Me: Do you know yet whether you can come up for my birthday Nov. 17th?
Girlfriend: I'm afraid I can't. I just can't.
Me: Why not?
Girlfriend: Because Buffalo took you away from me.
Me: What? What? (in disbelief)
Me (thinking silently to myself): I waited close to two weeks for you to ask at work and figure out whether you could come up and visit me for my birthday. And after all that time, the answer you give me sounds like something you could have thought up in two seconds and could have given me two weeks earlier.
Me: So, after I've flown down and visited you this summer, you just can't do the same for me? (did I mention I'd be paying for her entire ticket up here?)
Girlfriend: sorry, I can't come up and visit you. It's like me saying 'I've got this really nice friend in North Carolina, and I'd like you to come down and see him.' Buffalo is what took you away from away from me, so I can't go up there.
Me (thinking silently to myself): Me trying desperately to get any computer job I could back in NC and submitting hundreds of resumes and constantly getting turned down, followed by you and your mother calling me "selfish" for staying in Raleigh for a potential job interview instead of driving you to to do work errands for your mother, who's also your boss, that you couldn't run yourself because of your driving problem*, followed by your mother busting on me for being a 30 year-old man without a job who couldn't support her daughter in the future and who should be spending his time sending out resumes--that certainly influenced my choice to take a job up in Buffalo. You should be blaming that BS for taking me away from you.**
Me: Do you know how silly that sounds?
Girlfriend: You just don't understand.
Me: You know, in this entire relationship, I've gone out of my way a lot to come and see you. For over a year I did all that driving back and forth from Raleigh 40-60 miles out to Zebulon and later Wilson several times a week. The whole time, you almost never came to see me in Raleigh. I was kind of hoping after all those times I came to see you, the very least you could do would be to come up and see me.
Girlfriend: You just don't understand.
Me: Well, I need to go to work tomorrow. Goodnight. Bye.
Girlfriend: Bye.
(End of conversation; I hang up).
The irony of this situation is that I just came back from the end of services for Yom Kippur (the Jewish holiday which deals with wrongs you feel other have done to do you for which you're supposed to forgive them) and already I have something that I should be steaming furious about. I guess I'll try to rise to the spiritual challenge and look past it. Of course, that means not letting anger dominate my life; it doesn't mean continuing to let myself be jerked around on a string like a Yo-Yo.
- My girlfriend has this issue with driving long distances. Basically, up until a year ago, her mother forbade her from driving distances more than 5-10 miles, even though she was 20. The GF told me, at the start of our relationshiop, that if she were to drive any significant distance, her mother would call the police and report the car as stolen, even though the GF was the one making the payments on the car and insurance at the time. If someone tells you that you can't do something and prevents you from doing that thing and threatens you with punishment for doing that thing, and if they are successful in getting you not to do that thing, then they have basically undermined your ability to do that thing. Whenever the GF needed to go somewhere and her mother couldn't take her, then I had to take her because of what her mother did to her. In the last year, my girlfriend has denied that her mother ever did this, and has basically internalized her mothers feelings about her driving as her own. The end result is that she can't really go anywhere other than a few miles from her house, and she thinks that "this is the way things have always been."
- I tend to see any attempt by the mother to get me to drive her daughter somewhere, or her refusal to drive her daughter to somewhere she wants to go, as a refusal to acknowledge the damage in her daughter's development that she caused in undermining her daughter's ability to drive significant distances. That the mother would refuse to acknowledge her role in making her daughter unable to perform the errand while casting me as the "selfish" bad guy because I would not help her with the errand is something I consider to be intolerable hipocrisy.
I'm sorry about hearing all of those things.
Just to let you know sometime in the future if you want to hit up Canada, the offer is on the table that we discussed @ the party. At the very least it would take your mind of all of that for a while.
A few comments to the commenters:
1. No need to apologize for anything. My friends and family have said far harsher things, and a good deal of those things certainly ring true. And the driving stuff is crazy. North Carolina is a state in the US, not a province in Afghanistan. If the mother had her way, my girlfriend would be wearing a burqa.
2. My father, the psychiatrist, says that for the mother to have that kind of control, the daughter in effect has to "be her mother's ally". In some ways, I can't just totally blame the mother, because it's the GF's job to resist her mothers ridiculous demands and to not incorporate these messed up demands into her course of thinking.
3. There's a lot of other messed up stuff going on with the GF's family, which gives me a lot more cause for considering ending it, so the original "you should just let her go" suggestion definitely has merit. In a future post/rant, I'll probably go into this stuff.
Untill I read the explination of her problems I was going to say dump her she obviously dosn't care about you at all. I was also going to say to make a surprise vist down there and see if there is anything going on that she isn't saying. If you love her in the way that you think she is "The one" get her help cause she needs it, if she isn't all ready getting it. I will admit I don't really have any good advice on how to get her to get help or really what to do.
Lord knows fresh starts are hard, but I think that is where you ought to go. It ain't fun, but you will be liberated from all the controlling of the mom and the I'm not sure what to call it of the girlfriend. Quid pro quo is a key. Put up with each others crap and whatnot. You're doing all the heavy lifting so to speak and there doesn't seem an end. You're not the only guy in Buffalo starting fresh. I'm thinking of designing jackets.
First of all, that driving stuff is crazy. But secondly- And this is harsh and I apologize, but I really think it's a factor- did you say that she's 20 and you're 30?
I think that explains a lot right there.
Far be it for me to give ANYONE relationship advice since I am utterly incompetent in that dept- but I will anyway. My advice is to make a clean break and start fresh. She doesn't seem willing to make a compromise (as you have said yourself), and it seems there have been issues before... Buffalo is not a dating mecca, but still, it's worth a shot.
Sorry if that's overly harsh.
Do not let this girl walk over you and try to play the guilt game. She is the one that should be feeling guilty, not you. DO NOT let her put you in that spot. She might be your girl, but I don't see how you could tolerate that nonsense.