Broken Promises: Next Day Follow-up

Thanks for all the support and advice, everyone! After I wrote that post yesterday, I decided I needed to do something about it. I called James and invited him over. I told him that I was really upset about the promise he broke to spend the night with me. I knew it was an overreaction to a small change of plans, but it hurt me, and I thought he should know. I told him that promises are important to me, and asked that he not make them if he couldn’t keep them.

Really, though, I think a lot had just been piling up, and I needed a bit of a break down to feel better. It’s amazing how much your mood can be affected by not sleeping enough and being sick. As well, the past two days I have had a terrible stomach ache, which I now think was just because I was so stressed out. Luckily I have a couple of days to relax.

I wanted to clear up some things that I said yesterday, though, because I think I painted James in a rather negative light. He doesn’t break all of his promises, just the small ones sometimes, and never without a reason and alternative option. He is very logical in the sense that he finds a solution, like staying the next night instead, and doesn’t tend to take into account how my emotional side will overreact. I know I’m an emotional person, and when I get really stressed out my emotions tend to just overflow. It is just one of those things that although he doesn’t understand, he wants to be there for me to make it better if he can.

This also brought up another discrepancy between us, which is personal space. James likes spending time by himself, reading or playing guitar. He likes spending time with me, but every once in a while he just needs to unwind alone. I get that. I do the same thing. I think he just needs more alone time than I do, which wouldn’t have been a problem if I hadn’t been having an inconvenient meltdown. As soon as he knew I was upset, though, he came over and wanted to make it right. He even let me cry on his shoulder at the risk of getting snot on his sweater. He is a fantastic person, and I wouldn’t trade him for the world.

I’m not trying to say that what happened wasn’t important to me. It was. But now I feel like it was just a bump on the road, and now that we know this issue is there, we can avoid it in the future. Now I know for certain that he knows how important promises are to me, and he knows that sometimes I need him to be there for me. We have different ways of thinking, and they don’t always mesh well together. We never fight, though, and there are probably one million great experiences with him for every small thing that happens that makes me upset. I know he loves me, and is in this for the long haul. I think we will be better off because of this experience.