In which I describe one of my many neurosis: the one where I’m some kind of anti-social biatch.

I’m such a Libra.

I have some kind of internal device – yes, very much like a scale, thank you – which constantly weighs my external perception of others’ happiness against my internal comfort level. If the people on the outside appear to be more comfortable than I am uncomfortable on the inside, I just go with the flow.

I assume that people say and do what they want (even though apparently I don’t, myself) and I spend way too much time doing what I think my S.O. wants until one day I wake up and hate his guts because I didn’t get my own needs met.

Lately, I spend virtually all of my non-work time with Teh BF, doing essentially nothing, because he seems to want to hang out more than I don’t want to.

It’s a non-issue, really, until I spend some unscheduled time alone (like I did last Tuesday night, when Teh BF was home sick) and suddenly realize that I can’t remember the last time I spent some unscheduled time alone.

Tuesday night I was home from work by 7:15. It was still full daylight out. I sat on the porch and read for awhile (!!!), and then I went upstairs into my newly rearranged room (!!!) and hung out with my dog and watched five episodes of 30 Rock on Hulu (!!!) and started a knitting project (!!!).

It was ineffably awesome.

My schedule has turned into one in which I spend 40 hours a week at work, sleep and bathe at home, and spend the rest of my time with Teh BF. We either go out and drink or we go to his place and watch TV. I don’t get my laundry done, or pluck my eyebrows, or clean my room or knit or build that website AmmZon needs or clean the bathroom or hand-wash my delicates or vacuum, and I’m perpetually behind on all the little things people need to get done in their lives.

I spend a bunch of time with Teh BF because that’s what we’re in the habit of doing. Whether we want to or not.

Saturdays he works, so I’m free until 6 o’clock. I get roughly 8 hours to myself before he comes and picks me up, and during those hours I don’t want to do laundry and clean the bathroom and go grocery shopping. I want to lie in my fucking bed and do nothing. With no one. Because the rest of the week I’m either at work, asleep, or with him.

Sure, it’s nice to spend time together, of course it is, but we’re not married and we don’t live together. There’s simply no good reason for me to sit on his couch in front of the boob tube while he does his laundry. The whole point of dating instead of being terribly, awfully, legally chained to one another is that you don’t have to do that crap. The soul-killing banalities can and should be done separately.

It seems that the traditional direction of a relationship is one in which you eventually start spending all your time together doing mundane things… and then you move in together and get married.

Which is fine in a relationship that’s following a normal path, but we’re not in a normal relationship. We’re not trying to move from dating to shacking up to getting married to living happily ever after. He’s got a mom to take care of. I’ve got a divorce to get over, and I want to play house like I want to staple the arches of my feet together. There is no forseeable future in which we’re living together unless some old lady dies first, since he’s already stated his intention to spend the rest of his life in the house he’s in now.

Well, actually, let me contradict myself: for me, that ‘normal’ relationship path is actually not fine. It turns out that I don’t like being with anyone that much. I tried it once, hated it, and am no longer interested. Dating is WAY better than shacking up. Apparently I lack the gene that makes constant, relentless interface feel soothing and safe; to me it’s smothering and cloying. Which is probably a horrible character flaw, but it’s how I’m made.

But in spite of all that we’re instinctively trying to play house anyway, and if I’m honest it’s just plain irritating me. I don’t even want to live together, but the weight of a relationship’s normal course keeps nudging us into pretending to try to do it anyway.

Which is impossible, since neither of us lives alone. We couldn’t play house even if we wanted to. Which we don’t.

(Or at least I don’t. I can’t really speak for him, since I never asked.)

I need to learn how to speak up, back the hell off, and spend more time doing my own thing. And why don’t I? Because I’m such an asshole that I assume that he wants to spend every waking minute with me – which I’m intellectually certain is not even true – and am trying to protect his feelings. Or some shit. Who knows.

Not long after we hooked up, we had a discussion in which I admitted I need a lot of space but am bad at asking for it and he admitted in return that he’s a “hostage-taker from way back.” His bad habit is that he pretty much drags a chick home and keeps her there, bringing her coffee in bed and cooking and running helpful errands… until he wakes up a few years later paying all her goddamned bills and raising her kids. And, one assumes, hating her guts for it.

So I’m gonna back off. I’m not going to spend every single night with Teh BF. I’m not going to let him drive me everywhere. (I’ll admit it was nice in the dead of winter, but it isn’t fair for him to be my own personal taxi service when I have perfectly good legs to walk on.) I’m not going to let him pick up 80% of the checks when we go out anymore, either.

I’m going to spend the majority of my week nights at home, or maybe even out with other friends sometimes. And when I do hang out with him it’s going to be fun because we’ll both have gotten all the mundane shit like laundry and TV-watching out of the way on our own time.

I find that I still have a lot of resentment built up around my marriage. I don’t like spending hour after mundane hour with someone doing nothing just because we’re “together.” And I don’t even want to do everything together, because most of ‘everything’ is stupid and common and I barely want to do my own chores let alone watch someone else do theirs.

And I most certainly don’t want to rack up thousands of hours of TV-watching. Although I do enjoy a certain amount of TV (especially Brit TV), overall I think it’s disgusting and banal and to be avoided, and I hate having it on all the time. Sitting in a room watching TV with someone, most of the time, is me not doing what I want to do: read or knit or surf or cook or call my Iowa friends or sew or pluck my eyebrows or sleep or stare out the window or, hell, rearrange my damn closet.

If there’s a theme to my life, it’s that what goes around comes around. Anything I used to judge against I eventually become: I used to absolutely rail against men who wanted to be with me but didn’t want to let our relationship progress in what I thought was the natural way, from dating through shacking up to getting married to spending an eternity doing mundane shit together.

Now I might be on the other side of that equation.

And I’m here to tell you: both sides suck.

~+~+~
Update: So I told Teh BF all this last Friday night and have only seen him once since, for Mother’s Day brunch at my house.

Moral being that if you just open your fucking mouth and say what you need, and you’re with a nice person, he’ll just give it to you! Easy as pie. Dumbass. *rolleyes*