The background is that I’ve moved to my own apartment. We’re still married and together, but for different reasons, we can’t live together right now. So, I needed a bed and a sofa. We were in total agreement about the bed. Basically any reasonably comfortable bed of around 160-180 centimetres was fine for me. I knew that I could count on my wife finding such a bed for me.
The problem was the sofa. She showed me the sofa and said that it was perfect. I took a quick look at the pictures and nodded my approval, feeling that she more or less had decided on the sofa. The thing is, that this was before we decided that I would move to the apartment, when we wanted to have it together, so that we could spend some time alone, away from her teenage daughter. But when the plans changed, I didn’t stop to think that my wants and needs might change as well.
Long story short: we picked up the sofa and it turned out to be way too big. First, I didn’t say anything about it, thinking that I would just accept things as they were. But then, as we were driving to the apartment, we got into a small argument. My irritation over it lingered. Then, when we got to the apartment, the sofa turned out to be really difficult to put together. I was worn out after a week of hard work and had really longed for just eating something, watch a movie and sort of land in the apartment. Especially since I hadn’t watched a movie by myself in a long time. Now I felt that I would be too tired to watch a movie and that I would probably just crash in bed after we were done.
Adding to the stressors of the particular situation, was the situation of moving away from my wife in itself. While I think that we need to do this for a while, and while I do feel good about being able to do some focused work, that I had trouble doing at home, I also feel sad about this. I am an introvert and I do require a lot of time alone to feel good, which I couldn’t really get at home, I also feel a bit lost and scared without my wife with me by my side. She’s only a few minutes away, but it still feels strange in a way that is difficult for me to handle.
This also blended with an issue that goes much further back, where I feel that my wife often make decisions without consulting me, or that I just go along with her wishes when she already seems to have made up her mind about something.
As I’m writing this, I realised something funny. She has said the exact same thing about me. That I just run her over when it comes to certain things, seemingly leaving no room for her to object. There is clearly some more problems with communication than I had already realised.
So, anyway, as I got more and more frustrated from trying to put the sofa together, I started making angry comments about the size of the sofa. It sort of just happened, as these things often do. Emotions that I had been able to keep in check for a while, started to pour over.
Then, as we returned the trailer that we had used to transport the sofa, we discovered that someone had pulled a really lousy prank on us, attaching the trailer to the car with a steel-wire that had to be cut. At this point, I would have probably beaten up whoever had attached the wire, had I gotten hold of him, even though I’m not a violent person. I was just so angry and frustrated over so many things at that moment, half of which I was only dimly aware of at the moment. I only became aware of them as I put into words exactly what caused my frustration now.
As you can see, there is a lot of confusion to both what started the conflict, and why I was feeling the way I was feeling. Isn't it always so?
I think that this will be a good time to end this post, and talk about putting things into perspective through writing them down in the third and final post on this subject.
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