Paradise Lost?

[JayLo]

OKay, my very first post on this board. This story could easily be a film and I think I would enjoy it but I don't know how it ends.

 

I am a 30 yr old stock Broker from Calgary Canada. 3 years ago I got a bit frustrated with the lead broker I was working for, so I took 4 months off to travel around Europe. I backpacked around London, Paris, Germany, Italy, France, Spain etc. About 2 months into the trip, I found myself travelling with two other guys, on a train in Southern Italy, on our way to the Greek Islands. On the train I just so happened to sit down beside three beautiful french Canadien girls from Montreal. We all had decided to travel together and see if we could save on accomodation.

 

The next three weeks were fantastic, 8 lively people partying, touring, and laughing. It was during this time that my girlfriend and I fell deeply, madly in love. We spent every second together talking about our families, our dreams, our lives....everything. I was blown away with how well suited we were for one another. The others looked at us and laughed, it was almost pathetic. When the three weeks ended, we were apprehensive to show our true emotions because we were both in love, but even in Canada, we lived so very far away from each other. So, we hugged, and decided that we would just go back to Canada, keep in touch, and maybe visit once in a while. Up to this point, there had been no sexual contact, with a few alcohol induced nights of kissing and groping...but no serious contact. We held hands waling along the beach usually.

 

During the next month, I was travelling throughout Europe. I spent another month in Italy, ran with the Bulls in Spain, dove off of cliffs in Portugal. It was a fantastic life experience which I highly reccomend. While I was travelling, she was working in a little ski villiage in the french Alps. We kept in touch through email and telephone calls during this time and we both divulged later on that those emails and phone calls were like heroin! We organised our days around receiving them from each other. After a month, I asked her if she wanted to leave her job early and travel with me for the last month of the summer...she agreed.

 

I took 4 buses, and about 7 trains, travelled for over 40 hours to get from the bottom of Portugal to Geneva Switzerland to meet up with her. I was shaking like a drug addict when I got off of the train. SHe met me there, on the street, and we proceeded to have a romantic three weeks in France and Spain that you only read about in books, and only the GOOD books!

 

At the end of our trip, the problem still remained about coming from separate cities, she in Montreal and I in Calgary. We returned home after a get-wrenching separation in Europe. As soon as I got back to Canada, I flew her out to meet my family. Then I impulsively bought a return ticket with her to return to Montreal with her. I came her to meet her family, her friends, and also to poke my nose around to see if I could handle moving here. I liked the city, but the job prospects were not great.

 

I remained in Montreal for 3 months without a job and became frustrated and lonely for my friends and family. Money wasn't an issue, but I felt like I was just living off of her, in her apartment etc. After 3 months I found a great job that paid amazingly, but was extremely hard work (broker again). With the new job came a sense of security and hence permanence...I called back to Calgary and had all of my furniture and belongings shipped accross the country. All the while the two of us were completely in love and happy, but still having serious conversations about whether this step was the right one. We felt it was.

 

After 8 months in my downtown loft by myself (where she would sleep with me every night) her roommate was leaving so she needed a place to live. The two of us then moved into our own place and have been living in it ever since (about 16 months). The problems began almost immediately. SHe was messier than me, I had to have things just my way and she had to have things hers. She wanted to study with classical music and I wanted to watch hockey games in the living room.

 

For the past 6 months or so, I have been working until 8 or 9 PM and she has been working and studying until almost the same hour. She is a medical student so the two of us are just as busy and have the same demands on our time. We thought that this was great and that we could understand each other. As time wore on, we began to only eat dinner together and sleep together, not go out as much, and just slug it out every day. Every time we were together, we seemed happy (was it superficial? I don't know). SHe always wanted to go out with her freinds from work, friends from school, etc. who are 95% french, and although my french is not bad, I never found it to be a good time so eventually, when I became confortable, I stopped trying to go with her.

 

Over the past 3 months she has slipped away from me. She met a group of people at work that truly lift her soul, she is so happy when she spends time with them. They are basically the personification of all of the qualities that I lack and vice versa. Everyone says that she is just venting her frustrations and focussing on this new job to "get away" from our daily grind.

 

Okay, finally....last week she had "another" discussion with me about how she thinks she should move out. We are stuck in a rutt, we don't have fun anymore, and although two days prior to our conversation she told me she wanted to marry me, she wanted to take a break. I lost it. I was extremely upset that she had held all of this inside for so long and never told me. It was hard for me to fit into this whole situation and now she tells me that it wasn't good enough and that she feels responsible for me moving all the way to Montreal.

 

She moved back to her parents' house and is sleeping on a crappy little mattress on the floor, crying her eyes out every night because she misses me and I don't know what to do. For the first four days, I was devastated! I jogged, worked out, walked, anything to take my mind off of it but it was not helping. I have lost 20lbs in 1 month (which maybe I could have lost 10, but not 20) and I felt the need to call her and talk to her every day for the first 3 or 4 days.

 

Now, I have left her alone and haven't heard from her in a few days. I am tight with her family and I see them. They tell me she is trying to spend time with friends and not think about it, but that she is sad and doesn't look healthy. I am going to give her her space to think, which I am somewhat sure will end up with her missing me too much and realising that she made a mistake, but I can't help but think that I should just move on. I am going on a business trip to Toronto for 10 days, which couldn't have come at a better time.

 

I am worried that I may come home to an empty apartment, with all of her belongings moved out!

 

Do I cut all contact with her? Do I try to call or write her to let her know that things could be better now that I am established here in her city? Do I give in to the few female advances that I still receive and just forget about her? or Do I just keep plodding along, drowning myself in work, going to the gym, and missing her incredibly until she comes around?

 

I am unsure what to do at this point. It seems to me that the best advice has been to just forget about her and let her go, to focus on ME. People are not attracted to weakness and if I just continue to be myself, succesful at work, charismatic, charming, either she....or someone else, will come around.

 

Maybe I just wanted to type and get it off of my chest, but if anyone gets to the bottom of this enormous post, give me a reply or an email.

[moimeme]

Hi!

 

I did the opposite - moved from Ottawa to Calgary though without the lovely European idyll to preface it all.

It sounds as though the difficulty of living together got to you both. It sounds as though you still love each other.

 

Ask her to go to a counsellor with you. Find a good one; ask for recommendations if possible. That, or get some excellent relationship books (Romance for Dummies and Dr. Phil's Relationship Rescue aren't bad) and work through them together. Maybe even to to a marriage prep course. These can really help to cement whether or not you are well-suited to be together. You aren't obliged to get married once you've taken the course.

 

Living together, especially with that many outside stresses of school and work, can be incredibly difficult. They really ought to teach people how to live together because loving each other isn't nearly enough. Still, if she's miserable and are you, this can still be saved. People tend to blame each other when living together is difficult when the fact is that living together is difficult and sometimes people need objective assistance to help them work out the details to everyone's satisfaction. So definitely seek some sort of outside help and good luck.

 

PS. Caveat to anybody else planning to move thousands of miles to live with someone; put your stuff in storage back home and rent your house if you own one. If things work out, you can sell the house and call for your stuff, which is MUCH easier and cheaper than moving all the way back and getting another house.