Lost in notation blog

Day 54 – For richer for poorer in sickness and in health

February 24, 2010 at 1:12 am (Addiction, bipolar, Chemistry, Cookery, Depression, Destructive relationships, dresses, Employment, Friendship, Health care, Holidays, Homelife, Job hunting, Long distance relationships, Loving, Manchester, Market Harborough, Medication, mental health, Music, Musical Theatre, NHS, photography, Smoking, Student, Style, Uncategorized, Unemployment, University life, Walking, Wine) (http://www.kenwright.com/default.asp?contentID=576, http://www.kurtgeiger.com/, http://www.oasis-stores.com/, http://www.uk.castingcallpro.com/view.php?uid=213178)

Come this Saturday me and the boy will have been going out four years.  In spite of me having a fair few up and downs and in all honesty a couple of quite serious breakdowns during this time, I think the reason we have come the distance; aside from the fact that he has the patience of a saint and we still quite fancy one another; is because we have always right from the start applied the basic vows of marriage to our relationship.  Now, I’m not one to say that marriage is essential to make a relationship work; I have plenty of friends who have got along quite nicely thank-you very much without ever feeling any urgent need to put a ring on it; but nevertheless I think that relationships work best when you apply principles such as “in sickness and in health”, “for richer for poorer”, and unless you have a really very cool/ liberal lover, “forsaking all others”.  

When myself and the boy first met I was flat broke and though I was not looking for anything serious as tends to be the case we accidentally went and fell in love.  At the time I was spending all my spare pennies on cigarettes and alcohol and because he was a sweetie and probably because he didn’t want to see me lose my rather curvaceous figure he kept feeding me fry ups and insisting on cooking me dinner.  I remember one day when I was about to set off for home he slipped me a tenner to go and buy food.  Ten minutes, 20 Marlborough mediums and a bottle of red later I came to the conclusion that yes 12p chicken noodles were a suitable source of nutrition.    

Although he was the provider at the start of our relationship by the time I graduated I was making a tidy enough package so that if he was skint we could dip into my privy purse to pay for cinema outings, bottles of wine, nights on the tiles and steak.

The boy graduated two years after me, not because I am seeing a toy boy you understand but because he was rather more keen in being the drummer in every Mancunian band around the way than getting all academic.  It was because he was still a student that when our one year anniversary came round, I ended up treating us to a holiday to Rome and when we were too lazy to cook it was me who paid for us to eat out in West Didsbury, Manchester’s one stop haven of heavenly cuisine.

When I lost my job though, both times, it was the boy who helped me pick up the pieces, kept me financially afloat when I was too proud to go to the job centre and who even helped me search through the rubbish to find a new role.

Although most of our relationship has been spent just below the poverty line we have always found ways to entertain ourselves; games of Scrabble where JB, Onions lead singer always wins; games of monopoly where I always win; tea and music; my ever more elaborate attempts at dinner parties for ten even when we have no table; gigs; walks in the woods; running (failed after one attempt when he smoked throughout whilst I had a series of small heart failings) tennis, technically not necessarily legally sound movies and more gigs.  Although we loved it when I was making a tidy package money never brings happiness and as Neil Sedaka’s wife says to him in Laughter In The Rain, “Sometimes I miss the cold days.” Struggling together is terribly romantic and there’s nothing quite like playing cards through the night with nothing to fuel you but a pot of decaf tea.

The other issue is of course the sickness and the health.  Luckily the boy is fine and dandy other than the occasional sulk and the dreaded man flu, according to the boy he has single handedly fought off swine flu and is a pillar of strength in the face of modern medicine most of which he views as being in some way linked to a conspiracy of making us weak. Maybe because of this, when we first met I waited till June to come clean with him about my crazy.  I didn’t want to scare him away and if I’m honest I thought I had completely recovered, love does wonderful things for your brain and your body; eating becomes a chore and your entire mind turns to mush.  if you don’t watch out you end up boring all of your friends to sleep by talking about how fabulous your lover is.  Luckily however, by the time me and the boy got together I was a cynic about love and when he etched the words “I love you” on my back I told him to, “Get a grip”.

When I told him about my poorly head it was because I had decided to come off the anti-depressants I’d been taking for two years.  Buoyed up by love and the wonderful newness of it all I didn’t think I needed them.   With his approval and no advice from any medical practitioner I came off the drugs. Within a month I crashed so hard and so fast that some days I couldn’t even look in the mirror because I felt so ugly and frustrated with what I saw.  I put on weight and because getting out of bed was so hard I would sleep for hours and rather than looking for work I would watch West Wing episodes convinced there was no point trying because I was useless.  In the end I had to move home so I could survive.  The boy did try to support me but he was still a student and one part-time job shared between two people equals not a lot left to live on.

With the help of some friends in the know, my family and the boy I managed to pick myself back up but it wasn’t easy.  Every time I go down hill it is always the boy who has been there over these last few years who is there straight away to drag me back up again.  Every time I get poorly he’s there to wipe away my tears, calm me and convince me that the world is a good place and that things will get better.

On one poorly head occasion when we somehow found ourselves at A and E after a particularly bad reaction to Sertraline, (the name still gives me the shudders), we came face to face with a psychiatrist who had obviously decided he was not a fan of women.  After deciding, from looking at me rather than my notes you understand, that I was anorexic with father issues he banned the boy from hugging me, told me there was nothing wrong with me and then finished by telling me I should just go ahead and give up then and live in a mental health ward.  Thankfully both the boy and the psychiatrists assistant realised I was just extremely anxious in a very scary place and needed to get some sleep and the boy got me the hell away from him before had a chance to lock me up and throw away the key.

I have never forgotten what he did that day and acknowledge that what ever happens with us in the future, without him being by my side that day I could still to this day be living in a closed ward, misdiagnosed and miserable overseen by the most tyrannical mentally unstable medical professional I have ever come across.

We never signed any contract when we got together but both of us always find a way to work it out, scream it out or just forgive regardless.  I like to think that its because he like me knows that whatever our problems with us when its good it’s so very good, though at times we can of course both be wicked.