When you say no to champagne....

[sage]

Hi all! Thanks for visiting me in my new home!

So..onto explaining the thread title -- the real quote is from the DeerHunter "When a man says no to champagne he says no to life". The applicability to my life is manyfold -- but in particular, H and I drink champagne quite a bit and one of us always says the line. Our sharing of champagne always feels to me to be a celebration of our life....

SB and Jeannine -- I'm delighted to hear that my rant was meaningful to you guys! Do you want me to do that more often? Fact is, I hold a lot of stuff in until it becomes too much in my head and it has to come out -- unfortunately, I do that in "real life", too -- gotta work on that.

I'm going to continue my practice of journalling the goods and bads of the day before...I do find that that helps me keep my goals in mind.

What went well:
1. H. met me before I went to class and we had dinner together. It's not the most convenient jaunt for him so it's doubly special

2. Before we fell asleep, H said "I really love you" in an emotional way

3. I got a 98 on my midterm! (Ok, that has nothing to do with DB'ing but...)

What didn't go well --

Lots of opportunity for identifying some 180s here....when H came to meet me for dinner, he seemed "off" just a bit -- distracted? sad? preoccupied? Or, was it just me being oversensitized? Some of you know that class nights are very hard for me -- H and ow used to see each other while I was blithely pursuing my degree now it's often hard for me to not feel anxious on those nights still.

So...I asked him if he was allright and he said yes but he was still less warm than recently. I started spinning stuff in my head -- that ow was MAD because he wasn't going out with her, that H was sad that he wasn't going out with her, that he was stuck with me, etc. So, what ends up happening? Well, of course, I start feeling wary and distant and "off" myself. So, dinner felt slightly tense to me then I went off to class. Got home around 9:30 and it just didn't go in a comfortable way -- first H said that he was going to go to be early but then he decided to stay up. I was afraid that I was going to seem bitchy so I just read in the same room with him but then I worried that I was ignoring him. He asked if he had done something to irk me and I answered brightly "no" but then said something like "sometimes I just don't really know what to say to you" (huh?) and he said something like "just say 'hey, how are you handsome?'".

So...like I said, plenty of opps for 180s. I had set a goal before of managing through a period of "ow anxiety" w/o confronting H -- and did ok with that. but, I think I need to expand it to include figuring out different ways of dealing when I'm sensing (rightly? wrongly?) that H is distant -- normally, I ask, then worry, then conjure up stories, then worry, then get mad, then get sad.

What should I be doing instead? I think the biggest 180 would be to not withdraw -- to maintain a positive attitude, to not dwell in thought patterns. To be supportive of H's normal changing moods by accepting him just as he is.

I need to think about this more concretely!

Sage