Glass Slipper

I'm guessing the super-couple is a pretty staple thing in most high schools - that couple that seems so good together, and you know that they're going to get married, buy a house and have kids together. For me, it was Huey and Jamie. They would hang out a lot together after school and on weekends, I was told that they spent hours on the phone together, and while there was some drama every now and again, they were really stable. The first few years after we left high school, things sounded like they were going really well.

The wonders of Facebook mean that I get to find out whether they did have that happily ever after, and the answer is no. A post came up in my feed with her saying she is so happy to be with this other guy, and that's when I realised they had broken up. It was so shattering to me. This was Huey and Jamie of the "Huey & Jamie 4 eva". It seemed like nothing was going to break them apart. Hollywood lied to me. The girl gets the guy, but can she keep him for ever and ever? When he puts the glass slipper on her foot and tells her she's the one, does he really mean "the one.... for now"?

I'm a really neurotic person. The kind of person who worries about leaving the stove on, and if I did any ironing, I'd probably fret over the iron being on, too. One of the things that I constantly worry about is MrMan5.5's safety. Maybe he got hit by a car, mugged, or fell down into a hole with no phone reception, and nobody around to hear him. Then I get hit with this panicked feeling of what I'd do without him, and my brain just shuts down. Does not want to process. (I should probably see someone about this....)

In light of all the break-ups I see around me, and the fact that my co-workers fairly regularly complain about their wives, I can't help but wonder how long until MrMan5.5 sees the light and moves on. I was trying to help one of my friends get over his break-up, and said that sometimes people change, and they no longer have the feelings they had previously. He asked what the point was, if the person that you emotionally invest yourself in can just up and leave? I think maybe I waffled on about taking risks, better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and that kind of rubbish, but I'm actually starting to think he has a point. I want to be the person that MrMan5.5 stays with for the rest of his life, but the person that he is now isn't the same person that he will be in 5 years.

Julian says that women get away with a lot, and that men are usually willing to put up with a lot of crap in order to have stable sex. I also know that it does become a problem for a lot of couples later in their marriage, as the wife usually loses the desire for sex. I have seen it in myself. I have a theory that sex was a kind of procrastination for me. When I was a uni student, I thought about it a lot, probably because I had a lot of spare time, and a lot of things that I wanted to put off doing. Contrast to now, where I feel like I have very little spare time, due to work, and the list of things I want/need to do during that spare time is fairly long. I'm usually thinking about work, what I want to eat (this actually takes up a huge amount of my mental capacity - I spend a lot of time thinking about food), exercise, Dota 2, what I plan to do during the rest of the week. There is very little room in my mind for sex these days, which has the unfortunate side-effect of me just not feeling like it.

Char says this is really bad, and that I need to work on it, which I am. I don't know how she does it, as she is also working full time, yet still has a healthy libido. I'm making a conscious effort to think about it more, but I assume that as life goes on, and you introduce kids, and more and more difficult work, it'll slowly die out. Is this why some couples find that their sex life dies after marriage? When I was at uni, I was so sure that I wasn't going to be one of those wives who gets into bed, turns the light off, and passes out, but now I'm not so sure.

A woman made a post on a forum asking why she wasn't able to attract men with a certain salary range, and one man who claimed to be in that salary range basically said that she was a bad investment as his assets would increase in value, and hers (looks) would decrease. If the only thing she was contributing was an attractive face and body, and the sex that goes with it, then it would only make sense to rent and not buy, as you can just trade in for a newer model every few years. Not that MrMan5.5 is in it for my body and face, but thinking about my assets (my wonderful wit and ability to check for danger in a first aid situation), those will also naturally dry up as I get older, too. I guess unlike the "brainless beauty" stereotype, I am also in a profession that is capable of making money well after I get saggy boobs, but to be honest, it's not particularly one I relish in, and so I don't know how long it's viable for me to chalk that up as an "asset".

Rationally, MrMan5.5 would be better renting than buying, yet he still proposed and we do intend to get married some day. I thought maybe he was just pot committed - he had invested so much in this relationship that it'd be a waste to just toss it out. Yet there are people who have been married for 20+ years who get divorced, so there is nothing to say that won't happen to me. It's just my risk averse nature that makes me want to avert the possibility of that happening as much as I can, and a part of it is saying, "Well, if you never get on the horse, you can't fall off." Which is a bit ridiculous, because if you never take that risk, and you are interested in finding someone to share your life with, then you'll never be able to truly commit to someone as you have one foot out the door ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I do have a solution, and that's the baby trap, as I know MrMan5.5's sense of duty would mean that he would want to raise that child as best as he could, but I would be so sad if I knew that the only reason he stayed with me was because of our child(ren).

So I don't know, how can you ever know whether someone will really be with you happily ever after? I'm going through a phase at the moment where I am trying to improve myself to increase my value to MrMan5.5, but what if I'm dumping all of my stats in X when I should really be working on Y? I don't know what Future MrMan5.5 will want. I guess all I can really do is try my best, it'll hurt if I fail, but I did the best that I could. I think I'm also fortunate that when we have had problems in the past, he has been willing to at least try to work it out, so hopefully I won't just wake up to an empty bed and a note on the kitchen counter some day.