Mikey, I can't imagine what it must be like to deal with that every day. Here's to you, man.
Tsu, I'm really sorry about your tragic news.
Your issues dwarf mine for sure... but anyway, I'm on here because I have to gripe a bit, and I hope you guys can indulge me... Beware, I'm about to emotionally barf all over the place!
Ok, so I play with a Dixieland group, and tonight we're having our debut gig in San Francisco at a hip club. We don't go on til 10:30pm though and my fiancee has to work the next morning. She was originally planning on going anyway, which I would have really appreciated, but a couple things have come about that really bother me. First of all, she also planned an entire day of visiting friends that involved hours of driving, when she knew the gig was important to me. She did say she could make it, but that she was gonna have to bring her friend along, which was fine with me; the more the merrier! But, it turns out the friend gets up at 5AM every morning, so now my girl doesn't know if she can even come. Now, she knows this particular gig is important to me; normally I try to be understanding of the fact that she can't come to all of my performances. But it really bothers me that she would plan an entire exhausting day in front of my concert, when she knows that by 10 she's going to be ready for bed. Anyways, she knows how I feel, and she's going to 'see what she can do.' She's not completely insensitive, but damn it, I often feel like she doesn't have the time or energy to really take my feelings/needs into consideration. I know I can be a needy guy. After four years, I'm sure she knows it too! I feel like this kind of thing shouldn't be a surprise to her. It's just another straw on the camel's back, you know? I love her very much, but I continue to feel pretty distant from her most of the time.
Other issues include our love life (which has not improved at all since I whined about it on here several months ago), and our plans to get married - they're on hold indefinitely, because she now gets serious anxiety when she thinks about it. Of course, I'm finding myself unsure of the whole marriage thing too, for the reasons I'm currently complaining about. But her point of view has shifted to "I still love you, and I'm never going to leave you... I just don't value marriage the way that most people do." Even when we were trying to plan and set a date, she wanted me to take the reigns. It's like, uh, no, how about we get married together?
Meanwhile, she still wears the engagement ring and shares our apartment, and asks for massages, and will kiss me when I ask for it (though rarely at her request). Sometimes I feel that there's a mutual feeling of warmth and love in our relationship, that we're going to be OK, but other times it honestly feels like I just have a really close roommate, and that we're both afraid to think about breaking up because we don't want to be alone. Maybe I'm looking for an unhealthy amount of closeness (though I don't think so), or maybe this is what everyone means when they say that relationships naturally cool down over time. But we've been working very hard on our relationship, although recently things have sort of been on autopilot. We've been to counseling. I've been to a psychiatrist. She's found medications that help her deal with her serious anxiety but also kill her sex drive completely. It feels like there's nothing left to do except settle.
I'm not dumping this here hoping for y'all to solve my problems. I just need to vent my frustrations in a place that's isolated from the rest of my life. I can talk to my family about some of this, but they're not going to be partial. They'll be worried about me. Anyways... Woe is me, boo hoo, all that crap.
Wait, hold on... I think I here something coming... Yep, it's the Waaaaaambulance!