Mutual Destruction

The man I’ve been seeing for the last couple months has a habit of just not sleeping. Whether it’s working late, gaming on his PC, or sometimes… well… fucking me. He’s often up late, which is fine, so am I. But I sleep in, he does not. He probably averages <40 hours of sleep a week.

This is a sharp contrast to me, who has been sleeping for about 15 months straight. My pregnancy was relatively easy, my main symptom being exhaustion. I just wanted to sleep all the time. And I’m sure it’s shocking to everyone that being a new mom has kept me pretty tired. I thought by now I’d be back to normal but I still love to catch a nap with my daughter every chance I get. I realized recently this is probably because of all the energy I’m using breastfeeding. I’m burning between 1000-1500 calories a day just from that. Basically doubling my resting caloric needs.

So here’s where my problem comes in; I just don’t really feel like eating a lot of the time. The baby weight came off fast. I was down to +10lbs of pre-pregnancy weight within a couple weeks. Nearly all my weight gain was actually baby, placenta, or extra blood volume (that I lost a good chunk of when I almost bled to death in the delivery room!). I was watching my weight purely out of curiousity. I was fascinated, scientifically, by everything happening. Growing a baby, delivering a baby, making milk, etc. Watching my stomach shrink in real time over the first month postpartum was wild.

So anyway, after it plateaus I don’t keep weighing myself. I’m not worried about shedding the last few pounds of baby weight while breastfeeding, especially since being a few pounds up from where I was is still perfectly healthy and quite frankly was still a more attractive body than most women… so it’s a surprise to me a few months later when I’m down to 97 pounds. Oh. That’s 10 pounds less than my pre-pregnancy weight and my tits are clearly bigger than they were before. So how did I weigh less than I ever had as a fully developed adult? I was losing muscle.

So anyway, my guy (whatever title he’s supposed to have) and I have a deal. I’m supposed to actually eat. He’s supposed to actually sleep. We both aren’t doing great but we’re trying. This is how relationships, whether romantic, platonic, whatever, should look! If you care about someone you should push them to be better. Whatever “better” might look like in that particular case.

Unfortunately, I feel like it is often the opposite that happens in long term relationships. Food and sleep are great examples for my and Dakota’s relationship as well. We’re bad about keeping each other up later than we should. We eat an atrocious amount of fast food. Why is it easier to promise improvement for someone new instead of him? Are we just too comfortable with each other? Or maybe I’m overlooking all the improvements we’ve made over the years and focusing on the recurring problems we haven’t fixed yet.

The man I was seeing a couple years ago had major depression and so do I. At first this was a point of bonding. Finding someone that gets it. But one of the major reasons I ended things with him was that he was dragging me down with him. I was already struggling to have good days and it felt like every time I was he wasn’t, which would then ruin my day. I didn’t want him to be sad. Why was that the direction it went? Why couldn’t I make him happy? Why could he only make me sad?

Are certain relationships just destined to be beneficial while others are destructive? It doesn’t necessarily even seem to be the individual people but rather the pairings. Sometimes we just bring out the worst in people. My high school boyfriend is a great example. Granted, we were immature teenagers which I’m sure doesn’t help, but we were and are decent friends. We were horrible partners. I am a much better partner to Dakota than I was to him and he is a much better partner to his wife than he was to me. Obviously a decade worth of maturing helps, like I said, but still. We just were not meant to be together.

I feel this applies to several of my friendships as well. Some of them are beneficial, some of them I ended because they were definitely not. Take this into consideration when dating, it shows up earlier than you think. It might seem like small stuff you can work passed but if you notice a pattern of “making you worse” they’re not meant to be in your life, no matter how much you enjoy being with them. I truly don’t think it’s malicious a lot of the time. I think some cogs just don’t fit together well.