The up-and-down freakout in the friendship-thing, the part where his really laconic and not-much communications skills have me freaking the hell out on a regular basis? Not so much his fault. I recognize that he has really lousy geekboy communication skills, and I bear the burden of communicating. I have demonstrated on several occasions that while this is not ideal, it is generally OK, and I can deal with it. What happens when it goes wrong is not that his communication skills have loused up, but, in fact, that I am having a really unstable episode, and probably need to momentarily up my dosage of St. John's Wort, put down the caffeine, take a nice long warm bath with a good book, and go to bed early. (Or, if it's too late to go to bed early, just go to bed.)
I realized that it was My Thing, not His Thing, one night when I was writing out a rather hysterical "OMG YOU DON'T REALLY LIKE ME AS A FRIEND DO YOU OMG PLEASE WRITE BACK TO TELL ME YOU DO LIKE ME AS A FRIEND BECAUSE IF YOU DON'T LIKE ME I CAN JUST GO OVER THERE AND SOB AND NEVER SPEAK TO YOU AGAIN" e-mail, and decided against sending it because I knew that I have the capability of being very cutting and cruel with my words, and I was going for effective writing, not hurtful writing. I decided to sleep on it and see if it looked OK in the morning.
It did not look OK in the morning. In the morning, it looked as though I had been having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night. I got used to dealing with things like this with complaining about household chores. I was not used to the idea of me acting all crazy in the relationship. I made it stop.
