Fast forward to 2004. By this point I'd had the lap-band surgery, and with my weight loss came an increase in confidence (I think it was coming anyway, but the weight loss just helped it along). We always joked that JG and K were a lot alike, and that JG's husband and I were a lot alike. JG's husband and I both liked to go out dancing, JG and K didn't, so the two of us who liked it went dancing. Much fun, I hadn't gone out dancing since college, and I loved it. We talked a lot about relationship stuff, and just had a good time. Well, we went one time, had a few too many shots of Crown Royal, and he kissed me. Zoiks. Of course K knew something was up (he's always said he can read me like a book, and about that, he could) - it took him two days to figure it out and pry it out of me, but he did. He felt compelled to tell JG, since her husband had just moved back in, and I understand that - if your friend's husband has just moved back in, she's thinking all is fine, and he's kissing some other woman, of course you should tell that friend. During all of this, K and JG had a serious falling-out, to the point that they're no longer friends. And obviously I lost my dancing buddy - after that, there was no way the two of us were going dancing again. Bummer, we did have fun, and now I've got no one to go dancing with - just when I was getting back into it.
Anyway, K and JG were no longer anything, but he still wanted to move out. We talked a lot about what we thought we wanted in a partner, and I think the biggest challenge for him is the fact that I'm so freakin' independent. I grew up an only child, my parents raised me to believe I could do anything, and I'm intelligent enough to, well, do anything. I'm capable of taking care of myself and my family. And K, thinking I didn't need help because I never asked, sat back and let me do. I've never been able to get the point across that it's not so much that I *needed* help - I *can* do just about anything by myself. The point was, I'd have *appreciated* the help, and I'd have appreciated it if occasionally the help were given without me having to ask, if it would have just occurred to him to help because he cared about me. I took the lack of help as meaning that he didn't care, and it made me mad. Even after we'd had this discussion, it still seemed like he was content to sit back and let me do. (I told him once that I wasn't his mother, and he got upset, said he didn't think of me that way - it sure felt like it to me.) So I reckoned he needed to move out, if only to learn how to take care of himself, as well as to give us space to sort out what direction we wanted to go. And eventually, he did.
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