You can also check out my wedding blog, Tara Getting Married. It has lots of DIY wedding information!

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Life... and love.

I will be in Gatlinburg for the weekend. A long weekend. A FOUR DAY WEEKEND. Oh my goodness... I can't even express how excited I am about this weekend. My parents and my sister are coming down and we're going to go hiking, shopping, and white-water rafting. And Philip is coming with me. It doesn't get much better! :)

I found someone to take my job. I've been training her for just over a week now. It's going really well. I think she'll fit well... for at least a while. She can keep the guys in line... I hope. And she has no attachments to the family, so she shouldn't be torn in a million different directions. Also, she has lots of administrative experience and is used to dealing with bulls**t and having to babysit her bosses.

I have the most wonderful boyfriend in the world. Sometimes I think about Philip and wonder how I ever stayed with any other boyfriend. I mean, Philip is wonderful to me. He tells me that he only treats me the way that I deserve to be treated. Why did I put up with any less?? lol

The dogs. Always so much drama. Ugh. Hopefully I can figure out something to do with them. I don't want to find them new homes because they are MY babies. But, Joe makes things difficult a lot of the time.

Joe. I swear, things go up and down more than a rollercoaster. Some days I think he hates me and then the next day, things are peachy-keen and he wants to be friends. I hope that things will be different when I'm not working with him anymore. Then we will either have to be real friends or just completely go our separate ways.

Most of the time now, I wonder why we were together for so long. I don't mean that in a mean way. I just mean that now, I can't figure out what I saw in him. We are so VERY different. He drives me crazy for the most part. I still care for him, but sometimes I sit down and think about everything we went through and wonder how we made it as long as we did. The heart is a scary thing. I stayed with Joe through a lot of crappiness and unhappiness and gave everything I had to try to make the relationship work. But, I don't honestly know why. The only thing I can come up with is love. I loved Joe with every fiber of my being. But why were we in love? What made us fall in love? What made us stay in love? It wasn't what we had in common... we actually had/have very little in common. We mostly just had a mutual love for each other in common.

I used to think that was fine. I thought every relationship would require a lot of sacrifice and that being different made things interesting. What I didn't realize is that I was giving FAR too much of myself to the relationship and not getting nearly enough out of it. I'm a sucker for the underdog. Stray puppies, geeky teenagers, losing teams, or anything else that needs help... I get sucked in. I can't look away. I have to give what I can to help. That goes for relationships, too, apparently.

I have recently realized that my previous two boyfriends were sucking the life out of me. I gave everything to the relationships and had nothing left for myself. It's not a problem for me to be giving freely to a relationship but it's unhealthy if the partner is not reciprocating. It royally sucks to be taken for granted.

I think it's probably never going to sink in for Michael, but I think that Joe sees what went wrong with our relationship and what he needs to do differently to make a relationship work. And, I learned things from both of those relationships. It's just taking a while to sink in... ;) I can't let my partners walk all over me. I need a give and take relationship. Not just a give relationship. And, I can't let love make all my decisions for me. Love is not enough to keep a relationship alive. It requires work from both partners and for there to be some common ground. A relationship cannot work if only one person is in it.

Philip and I have been dating for almost 4 months. We have yet to have a single argument. I didn't know that was possible. Seriously. I honestly did not know what a healthy relationship was before now. I thought I did. And it scares me because I think there are probably lots of people out there who think they are in healthy relationships and they really aren't. And that makes me sad.

Philip is supportive and sweet and loving and thankful and generous and easy-going and wonderful. Ugh. I'm disgustingly in love with him. He makes it easy to be in a relationship. He wants me to be happy and I want him to be happy. And we make each other happy. And it's so effing wonderful... it's indescribable. I'm sure we disgust people. lol We just have a lot in common and have common goals and it's just SO EASY. How can it be so easy? I love it. :)

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