t bad for me to read. 🙂 I am given access and all.
But you are right. Moments change.
Oh my. I do the same thing. It’s like I have to try and dig for reasons to find something wrong. I have super huge trust issues. I’m not positive, but I think it has to do with the fact that I was married to a pathological liar for 5 years, and he taught me that I *can* be lied to and never know it. That sort of knowledge makes it difficult for me to trust what anyone says. Coupled with the knowledge that, as humans, we’re all pretty much capable of anything, and I have myself a nice mixture of paranoia, mistrust, and godawful anxiety.
I think you’re also right about trusting yourself. I think trust is hard to give to others if you can’t give it to yourself. Meh.
So – I think you’ve made a good decision in not going back and reading old journal entries. I’ve been there and done that, and it is in NO way productive. I just recently turned off the detailed billing on our cell phone account just so as not to give myself any sort of possible opportunity to be a snoopy trouble-causing twit. I did this to save myself grief.
Trust is SO hard, and it never used to be for me, so not only am I mistrusting (is that the right word?), I’m also frustrated at myself for being that way.
Sorry – didn’t mean to mini-rant in a comment on your entry, but it was like reading something *I* had written and have discussed ad nauseam with different folks.
Keep affirming your choice (to be with Noah), and try to beat that buggy weird bitch back into her place! 🙂
The funny thing is, there are times when I can go back and read and do fine and ask him questions about things and it is just expanding what I know about him. During those times I like reading the old entries. Right now is not one of those times. 🙂 That’s where the trusting me has to come in–cause I have to be able to know the difference between those times and I can predict the fuss.
(You probably wanted distrustful–they are different in really subtle ways. Mistrust is a word though. 🙂
Min-rants about your own stuff while not telling me what I *should* do is fine and dandy. 🙂
I think I did well on beating back the buggy weird bitch. We had an odd night but it wasn’t really about me or this issue and that’s ok. It lead to productive looking at where boundaries need to change some so Noah’s happiness can increase. 🙂
Awesome. 🙂
(By the way, did I come across as telling you what you should do?)
Not at all. 🙂 But because I rant about people doing so I figure that saying, “Hey! You didn’t do it! Yay!” is helpful. 🙂 It’s a calibration thing.
Wonderful. 🙂 I love clarification! LOL