Tough guy stance in Dear John

So I told John how his behaviour made me feel. I know he’s having a hard time and there’s things I can let slide but he still knows what’s dickish behaviour and what’s not, and how to have common decency.

He didn’t reply to message til 4pm yesterday saying he hadn’t known what to say. By that time I was hopping mad. He basically said it was a bit intense for him, and I said just because something is intense you can’t ignore it, and that I’d made exceptions about stuff because he’s ill but there are some things that are really important and I couldn’t turn a blind eye to. He didn’t reply, again.

I went for dinner with the girls last night, and sent him a message when I got home saying we needed to talk. So we skyped when I got in, both have bad phone line signal. He said the same thing about it being intense, and he knows he should have apologised etc, using the depression as an excuse, and I said you keep telling me you know you should apologise but you actually still haven’t...... So he did, and I ranted a bit more and he said a bit more how intense it was, and I said this is what real relationships are like, you have to deal with issues as they arrise or it just leads to simmering resentment and him being in the situation he’s in now, having never dealt with anything that’s difficult.

I also said that I didn’t enjoy fighting with him, and that I too want things to be right in our relationship but I’m not gonna let him off with behaving badly towards me, and that if it was any other guy we’d probably have broken up already. He said he thought I was threatening him, I said I wasn’t but he needed to understand how upset the way he behaved made me and how important it is to me that when he tells me something he means it and isn’t just saying it to pacify me at the time.

So things are ok, he’s messaged me this morning and we’re speaking again. I think even if he doesn’t want to deal with anything else cos it’s intense, if I keep making him deal with our relationship then he’ll realise that it’s horrible, of course it is, no one wants to fight with the one they love, I don’t want to fight with him, I felt sick and shaky all through our conversation, but we’ve both come out the other side unscathed. He needs to essentially learn facing horrible situations is scary but manageable, you can’t just walk away if you don’t want to deal with it, which is basically what happened, it’s not that he can’t, he just doesn’t like to.

Things being ‘intense’ isn’t a reason to ignore them as far as I’m concerned.

Xx