[color=green]Mod Note: Split from Anti-Nagging Tactics, due to “nagging”. Change title as you see fit, Pulpwriter![/color]
(Apologies for the length of what follows, I’d intended this to be quite a short thing, but sometimes the words won’t stop coming. I’d meant to stick to nagging specifically, but the need to vent was overwhelming.)
Reading some of the posts here, I’m beginning to think I’ve been lucky - until now.
A quick bio; I’m living with my TW girlfriend in Taiwan, after having met her back in my home country where she was living and studying. I’ve been with her here for a few months. Much of that time has been marked by constant arguments, or complaints about my failings, or sullen silences, or constant nagging. Frankly, I’m not used to that kind of treatment on the basis of previous relationships.
And yet from when I met her up to recently it was sweetness and light, really, it was. It was utterly lovely. My friends couldn’t get enough of her. They thought I’d be nuts to let her slip away. A few months after we met she returned to Taiwan to start a job, so I came over for a couple of weeks to stay with her and, to be frank, make sure she was reasonably sane before committing myself further. Again, sweetness and light.
So I decided to come over here semi-permanently to be with her (with a view to us going back overseas at some eventual point).
Instead, it’s been getting bad enough I’ve developed a kind of fantasy of escape; it involves me getting on a jet back home, walking into a shop and walking out with an X-box 360, returning to my flat (never mind it’s actually currently rented out to an ex-girlfriend for at least the next couple of months), plugging the machine in and playing games and drinking beer effectively non-stop for the next 72 hours. Oh, and eating all that food that’s really really bad for me.
Let’s be clear, I have my failings. I could be more hygienic. My diet needs improving. I can be grumpy. I could pick things up more. I don’t mind having these things pointed out to me by her, because I figured this relationship would help me change; and I have. I wash things more, I do the dishes every night, I eat a lot more veg and fruit, whatever. All good, all thanks to her.
She’s had some terrible past experiences with relationships, and I mean terrible. It makes me careful to be as understanding as possible. I don’t hit her (anyone who does hit a woman deserves to go straight to hell), like at least one ex frequently did. I don’t play games with her head and tell her what a terrible person she is, like some have. I tell her how nice she looks, how proud I am of her, how happy she makes me.
Yet the reality appears to be that nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever apparently make that woman happy. Hence the nagging.
Here’s an example. She has a basketball. I am not a sporty person. I have no great interest in watching or participating in sports. She is, by contrast, reasonably sporty, likes rugby, used to go to a gym. By the way of getting out and having some fun of an evening, I suggested we take the basketball down to a local park and, I don’t know, just bounce it around and have some fun or something since I spend most of my day in an office chair in front of a monitor.
We went to the park. Over the next hour, I was loudly berated, lambasted and shouted at for:
• Not being able to dribble a basketball properly (despite my having a bad back and having never played basketball);
• For not wanting to stand and watch a bunch of other people playing basketball (because I just wanted to fuck around with a ball with my gf, for christ’s sakes, not ‘get tips on proper technique’;
• For not wanting to use a hoop in a court otherwise occupied by lean and strong kids in order to treat them to the sight of a balding shortsighted forty-something with a bad back attempting to put a ball through a hoop, a task which, I might add, I couldn’t manage when I was fifteen yet alone the age I am now;
• For not knowing who the hell somebody-else-or-other-is (a famous rugby player apparently);
• For ‘drifting along in life’ when in fact I’m a highly motivated, skilled and ambitious person working in the arts who’s been nominated for related awards;
• And so on and so forth. And let’s not forget the ‘piece de resistance’, that she ‘should have been going out with someone sporty’.
Which she has, by the way - gone out with someone sporty, that is - except he used to pick her up and throw her at the wall for looking at him funny, whereas I make her cups of tea, buy her flowers and rub her feet when she gets back after work.
Sometimes I’m the ‘best boyfriend she’s ever had’, other times I get hours of angry, pregnant silence. Then when I finally dig out what it’s about, it’s some statement I made I can barely remember. Oh, and let’s not forget the several occasions when arguments - some of them bad enough to make me feel physically sick - have wound up with her admitting she feels the need to destroy things when she feels too happy.
And let’s be even more clear; most of these arguments end with her apologising to me for her behaviour.
And then there’s the time she demanded access to my email in order to find out if I was cheating on her. Let’s be absolutely clear, this came flying out of the blue. There was NO reason for her to think this, and I do. Not. Mess around. I was berated and nagged over a 24 hour period into giving her my user details for my facebook account, something I still regret giving in to, so that she could then scan the contents of my mail for evidence of wrongdoing - none of which was present. And then she suggested I must have - wait for it - deleted the proof of screwing around before giving her my user details. Which is impressive, coming from a girl who just before she met me used to get off with her married Professor on a regular basis (this was okay, apparently, since she didn’t actually go to bed with him).
So when I read some of the statements here about nagging partners I wonder if I’m just too sensitive or stuck with a lunatic. I apologise when I’m in the wrong; I hang the washing up; I try and treat her well; I’m open to my own admitted innumerable failings; I came halfway around the world to be with her, far from all my friends; yet every couple of days something kicks her off again, some mild sign of irritation on my part, whatever, that leads to one of those interminable angry silences that always leads to some seemingly endless list of my faults.
So why do I stick around? Poor sap that I am, I’m in love with her, and I came this far because I believed I’d found someone I really did want to spend the rest of my life with. But there are limits, and maybe I’m reaching mine, even if the idea of returning home alone and without her feels like an absolute, gigantic admission of personal failure. I wanted to think finally I’d found someone I could be happy with, and we were - until I moved into her flat, and the mindboggling nagging began in earnest. So right now I wonder if it can really possibly work, or if I’m a bad person for wondering if she might really need to speak to a shrink about her self-confessed destructive tendencies.
All right. Sorry for venting quite so much, but after a morning kicked off by an angry several-hours-long silence and her hard, angry stares following a brief, half-awake exchange concerning what I should or shouldn’t be wearing that day (I can dress myself all on my own, thanks), I feel tired, wrung-out, emotionally distraught, when I should be feeling happy at sharing my life with a woman who can at her best be kind, sweet-natured, loving, and enormous fun. Maybe you can handle the nagging, but I wonder if I can.
- PW
. Come on now, let’s not lump a clear case of emotional abuse in with a person having the gumption to make a suggestion once in a while. Nagging once in a while, something that many people do, and attacking someone’s character on a regular basis, something that far fewer people do, are two very different situations.