I Pissed Off My PlayThing

I was a plaything to my last boyfriend. Plain and Simple. Good guy, really he was, but he was stressed, high-strung, cynical—when it came to real life. We functioned because we didn’t talk about real life. I asked about how applications to medical school were going “oooooh, you know. But let’s just not talk about that right now,” and he’d pull me onto the bed.
“Are you still fighting with your Dad?”
“What? Oh, it’s cool,” and….he would pull me onto the bed.
He didn’t want me involved in his stresses. I was not a part of that Real world, O.K. But the trouble came when I realized….he didn’t want to be a part of my real world either. When I began to notice, after I’d give an animated account of a new blog I’d discovered that day, or a job I was excited about interview for, he would pinch me on the arm and say “well that’s great”. And. Pull me. Onto the Bed. He was great at finding funny movies for us to watch, or new restaurants to get take out from, or little articles he found amusing to read to me. But we never talked about ANYTHING serious.
This was what I said when I broke up with him:
“I don’t think you realize I even exist when I’m not in front of you. I don’t think you are able to come up with one single picture of what my days look like during the week when we are not together. And that’s exactly why you don’t take me seriously! That’s why you only make plans last minute with me, or flake on me. Because you don’t realize I’m a real person with real stresses and real things that take up real time! And you don’t realize that, because you don’t want to.”

And this is the phone call my current boyfriend made to me last night.
“I feel like you don’t value what I do at all, like my work. Every time I start to talk about anything work related, you make a joke and move the conversation somewhere else. I don’t feel like you take me seriously at all. But if I didn’t talk about my stress and my work, my life, for godsake!, you wouldn’t even know what I’m doing with my days!”

Ok. He’s right. It’s true, I make jokes. But it’s because…I feel incompetent, inferior even, when photography, lawsuits, money, GROWNUP things are brought up for which I don’t have any of the jargon. More importantly, I do it because I love him and I want to provide FUN for him. I want to bring in a LIGHT mood when he is stressed. I want to make him happy when he is unhappy. It’s not that I don’t take him seriously! It’s that I take him so seriously, because he is so kind and caring and hardworking, that I want to provide for him a BREAK from all that. Wait! Don’t You understand?!...
……Oh. Uh OH. I think it’s me who understands now. I think maybe I understand my EX a little bit more? I think I understand that we can do the exact thing someone did to us…to someone else. Without even realizing it.