I'm a woman with lots of pride, and I am completely emotionally-draining, if not financially. I thrive on attention, and when I don't have it I feel unimportant and not only am I annoyed, but he is annoyed by me. When I don't get my way, I pout. I try and be quiet about it, but I will huff and puff with the best of them and make sure that at least everyone in the world is aware how annoyed I am and who I am annoyed with. Normally, that would all fall under that chatter category, but I think it's necessary to understand the point I'm going to get to somewhere. He is the sort of man that is very independent emotionally, he doesn't require attention and does not believe in bending to my every whim. If I'm misbehaving, I will be punished. My pouting is misbehavior, and his apparent ignorance of it is the punishment. Any man knows that he is fully aware of what I'm doing, and any woman would tell me that he's awful and should be more willing to make a sacrifice of his attention. I'm of the belief that he's doing the right thing, even if it's aggravating. Lately, we've both fallen prey to the MMO world of Ragnarok. [If anyone reads this and decides to get into it, we play on the Midnight RO server and you can find us at Rachael Temple. I'm either Polly or Puzzle and if I see you I'll invite you to the guild.] Naturally, he's addicted. First thing he does when he wakes up is kisses me good morning, and then it's game time. And it's game time all day, until anywhere from midnight to 6.00am the next morning. I bet you can see where I'm going, the whole day while he plays, I'm attention starved. And I pout when 3.00am rolls around and he's still staring into the screen.
Here's where I attempt to salvage this mess. Track weekends are brilliant for the attention starved woman. It's cold, it was raining, and there was no RO for three nights. And it was magical. I had his full attention like it hadn't been had in months. Instead of pouting, I had found the words I needed to give him and been able to feel like he was really taking in what I had to say. And it was all reasonable and we communicated. I didn't just talk until my face turned blue, and his eyes didn't glaze over. We came to a point where we understood each other, and it was worth every hour we had spent not communicating.
The point of this is that every couple gets stale. In the beginning, there's so much communication and so little understanding of any of it. It's just a big mess of uncertainty and insecurity. I've known him for nine years, and every day I wake up and feel like I don't know anything about him at all. You can fall out of love so easily, just like you can take it for granted because you grow comfortable and believe that things can last without work and maintenance. I didn't need to sit down and have an intervention with him, and I didn't need to point fingers. He didn't need to call me out on my misbehavior and he didn't make me feel insignificant or continue what I perceived as punishment. I want to say that we sat there like adults and talked about things reasonably, because we did. But even more than that, we communicated. I told him what I felt about the situation, and even proposed my solutions to them. And he took in every word and we managed to agree to most of it. He told me how he felt about what I was thinking and saying. And we were valuable to each other. We have never lost our honeymoon phase, just forgotten that we need to value all of it and through that each other. On Monday morning things weren't magically different and completely how I wanted. But I learned to talk, and he learned to listen. We love each other, and we're still magically, stupidly, in love with each other. I found my one in a million this weekend, and the reason he is that one and not the rest of the million is easily because we re-learned the value of each other.
