Guillaume does not express his finer feelings like an ordinary person and it was beginning to confuse me. And by confuse me, I mean severely shake my confidence in my own ability to 'analyze his quirks and dig a tunnel to his heart.'
“Do you even have a heart? And how do I win it?” I would whisper softly into his ear while stroking his hair as he slept soundly. (This is totally not creepy behaviour at all, btw.)
We have since encountered two bumps in the road, and each time I’ve made note of the emphasis he places on directness and honesty in a way that is productive but very foreign to me. He doesn’t like playing games and expects me to tell him when I’m angry so that he can be “Okay, well, why? What can we do about it?”
Our first real fight happened the night Guillaume and I were talking about how my period was late. “Too bad babies aren’t like cats. We can’t just leave them at the neighbour’s,” he said. To which I said “goodnight,” and turned my back towards him.
“Are you mad?” he asked about a minute later. “No,” I replied. “Did you know that there’s a certain kind of fish that changes colour when it…” Blah blah blah, he told me more than twenty fish facts that night.
I don’t usually like to go into great detail about why I’m upset because it reveals what a big idiot I am. (Also, most of the time I haven’t figured out why I’m upset. I just know that I am.) I was very quiet over dinner on Friday, which frustrated him to no end. “You’re no fun when you’re in this mood. You’re ruining my evening,” he said.
Shots fired.
Waterworks began.
I don’t remember how it escalated, but by the end of the night I was in tears and screaming, “I DON’T ADD ANY VALUE TO YOUR LIFE! JUST LEAVE!”
But Guillaume didn’t leave.
(Because we were in his apartment.)
At some point last week, I realized Guillaume was an awesome person I could potentially be with for a long time, so, of course, the urge to break up with him became unbearable.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, congratulations! You are a healthy, well-adjusted human being! To everyone else: Amirite?? You’ve been there, destroyed that.
After my brain started to identify him as “good” and “healthy,” I immediately began to overanalyze everything. “Bonne nuit, baby doll! Fais de beaux rêves!” he would say. “What the hell? Is he cheating on me?” I would think. Self-sabotage often feels like an out-of-body experience. You watch yourself destroy something, but you feel completely powerless to stop it.
When something like this would happen to me in the past, it was easy to justify because the guys weren’t a great fit anyway. But with Guillaume, it was different. I had to actually face the dysfunctional music and admit, “Oh man. If this falls to shit, it’s because I am fucked up.” I could either take the time to do the work on myself or watch this happen 10,000 more times and then die alone.
I’ve always felt that Guillaume was five steps ahead of me – in every way. Initially, I found this very attractive. He had a PhD and knew lots of stuff, he had experienced 8 more years of life than me and had so much advice to offer, he had a cool job and took me out for nice dinners, etc etc.
The five steps between us became strikingly apparent to me when I’d given him a yoga mat for his birthday while he took me to Phuket for the weekend of mine. I started to lose my shit about what I brought to the table apart from a perky ass and lots of LOLs.
So I asked.
“I dunno” he said, with absolute coolness and detachment.
What I’ve realized is that Guilluame expressing his emotions in a way that is unfamiliar to me, does not necessarily imply that he is cold-blooded. I’m slowly learning to recognize and understand that he is not the kind of person who would come serenade me outside my window. But instead would go out of his way to make sure that I am really taken care of and happy and that nothing is troubling me. Which is what truly matters at the end of the day.
I’m picking up on the little things he does, like making sure I wear my seatbelt in cabs and forcing me to drink water so I don’t get a hangover and cooking me fluffy pancakes and greasy bacon for breakfast and playing TED Talks while we laze in bed so my weekend isn’t a completely futile hangover and teaching me the trick to chop onions.
“If I thought you didn’t add any value to my life I wouldn’t still call you. But I call you, so there” he said, with all the rationale and logic of a person with little trust in his emotions, who sees emotional expression as a display of poor self-governance. Distinctively different from the hot, passionate, Romeo-type response that I’m more familiar with.
But then his face softened and he looked at me in a way I’d never seen before. It was as if in that moment it suddenly hit him that I was the total opposite of who he was – highly emotional and not very rational or logical. And then he cupped my face with his palms as if he’d just realized it was fragile and to be handled with care.
“Do you even have a heart? And how do I win it?” I would whisper softly into his ear while stroking his hair as he slept soundly. (This is totally not creepy behaviour at all, btw.)
We have since encountered two bumps in the road, and each time I’ve made note of the emphasis he places on directness and honesty in a way that is productive but very foreign to me. He doesn’t like playing games and expects me to tell him when I’m angry so that he can be “Okay, well, why? What can we do about it?”
Our first real fight happened the night Guillaume and I were talking about how my period was late. “Too bad babies aren’t like cats. We can’t just leave them at the neighbour’s,” he said. To which I said “goodnight,” and turned my back towards him.
“Are you mad?” he asked about a minute later. “No,” I replied. “Did you know that there’s a certain kind of fish that changes colour when it…” Blah blah blah, he told me more than twenty fish facts that night.
I don’t usually like to go into great detail about why I’m upset because it reveals what a big idiot I am. (Also, most of the time I haven’t figured out why I’m upset. I just know that I am.) I was very quiet over dinner on Friday, which frustrated him to no end. “You’re no fun when you’re in this mood. You’re ruining my evening,” he said.
Shots fired.
Waterworks began.
I don’t remember how it escalated, but by the end of the night I was in tears and screaming, “I DON’T ADD ANY VALUE TO YOUR LIFE! JUST LEAVE!”
But Guillaume didn’t leave.
(Because we were in his apartment.)
At some point last week, I realized Guillaume was an awesome person I could potentially be with for a long time, so, of course, the urge to break up with him became unbearable.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, congratulations! You are a healthy, well-adjusted human being! To everyone else: Amirite?? You’ve been there, destroyed that.
After my brain started to identify him as “good” and “healthy,” I immediately began to overanalyze everything. “Bonne nuit, baby doll! Fais de beaux rêves!” he would say. “What the hell? Is he cheating on me?” I would think. Self-sabotage often feels like an out-of-body experience. You watch yourself destroy something, but you feel completely powerless to stop it.
When something like this would happen to me in the past, it was easy to justify because the guys weren’t a great fit anyway. But with Guillaume, it was different. I had to actually face the dysfunctional music and admit, “Oh man. If this falls to shit, it’s because I am fucked up.” I could either take the time to do the work on myself or watch this happen 10,000 more times and then die alone.
I’ve always felt that Guillaume was five steps ahead of me – in every way. Initially, I found this very attractive. He had a PhD and knew lots of stuff, he had experienced 8 more years of life than me and had so much advice to offer, he had a cool job and took me out for nice dinners, etc etc.
The five steps between us became strikingly apparent to me when I’d given him a yoga mat for his birthday while he took me to Phuket for the weekend of mine. I started to lose my shit about what I brought to the table apart from a perky ass and lots of LOLs.
So I asked.
“I dunno” he said, with absolute coolness and detachment.
What I’ve realized is that Guilluame expressing his emotions in a way that is unfamiliar to me, does not necessarily imply that he is cold-blooded. I’m slowly learning to recognize and understand that he is not the kind of person who would come serenade me outside my window. But instead would go out of his way to make sure that I am really taken care of and happy and that nothing is troubling me. Which is what truly matters at the end of the day.
I’m picking up on the little things he does, like making sure I wear my seatbelt in cabs and forcing me to drink water so I don’t get a hangover and cooking me fluffy pancakes and greasy bacon for breakfast and playing TED Talks while we laze in bed so my weekend isn’t a completely futile hangover and teaching me the trick to chop onions.
“If I thought you didn’t add any value to my life I wouldn’t still call you. But I call you, so there” he said, with all the rationale and logic of a person with little trust in his emotions, who sees emotional expression as a display of poor self-governance. Distinctively different from the hot, passionate, Romeo-type response that I’m more familiar with.
But then his face softened and he looked at me in a way I’d never seen before. It was as if in that moment it suddenly hit him that I was the total opposite of who he was – highly emotional and not very rational or logical. And then he cupped my face with his palms as if he’d just realized it was fragile and to be handled with care.
