I’m not sure what’s going on with my girlfriend; she seems to have been so unhappy with me, for so long, nothing I do or say is right. She doesn’t want to break up with me – but maybe I do with her. She just seems depressed – but says she isn’t, and expresses it more in getting at me, rather than talking about being unhappy – staying in bed all day and watching youtube, not really getting out and doing anything (and then claiming to others that she’s been so busy), moaning about her singing career but then making no efforts to practise or write songs, or tick things off on the repeated lists of things to do we keep making, such as record a CD, get some gigs. I’ve helped her loads in this, at the expense of my own stuff at times, and it grates that she then lazes around and does nothing herself. And does less than nothing, if I’m honest, because she’s so selfish.
She knows I have to write this book – but what has she done to help me? Does she desist in coming in my room and interrupting me, to say something about music? Has she ever made or offered to make me anything to eat? Has she relieved any of the burdens on me? Been extra-nice? Supportive? Encouraging? The answer to all those questions is, “no.” Right at the beginning of our relationship I perceived that she was the sort of person who only thinks of themselves. Now, it seems, I’m being proved right.
I’m wondering if she’s something of a narcissist. She is incredibly demanding when it comes to her singing and looks, and has told me off many times because I do not flatter her or encourage her in the right way. I am, apparently, supposed to tell her that she looks great every day, and that this is obvious, common knowledge, something even the stupidest of men should now. And I am also supposed to tell her that her every performance is amazing, and that she’s the best singer in Oxford, and that she’s much better than anyone that might be appearing on the same bill. She says it’s important that the people who love her feel this way, that it’s obvious that they would think that she’s the best. But it’s hard for me to see it this way.
What if she gives a bad performance? What if we see someone – as happened on Sunday night, much to her obvious distress – that is a better singer, who writes better songs? What do I say then? I’m a man who has been steeped in honesty, who loves that and finds it difficult to be anything but (although I’m learning to temper that and refine it all the time). So what I can honestly say is that she is great, and very, very good, and that I think she has the potential to be one of the best, if she works at at it – which she doesn’t – but that’s about as far as I can go. She gets mad at me and then deflated and sad. She has such a fragile ego. And so much talent, but so little effort to go with it, which is really the main ingredient in becoming a success. I don’t see how trying to bolster this fragile ego with untrue platitudes is going to help her to see that she has a lot of work to be done. My own belief is that, yes, you give encouragement and praise, but it is by pointing to ways to improve, and making it clear that there is much space to improve in, that people work themselves to greatness. If you think you’re already great, why would you work any harder?
She’s been emotionally spoiled, I think. Her mum thinks the sun shines out of her arse, that everything she does is amazing, will give up whatever she’s doing to listen to her at the drop of a hat, and never, ever says anything that approaches criticism, even as she’s later confessed to me that she didn’t think something was very good. This is the emotional response that she’s used to, and she has come now to demand it of everybody: she tells me that one of the things she liked most about her ex-boyfriend was that he always told her she was the best. She has also told me that he was a philandering dickhead who probably the said the same things to everybody, knowing that they worked. But this she prefers to anything of honesty that I have to offer. I just don’t work like that.
I must read up more on narcissism. But this idea of her as a selfish and self-centred narcissist is starting to dominate my impression of her – and the problem is, it’s not the kind of thing (I imagine) you can share with a person. Why do I think this? Well, there’s the aforementioned desire and demand for all a person’s attention and adoration; there’s the way she swans about the house leaving a mess everywhere but never tidying up, being cooked for and cleaned up for afterwards, and not even noticing; demanding chores of me, when I’m in the midst of my busiest and most crucial time of my life, after all the weeks and months that I’ve picked up after her, not thinking, “oh, I could just do this, that would be nice”; thinking, in short, only of herself. She knows that I have to write, and that this has thrown a spanner in the works as far as our upcoming holiday to
The question then, for me, is what to do about this. On the whole, she’s a lovely girl, with so much to offer: smart, funny, emotionally intelligent, sexy, gorgeous, talented and creative and, possibly, loving. She’s fun to be around, she digs me a lot, doesn’t nag me too much, doesn’t get drunk, and we get on really well. I’d like to get out more, do more things, more fun things, but that seems hard at times, and I’m probably as much to blame in that as it seems hard for me to know what fun things there are to do in this modern-day
- She’s young. She’s twenty-three, and maybe there’s still a lot of the teenager left in her, and maybe – I don’t know – teenagers are selfish and only think of themselves, and expect to be/are used to having others fawn over them, clean up after them, not having to give anything in return.
- She’s fresh from university. She’s finished her degree without any real plan, other than to get into singing, and suddenly she’s found herself in the gulf, the void of post-child, pre-adult life. It’s so long since I’ve lived like that – since I was seventeen, fifteen years ago – that I don’t really know how to relate to it. But on several occasions she’s said that she feels like she’s on summer holidays, which makes sense, and the fact of the matter is, she’s never had to live a ‘real life’, going from high school to gap year to university to this. And all the while supported by a loving, non-pressurising, and fairly well-off family, so that she’s never had to deal with the issues of money or jobs that us normal people have to take into account. Once again, spoiled (in comparison to my own upbringing, at least). And just typing that makes me embarrassingly feel that I’ve gotten myself into a relationship with a child! lol
- She’s been spoiled. She’s a self-centred narcissist who thinks only of number one, who demands of others and gives nothing back, and who will throw her rattle at you if you don’t satisfy those demands. She’s unreasonable, and needs to realise that she’s acting horribly. She needs someone to tell her that she’s behaving like a baby – or, perhaps more fittingly, a diva – and that unless she wants this particular boyfriend to walk, she’d better do something to change her ways. Like grow up. And make him the occasional meal. And give something in return.
- It could all be my fault. I could be missing something very obvious about how you treat a woman, and maybe you’re supposed to flatter them everyday, and tell them they look great – even when you think they look stupid, smeared and plastered in excessive make-up and fake lashes, etcetera – and pander to their whims. Maybe you’re supposed to pick up after them, and never mutter anything that could be construed as a criticism, and remain happy and cheerful in the face of their endless dissatisfactions and telling-offs and sexual withholdings. It could be all me. Other men do all that stuff, I suppose. And it’s not like I have a great track record. And she does seem a lot more stable and normal than I ever was at that age. Maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I don’t even know what it means to love someone, because perhaps when you love someone you do see them as the best at everything – even when they’re lazy and horrible and inferior – and maybe love is something that, when it exists, makes objectively necessarily disappear. Or maybe I do know how to love but I just don’t love her. But what is love anyway? That’s always the question I end up asking.
- She’s going through a bad patch. She’s waking up to the realities of life. She’s struggling to come to terms with that, the way the caterpillar struggles to work its way out of the cocoon. Reality and other people – other real people, as opposed to the excessive adoration of her mother – are providing a painful and shocking awakening, the shedding of her childish clothes – her ego – not exactly to her liking. She’ll struggle and moan and complain – and then one day she’ll say, “boy, have I been selfish, I really ought to stop that,” and she does. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Maybe she’s just a genuine, star-quality diva, and that’s what she was born with and that’s what she’ll be, a la all those other stars who demand and require and who people laugh at in newspapers and pity (yet envy) because of the way they fly in their hair stylists at enormous expense and explode into fits of rage because it’s the wrong type of mineral water or the carpet’s the wrong colour. Maybe that’s what she is – and good luck to her. But it’s not the sort of thing that I want to be around.
And now I have to go catch a bus to
Adios!
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