The Conundrum

When I met my boyfriend online, I decided to try to avoid all the normal mistakes people, or I, at least, normally make in the beginning stages of relationships. We had plenty of time to talk, so I tried my hardest to give him every detail of who I am, the good and the bad.

I told him about how moody I can be, how heat makes me cranky, and how clingy I can be. He told me that if he didn't take the bad then he didn't deserve the good, that since his body temperature ran higher than most people's, I'd probably have the A/C on even in winter, and that clingy was good because it would make him feel needed, wanted.

I even told him what I was doing. Bearing all my imperfections for him so he could decide whether he thought he could handle me before we went any further with our relationship.

On his part, well... He called me everyday, multiple times a day. He listened to my problems, and comforted me as best he could over the phone. He told me that he liked to cuddle and he liked to cook. He had custody of his three kids, and it sounded like one of his twin boys would get along great with my son, and that the other twin was usually around his sister, the oldest. He said that he didn't lie because it all came out in the wash anyway.

As much as I tried to avoid the awkward "oh, you're not who I thought you were stage," it didn't work out like that.

One of the biggest problems early on in our relationship was the accident that my son and I were in. On March 21, 2009, I was driving my son to my job to meet some of my friends, then we were going to go to the McDonald's near my boyfriend's job so we could have lunch with him on his lunch break.

We never made it. I swerved to avoid hitting a tractor who was driving half on the side of the road, half in my lane, and ended up playing a doomed game of chicken with a truck coming the opposite direction. We hit head on. My son sustained internal injuries and had to have a foot of his intestines removed. He recovered quickly, however, and was out of the hospital in 10 days, much to my relief.

I, on the other hand, broke my right foot, my left femur (in two places), my left arm (in two places), shattered my left knee, suffered a collapsed lung and a punctured lung, as well as a fractured nose, a burn on my left foot from the engine, and glass beneath my skin on various places on my body. I was also in the hospital for 10 days, then moved to a nursing and rehabilitation facility for 35 days, and sent home to heal more, with the help of a home health care professional and physical therapists and occupational therapists.

I was in a wheelchair until October, when, with the help of my boyfriend, was able to walk with the aid of a walker, and eventually came to use only a cane to assist me.

The problem, though, is that if you've ever been in a situation similar to mine, or you have had to take care of someone who went through something similar, then you know the toll it can take on all parties involved. In the weeks directly following the accident, I could barely move my right arm, which was the only limb completely unaffected in the wreck, and I couldn't do anything for myself. My boyfriend was there for the first two weeks non-stop. Then he went back to work. But he still came by every morning and every night on his way home.

I didn't go back to work until September. Even now, it was hard for me to do very much that required being on my feet for more than an hour at a time.

The thing is, the lies started small. He posted a video online and told me he made it for me, this was back before we were even together, but it was really for another girl who he had also had an interest in at the time. Then, after the accident, he received a phone call, which he didn't answer. I asked him who it was, and he said it was his mother. But it hadn't been his mother's ring tone. So I asked to see his phone. It had been his ex-wife. He had no reason to lie to me. We had never had any kind of argument about her because he constantly expressed his hate for her, plus, she had the kids for the moment, and I knew he had to talk to her about them. I didn't understand it. He said that he didn't want to have to explain himself to my parents, who had been visiting me in the nursing facility that day, too.

Then I found his criminal background.

I had asked him online if he had ever been in jail or prison, if he had ever been arrested. He had told me no to all of the question. Wow. There was the whopper of a lie.

Plus, he wasn't the warm, caring person in real life that he had been on this virtual world of the web. No, he has a very unique talent. He doesn't just ignore someone when he is particularly bothered by them or tired of an argument, he gives them an existential crisis. Literally. He can ignore someone, or me, at least, so completely, that one begins to wonder if one actually exists. In fact, sometimes I wondered if I had died in the accident and he had just kept on living in our house.

And the mood swings? He does not handle them, he ignores them. He doesn't comfort me at all anymore. He is too preoccupied with himself. The heat issue? Not a problem. The clingy issue? A huge issue.

We got into an argument once and he just got up and walked away, and was getting into his car. He said not to bother calling him because he was turning his phone off. I thought he was leaving for good, so I wheeled my wheelchair down the ramp after him, but the wheel went off the side of the ramp and I ended up falling out of the chair. He gets out of the car, cussing at me, and calling me a child.

This is usually the way it is when I get overly emotional with him. Whether it is trying to give him a massage after a hard day (he tells me no, he's fine), or telling him how much I miss him when he is away (he says that this is just the way it has to be), he does not like for me to show any kind of emotion because he doesn't. He is cold and calculating.

So the question is - how should a girlfriend act around her man? Apparently, there is whole book of etiquette out there on it that I have not read yet. So I am going to feel it out on my own.

I haven't called him in over 6 hours, and I am not going to call him until he calls me. That's a start. Because I always feel like I am bothering him when I do. Like earlier, I called him and he was sewing his boots together, and he constantly grumbled about having to do it with one hand because he was talking to me. And yesterday when I called him, it was that he was trying to get his niece to eat, and instead he was talking to me.

He went back to New Mexico about a week and a half ago. I miss him. I feel miserable without him. Apparently, it is not the same for him.

So I need to stop being such a girl and cowboy up, I suppose. Stop being clingy, stop calling him every morning when I wake up. Stop being so emotional about how much I miss him.

The future blogs probably won't be this long. This is just to let you know what is going on and why I am doing this.