The next day I knew this was all still swirling on his mind and I didn’t want to miss a chance to spend some time with him, so I offered to make a giant tray of eggplant parmesan and meet him at his parents house.  He was thankful and appreciative and I was making it anyway, so I stopped at my nieces soccer game then headed up to his parents house.  When I arrived they were already underway in the trenches of talking about, going over, reading and rereading his “stuff”.  I didn’t realize until that moment that maybe this is what it’s normally like and they’ve just not been talking about it around me?  I wasn’t sure.  It felt as if they were now all completely comfortable with the fact that I knew all about the “stuff”  like really knew and now there was no mixing words.

I watched football and made plate of eggplant parmesan for dinner for everyone, but they were all engrossed.  I totally understand, really I do.  When I was knee deep in my own “stuff” there was nothing that could pull me away from finishing what needed to get done.  I wondered though; would this now be our daily topic of conversation?  Would this take over most of what we talked about, went over, formed theories on, opinions, etc.?  I was a bit nervous and I even felt a little uncomfortable.  It’s not every day you are in the middle of someone else’s “stuff” as the girlfriend and essentially an outsider to the mess, but there I was.  I guess I never made the connection between how much we actually talked about our ex’s on the whole.

I freely talked about and even wrote explicitly about the men who have been in my life.  I talked about how they changed me, what they did, who they were, what I was like with them and a myriad of other things about them.  I guess for me talking about them, while not in the middle of any “stuff” felt freeing, felt natural.  These men, these people had been a big part of my life, they had played roles that changed me into who I was becoming and most of them I still felt warm thoughts for, not loving thoughts, but appreciative of the part they played in my life.  There was only one, just one, that made my skin crawl and I talked about with venom; Jolly Guy.  I wasn’t sure if I would ever get over what he put me and my children through, but what I did know was that talking about it with Dimples made me feel closer to him, it made me feel like Dimples and I had something in common, made me feel connected to Dimples in some way.  We had both had our lives turned upside by people and for this I thought we stood on common ground.

I never knew if what I spoke about bothered Dimples, he never made mention of it, he never cringed or cowered when I spoke of them, he never acted as if it was a problem and being we spoke so much about his “stuff” it never even occurred to me that it would or even could bother him.  I knew Dimples, I knew that if it bothered him at any time throughout our relationship, he would tell me.  He would trust me enough to tell me something bothered him and he would give us the opportunity to figure out what to do about it; together case like I said before; we were a team.  We would discuss it and we would make peace with making decisions on topics that bothered us and would try our best to be more conscious of not saying things that made us each uncomfortable.

I did however mention to him once, just once, that I thought it was weird how much everyone talked about his situation.  That it was like a free for all with opinions and thoughts on the matter, it made me feel weird.  I wasn’t jealous, I’m not technically the jealous type, but I wanted to protect him from judgment.  I didn’t like being the girlfriend, who was so in love with him and hearing how they spoke of things from his past.  We all make mistakes.  We all do it in the name of love.  I’ve done it, you’ve done it, the point is that we don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over.  We see where we went wrong, where we trusted when we shouldn’t, where we believed when we should have questioned, where we blindly followed a person out of duty or obligation or even love.

When we find that person you can say anything to, who you can discuss things that bother you without fear of judgment or criticism, the person who will always choose you as long as you give them the opportunity to actually be able to choose, that person…..that’s the person you keep in your life no matter what.  That’s the type of relationship I had with Dimples.  I could tell him anything, no matter how big or how small or how dark or how shiny it was.  And the best part was knowing that he too could tell me anything; if something bothered him, even if it sounded stupid or immature, if it was his dreams or goals knowing that I would always listen, understand and be willing to work it out with him; that’s the type of person Dimples is and that was the kind of relationship we were in.  Or were we?