I know these are some older posts I'm responding to, but I'm doing it more for general comment than your specific situation, since the Fiona Fiasco seems to have worked itself out through an interstate move
I understand her child is going to come first and that her relationship with her husband is going to take precedence, but if it is a choice between being with me and being with her extended family I have no idea how she would choose.
Why would she have to "choose?" I've always been anti-ultimatum. Since I learned the meaning of the word, roughly when I started dating, I made a policy that whoever gives me an ultimatum loses, on principle. People who make me choose are selfish and not at all interested in what
I want.
The fact that she only seems to text/call when she has a specific question kind of makes me feel like I'm not that important.
My husband almost never answers my texts because he absolutely hates texting. He'll give me max 3 words before he just picks it up and calls me instead, even now that he has a phone with voice-to-text.
And boy oh boy did I get in royal shit last week for texting his work phone when my calls on his personal phone were going straight to voicemail. Turned out he had 3 supervisors standing around him, and they shot him dirty looks when his message notification went off. Ooops!
I'm not mad about people not checking on me when I went upstairs. I honestly thought they would all sleep through until morning and wouldn't even know I was gone. The fact that Keith noticed and Fiona was 10 feet away and neither one thought that they would see if I was ok is what upsets me.
I feel that it's a person's own responsibility to tell their loved ones when they're feeling crummy and need a hug. I've fallen into the same trap, where I'll just sulk around and hope that someone notices. The longer it goes without notice, the more passive aggressive I start to feel. Eventually the smoke clears and I realize I'm being unrealistic.
I have struggled with guilt, and continue with that. It's a process. But you know, it's no different from any other emotion. You don't have to follow it. Just because you feel guilty doesn't mean you did something wrong. It is beneficial to try and look at the situation objectively to see whether there is actually something you should feel guilty about, or if it's coming from other places (like from something inside you, or from somebody deliberately trying to make you feel guilty).
I struggle with guilt from the other side of the fence. My husband was raised in a very guilt-trip ridden household, which really didn't end until his mother died. Now he has a guilt-trip ridden daughter. So I'm constantly on the defence about doing or saying something that will make my husband feel guilty, because I know how much he'll internalize it and really believe it's his fault that I'm in a bad mood, for example.
To compound the difficulty, I'm aware of his condition, which means that if I'm not on guard of myself, I could easily manipulate that to get him to do anything. That's the last thing I want to do!
And @rory... Fiona always acts like she feels bad for making me choose, but she always expects to get her way in the long run. I think she was not so pleasantly surprised that I put my foot down on this one. I'm inherently a people pleaser and am much happier when EVERYONE around me is happy, but that wasn't even possible in this case so I went with what I wanted to do. The main reason I felt guilty about this trip was because originally we had all agreed that we'd go again the 4 of us before Keith and I would go alone. I felt like I had kind of pushed Fiona into okaying us going without her by bringing it up and saying that we'd been invited.
I think it would be good for you to learn that you don't need anyone's permission to do anything. Fiona's not your mom and you're not 6. Given the way you met her, she really has no right to ask you to stop doing something that you find fun and exciting. If she doesn't like that you do that fun and exciting thing, then it's not a good match. Plain & simple. These kinds of restrictions are all about her insecurity, and telling you not to go to the club is not an effective way to deal with her insecurity. It's like putting a bandage on an infected wound. It might cover up the wound, but it will never heal like that.
There was some validity in the earlier posts people made that, while the relationship is getting established, it's fair to request that you not to go to the clubs. But if I ever agreed to something like that, I would put a finite and definite time limit on it. e.g., you have six weeks to deal with your insecurity, after that I'm going to the clubs whether you approve or not. Sometimes people use "I'm still working on it" as an indefinite excuse to not actually work on it, because they've put the bandage on the infection and are now pretending it doesn't exist...
