Communication Cadence and Future Life Plans Compatibility

This post should be prefaced to clarify assumptions about the intent of these kinds of post talking about new dating adventures. This is not an attempt at making someone jealous – I want Cris to find what she needs and deserves to feel fulfilled and be happy. This is both for my own memory as well whoever my future partner is, that I will inevitably invite to read my journal entries.

Cris has moved on with someone else (link to older post) and did so very very very quickly. If she actually spoke to me, I’m %100 positive she would wish the same for me. The reality is, Cris doesn’t look at this (literally zero people do – I can see the web traffic). This is for my own internal dialog, to track my growth and evolution regarding my approach towards relationships. I need to harness what I learned/learning to improve my next and hopefully forever relationship.

Annabelle is an inspirational blessing. Coincidentally, she is also Latin. Annabelle is inspiring me to the point that I just spoke with her on the phone for over 90 minutes….while the Senators/Leafs playoff series Game 3 is on. Yes, I just wrote that.

I can’t believe I’m writings this. The Senators haven’t been in the playoffs for 8 years – 8 long brutal years. They finally made it AND playing against their biggest rival, Toronto. This hasn’t happened in over 20 years!! 21 YEARS to be exact!!! And I chose to talk with Annabelle for 90 minutes instead of intensely watching the game. It was on in the background with the sound off. I barely looked at it.

This morning, Annabelle sent me a text message before I woke up. It was a little concerning but not alarming. She expressed that she felt communication has changed this past week and is making her feel “off” about this….”this” being the few dates and handful of very very long phone conversations we’ve had over the last 3 weeks since we first “met” over the phone, via Hinge dating app.

Yes, I should probably NOT be dating and should be focusing on my mental health right now. I impulsively started an account and had a very random encounter compared to any other time I’ve used dating apps in the past. I’m not sure what the motivation was/is to start that account. It was largely an impulse with not much thought until afterwards. Maybe I was looking to fill a void left from Cris? Maybe a little jealousy that Cris has bandaged her emotional wounds with another person so quickly? (I truly wish her luck) Whatever the reason, I’m glad I did because Annabelle has opened my eyes, even if this doesn’t turn in to any type of “romantic” partnership/relationship.

So in Annabelle’s text, she was saying that she felt a shift and it wasn’t making her feel very good. Not in a major detrimental way, but just in a way that maybe questions the validity or a potential future of us continuing this connection that we seem to be developing.

I replied that I agreed with her that I felt the same, but we’ve only been talking for a few weeks. I know that she’s been busy with her work and building her book and her art. She’s a professional. Did I mention Annabelle is incredibly inspiring?

She also has children and a fairly busy life.

This “shift” wasn’t intentional on my end. Some of my intent, was to not be overbearing and over communicate early on. Plus, I’ve also been dealing with my own internal issues and trying to figure out a lot of internal things. I have been transparent about my recent struggles with mental health and working through past relationship conflict (alone, without Cris, despite my attempts to simply speak with her).

I have also been asking myself questions about how things could potentially look If Annie and I decided to start dating in a more serious way, as in a long term and semi-long distance relationship. So although I have been messaging her, there was a few days where there was no contact.

To me, it sounded like there was a gap in regards to expectations for communication, especially this early in this dating relationship, whatever you want to call it “exploration”. This is something that I experienced with Cris in regards to daily communication. Cris’s expectations and mine were very different. That deserves a whole conversation on it’s own but Cris and I were working through that (me far more accommodating her needs than what feels natural to me)

Long Story Short, Chris’s expectations were speaking on the phone literally every day. Whereas mine, I am happy going days and days without speaking on the phone and just sending random text messages to update on what I’m doing, and that fulfills my communication needs.

Because when I’m not with my partner and I’m thinking about them all the time. Maybe it’s that I create this false sense of connection, because I am thinking about them all the time. Even though we aren’t talking, to me, it still feels like there is that connection. But in reality, that connection is not being made, either verbally or in person.

So with Cris and I, cadence of communication, specifically speaking on the phone, was something that we had to work on a lot. And by “we”, I mean I had to do what Cris wanted to meet her needs and I didn’t really have a choice other than to work on me meeting that need for her. Daily phone calls have never felt natural to me, even though I can do it because it made her happy. It came up many times. A year and a half into our relationship, that was something that I still needed to work on and be conscious of. Because I could see how it made her feel.

I value physical in-person time together, and if I’m in a relationship where that can’t happen every day or all the time, I simply just accept how things are. And again, maybe I’m fooling myself in regards to how I feel inside my head and heart because I still feel that connection, even though there hasn’t been a connection made.

So when Annie brought this to my attention, she said that maybe we shouldn’t continue exploring dating, and we should just agree to be friends.

Annabelle’s two children are in their teens. One is one’s in their late teens, and one is just about starting high school. We’ve talked about the dynamics of a relationship with me not having children and her having children. I’m open to that, and it doesn’t scare me. There’s a whole conversation around how that would look like in a relationship. We have explored that enough that it feels like both of us are comfortable with that not being an issue, and I think that we’re both open and honest enough to be able to navigate that world together as things progress, if they do.

In regards to expectations, she obviously doesn’t expect me to be a step father or a father type figure, but at the same time, I need to be supportive when needed, and be a good role model, etc. But where the issue comes up with the children is that kind of anchors Annabelle to where she’s living.

I’m making assumptions here, because we haven’t had that conversation yet, but my assumption is that the children’s father lives in Toronto area. I live in Hamilton and St Catharines.

I AM open to moving to Toronto area if it makes MOST sense, regardless of what Cris’s misunderstandings were about that situation.

Where that becomes complicated is the timing and the relocation. If for me to be truly happy, I feel that I can’t wait longer than a few years to be living with my partner, or at least closer and in the same city, or in a way where we can see each other more than just one or two days a week. And I realized from my relationship with Cris on how important that is to me, that I need to close.

I can do a semi-long distance relationship, but I can’t do it forever. I think my preference is that once a relationship is at the point where we are sure that this is a very, very long term/forever type of thing, that physical gap needs to close to the point where seeing each other is as convenient as possible in regards to life schedule.

Even when Chris and I both had free time, it still made seeing each other difficult on short notice and things like that, when schedules wouldn’t exactly line up or different life events and responsibilities. So if our schedules were not perfectly in sync, it made it extremely difficult to be able to close that physical gap and spend time with each other,

With with Annie, it would be an extremely large ask, almost to the point of being unfair to ask her and expect her to pick up her children’s lives when they’re at the age of developing potentially lifelong friendships with people in their high school years. Yes, her oldest child is close to the age of going off to college, but her youngest is 4-5-6, years away from doing that.

Is it fair to ask somebody to potentially move a child, to say, from Toronto area to Hamilton, just for the happiness of Annabelle and myself? That is something that I haven’t navigated before, and that’s something that I haven’t really considered or had those conversations, with a woman that has children.

For myself, if I did decide on closing the gap, then the onus would be on me to do that. And as time goes on, especially with this boat thing, I’m not sure the possibilities of that would be. It would take me, I think at best, a couple years, maybe 18 months, to comfortably get the boat to a point where I’m happy to sell it and I can regain the money. So it’s not a complete loss, and get as much out of it, or as much back of it, back from it, as possible.

I would also be giving up that lifestyle. So that would be a question that I would need to ask myself and figure out. With Cris, I was willing to do that. I was 100% willing to do that, but Cris continually showed a lack of patience and a lack of understanding for what it would take for me to get to that point or position. Because if that would take me 18 months to do from now, then in the interim, Cris would have to change expectations to the point where she would be giving a little bit up on her needs for a daily, weekly relationship. I would have to do the same too.

It wouldn’t be as bad as what it’s been during the last couple winters. So we could navigate through we could have navigated through that.

But the point is that there is a level of uncertainty there. I would need to be 100% sure of, that this is a forever person going into this situation. To understand that one of us is going to have to make a big choice, and it would more than likely be me making that decision and giving up things in my life for the sake of the relationship. Because there are two other people, definitely, her youngest daughter, that I would have to consider their needs.

The irony of this whole thing is that Cris would say that I don’t have empathy or compassion, yet my internal dialog is continually thinking about other people, to the point where. I’ve thought about other people and considered people that I have no relation to, like tenants, where it’s negatively impacted my life.

Ultimately, my compassion and empathy for people I don’t owe anything to negatively impacted my relationship, because the burden that I end up putting on myself. Those things were not something that I had to do, and I’m only just learning that now, over the last six, seven months.

It’s so heartbreaking, because those decisions absolutely contributed to the decline of my relationship with Cris, and she doesn’t understand that and doesn’t get it. That’s where a lot of my resentment comes from in that relationship and towards Cris. Because I tried to explain these things to her, and she just didn’t see it.

And then that makes me think that, do you have the empathy and compassion to understand decisions that I’ve made and how that affects my life? And those are decisions that I made before Cris and I entered our relationship. They were never her responsibility to clean up, but I felt like our relationship got to the point where those are things that we could have worked through if she was patient…and she wasn’t.

And it’s still so fucking heartbreaking that I’m tearing up and crying while explaining this. Literally, have tears coming down my eyes trying to verbalize this.

So I think that the next step with Annabelle is definitely to have this conversation and explore. It’s not so much the cadence of our communication, because this is a very new friendship, whatever you want to call it. Those things can be easily worked out. But the fact that is something occurring now, it brings up questions of the future in regards to other bigger expectations.

I can connect, and I’m sure Annie will agree with me, that the current daily communication to how things will look in the future, and my preference is to be living with or close to my partner as possible. This is something that Annabelle and I need to discuss now and figure out before both of us get too attached and hurt.

Because I’m scared shitless of hurting somebody, just because I’m not honest with myself and themselves about what our life plans are, or how we feel.