Communication (11/28/05)

Don’t know if I’m even going to post this but I still feel the need to write it anyway. People say communication is the key to a good relationship. But the thing is, communication is only part of it. It’s really about completely open and honest communication. I’m sure you can guess that this comes from a real life example, probably to do with this guy I’ve been going on about a lot lately, and you are right.

See, I did think we did the communication thing but the truth is we only did it on the surface. I can’t speak for him. I don’t know when he started thinking anything he told me. Maybe it really was just before he told me those things. But on my end, I can’t say that I was being completely honest, and the problem was that I wasn’t just not being honest with him but with myself either, which made it completely impossible to be honest with him.

The panic attacks, the dream I had—they were symptoms of my lack of honesty with myself. See, things seemed to be possibly leading to a serious dating situation and I knew at the start that I wasn’t comfortable with that yet but I got so caught up in trying to make sure I didn’t say anything to push him away that I forgot to continue being honest with myself. I thought, if I show too little interest in moving forward I’m going to offend him.

See, that was a big thing with my ex: Finding ways not to offend him.

So I fell into this pattern of trying to reconcile myself with whatever he might or might not want from this thing to the extent that I stopped thinking about what did I really want? The panic attacks were the first clue. Then the dream was my subconscious self hitting my conscious self over the head with a large, heavy object.

And I started thinking about it all, which is what I should have been doing all this time. See, I was so worried about not making him think I didn’t like him that at some point I stopped trying to identify exactly what I wanted out of all this. But my subconscious knew: Nothing much really. Not now anyway.

The details of the dream aren’t important but what is important is that I woke up knowing that I was in over my head with this guy. Not that I liked him more than he liked me but that I probably honestly liked him less than he thought I did. I still wanted to see him, just to lighten things up significantly. And I had to figure out how to be honest about this with him now.

Didn’t get the chance to though.