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.