Realizations (eight years later)

*Edit: This was eight years ago, and I don't feel the same way exactly.  On the other hand, I'm dumping old drafts.  I don't want to lose these thoughts, so I'm hitting publish instead of delete.*

  So, I had a critical realization today.  I was having an IM conversation with a friend wherein I commented that I sometimes feel resentful in my relationship with my boyfriend.  In reflecting back, I found myself wondering why resentment should be present.  I love him and he loves me.  He thinks of our relationship as a marriage and views me as his second wife.  As I considered that, I understood where the resentment came from and mostly why.

You see, my attitude toward marriage can best be described as...ambivalent (on a good day anyway.  On a bad day it's downright hostile).  My experience of my own marriage was, while not entirely unpleasant, not anything that I really care to repeat.  To have him describe us as in a relationship that I currently reject does not work for me, although I do understand that his experience of marriage is considerably different than my own.

The other part is that he never asked me to marry him.  I never got the proposal or the ring or the ceremony or the simple request.  Do you want to spend forever with just me (and my wife)?  I got "I love you"  "I want to be with you forever" "I want us to live our lives together" "If you want to be with me it has to be just me"...I don't remember being asked if that was what I wanted. (Honestly, I do remember him saying that and me replying, "How nice for you".  See?  Ambivalent.) So, the use of the term raised uncomfortable echoes of my first marriage wherein I was not asked either.  We were pregnant.  It was expected that we get married so we did.   What either of us wanted really didn't enter into the equation. So old resentment gets applied to new relationship & then buried for five years or so.  Not healthy.

Don't get me wrong.  I love my boyfriend.  He is good and kind and giving and loves me dearly and has seen me through some truly crazy periods in my life.  I just...even seven years in, I guess I just want to be asked what I want and be brave enough to say it.

Yah, that was another realization. Sigh. It sucks to resent oneself.

Update: We talked about this today a bit.  He at least won't refer to our relationship as "married (in [his] mind)", which I deeply appreciate.  There are a lot of other things that he's not willing to understand or that I am doing a piss-poor job of communicating (or both), but at least we communicated successfully over that particular issue.