Handling Drama

Sunday afternoon, Ed and I had some relationship drama that was kind of interesting. I find I don't often post about things that are super personal here, so I'm stretching myself a little bit.

When we were making our weekend plans, we made a date for Saturday night, and I asked Ed if he would spend the night Saturday and plan to spend Sunday at my house until around my bedtime. (He typically gets up in mid-afternoon and goes to bed before or around dawn, I think, so our schedules are quite different.) He agreed to this as long as he could bring his computer so he could get some work done. No problem.

Sunday afternoon we had some sex and then I said, "Hey, you wanna watch a movie or something?" and he said, "Actually I think I'd rather go home."

I think I kind of froze or something. "Do you have to?" I asked.

"You're disappointed," he said.

"Yeah," I said, and went into the bathroom for a minute to pee and think.

I had really arranged my mind around the idea that I had him until bedtime. Part of me was rational and did not want to trap him at my apartment, and wanted him to be able to get his work done wherever he felt he could best do it, or whatever. I wanted to get over it, let it go, and be mature. But the other part of me was just a child from whom something was being taken away in a completely unexpected and unfair fashion.

Given this, my temptation was to go out and do some kind of passive-aggressive bullshit thing like, "No, it's fine. I'll take you home. I obviously just can't make plans with you and have you stick to them. That's fine, I know that now," etc. Argh. I really wanted not to be passive aggressive and try to lay some thick smack of guilt down on him in an unsuccessfully sneaky fashion. (It's not like he wouldn't notice if I did that.)

So I went back to my room and started putting my clothes on. He came over and said, "You're not OK," and I said, "No, I'm not," and he put his arms around me and I told him how I felt ("We agreed that you'd be here today, and I want to let this go and be mature, but I just can't," to paraphrase) and he admitted he had done wrong in agreeing to stay and then not getting any work done Friday or Saturday and bailing on me, and he apologized and continued holding me tight while I cried a little bit.

(This all sounds ridiculous as I type it out, but you know, in the moment these things are harder. We were probably standing there 2-3 minutes total.)

He sat down to put his shoes on, got one on, thought for a minute (while I closed my eyes, sitting across him on the side of the bed, rocking autistically), took it off, and got into bed with me. I was really getting better by this time and had put my own shoes on, which he took off me. He said he was getting freaky from not having eaten much (I'd made some peanut noodles with seitan but they were a bit weird for him, and also he's really accustomed to eating meat) but he had brought his computer and could just work at my house if he got something to eat. I suggested we could go out for fast food if he liked, and he did.

We went to eat at Chipotle and spent much of the meal giving each other all manner of compliments about our superb handling of the situation. Of course, I want to make it clear that my own handling of the situation was only at all good given the context of my feelings, which I wasn't able to really control in a mature way. At best, I had sort of a bad hand dealt to me by my brain, and given that bad hand, I played well.

Now it's Monday morning and Ed got some good work done last night and spent the night and is no doubt sleeping in my bed right now. I love that boy.