Communication

I suck at communication. I never should have listed "good listener" on that list of skills waaay back in high school. Ever since I told anyone I was a good listener, I've increasingly become a worse one. And I'm not that great of a talker, either (oh, believe me, I can talk about a windstorm, but I can't for the life of me tell the people who need to know what I'm actually feeling).

I agree with people on things I don't really agree with them on. And then I never tell them otherwise.

I tell Wine Guy something doesn't bother me, that nothing's wrong, and then an hour, a week, a month later, we have a fight about the very thing that supposedly didn't bother me.

I also told him a lie for the very first time yesterday.

And what ticks me off is it was completely inadvertant. I don't lie. That's my thing.

But I went over to visit him at his place yesterday afternoon, and I was a BUNDLE of nerves. I was fidgety and awkward. I couldn't get comfortable.

"Are you nervous?" He asked.

"No. I just generally fidget." I said (as if he didn't already know).

"Yeah, but when you come over here, you never sit down to talk to me. You're always standing up and moving around. Why are you nervous?"

"I'm not."

A couple of hours later, after time out in the sun, a yummy cookie eaten, photographs taken and a car accident neatly avoided, I rested on his bed, in that space between his shoulder and his chest, and I said, "I was a bundle of nerves when I got here, and I don't know why."

He didn't call me out for basically lying to him, and he didn't ask me more about the nerves, either.

My first instinct when he asked me a question was to lie, and I'm not a liar.

And I DO know why I was nervous. Going over to his place was like going over to the house of someone I've just started seeing. It was only the third time I've been there, and sitting up in his room felt like being in college, visiting someone's apartment when I'm not exactly sure what will happen there. Being in his room somehow erased that fact that we've been together five months, and I have no reason to be nervous around him.

I was also nervous, because I know that I need to get back to being myself around him. I can't agree with things I don't agree with. I can't, as Irene helped me remember, give him all the control. And I'm nervous about taking that back.