For weeks, I’ve wanted to tell my boyfriend how great he is, and how grateful I am, but talking about the present risks touching on the past which he could hear as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and my ‘point’ could get lost in translation. Take how happy he made me by taking me to a bar, recently, for example…
 
Now, bars aren’t ‘my thing’, really,  but my BF thinks they’re essential and has taken me to more in our few months together than I’ve seen in all my years past. Yet another wouldn’t have fazed me, then, if he hadn’t insisted on frequenting a particular bar, where a particular bar hag hangs, and putting his ego before his choices and my welfare.
Of course, most chicks would have dropped him (the first time), but I’m not ‘most chicks’, and it didn’t take much to see that my BF was possessed of a ginormous and untamed ego, while the hag was the type that’s so caught up in her own drama she didn’t care who she did it with. That meant neither was willing or able to see me as a ‘person’ and would have done the same to anyone, making it my choice whether to take things ‘personal’ or not. Easy-going as I am, then, I could have let a lot slide if it weren’t for his knowing that she’d be there and apt to take shots. Heck! I might even have been ‘impressed’ if he’d backed me, barred her, and made sure that was it (!)
As you’ll probably guess, though, he didn’t.
Instead, he chalked it up to ‘jealousy’ and played games (for lack of a better term) while avoiding unwanted choices.
Don’t get me wrong, though, ’cause my BF’s the smartest, sweetest, sexiest guy going and we’ve had more fun together than anyone should! He also happens to be such a ‘nice guy’ that most folks don’t question his ego and, with no one to challenge it, it runs the show making him ‘gap’ on details… like ‘manners’… or the fact I don’t beak when he has dinners with his ex wife or meets his friend’s GFs for drinks time to time… because ignoring them’s easier than owning his choices and the responsibility that goes with them.
Thing is, though, I’m not ‘most folks’.
I did ‘question’. I pointed out ‘choices’. And, I waited. It wasn’t long before I was dreading spring, though, couldn’t pass that particular bar (or any, really) without my gut clenching, and had some choices to make of my own.
Just when ‘walking’ seemed the best choice, though, my BF apparently dropped the games and straightened his act out. ‘Course, I was pleased, but you don’t get over the kind of stress he’d caused without some kind of effort, and the best I could muster was ‘cautious enthusiasm’. Even when he ditched that particular bar for another, I knew all too well that it could simply mean the same drama played out by new players. When he invited me to join him there, though, it quickly became apparent that he was making a new kind of ‘choice’ that showed ‘we’ were a priority.

That’s why his taking me to the bar meant so much and why I’ve said less than I could.
My BF, after all, is a smart one, and wouldn’t take much to see that my happiness now is atleast partially related to the greif that he caused in the past. He’s sweet and quite apt to feel badly if he learned just how bad it all got. But, his ego could easily negate ‘who’ I am, hear ‘bad’ over ‘good’, and – loving the fact that he’s ‘sexy’ – use it to cause us more grief. And that, I coulldn’t take!
You see, jealousy’s no more ‘my thing’ than the bars, but no chick likes having to wonder who or what her man’s doing. Least of all, me. But, you can only hear the ‘but baby!’s so long before you know there’s an ‘issue’, and I just couldn’t take another ‘I wasn’t serious then’.