In A world Gone Mad: Saturday 30 may 2020...1

Saturday 30^th May 2020

Probably for the first time ever, I’m going to admit that I must have mental health problems. I think I need to see a psychologist, or a psychiatrist or book myself in for an extensive course of counselling—if they have a weekly appointment for four in the morning that’d be great.

I’m not being flippant. I’m coming round to the fact that it’s me that’s not right in the head. I got up at two-fifty—ten to bloody three for anybody unable to do the conversation. Max and I argued from then until three thirty and it’s taken three years—but I see it from his point of view. He’s right

I’m nuts.

Last night I was up at half one in the morning. It’s not normal. I should be able to just go back to sleep when he gets up. What kind of woman forbids her partner to leave the bed in the middle of the night?

This sounds as though I’m being my usual sarcastic self—and normally I would be, but he honestly has no idea that he’s doing anything wrong. So, it has to be me that’s wrong.  He gets out of bed all night and sleeps until one the next day. I can’t live like this. Why does that have to affect me? Surely I should be able to sleep through the telly after three years and when he gets up for a cig, regardless of whether he’s up for five minutes or five hours why the hell am I being sensitive about it? I get so angry that we are arguing about this every day of the week.

I love my partner, but right at this second I feel hatred for him.

I told him that he’s making me ill. I’m getting headaches every day, I’ve had one every day for more than a week. And I’m popping paracetamol. I’m so tired that normal life is evading me. I’m snapping all the time and don’t want to do anything.

I tell him that I’m ill and he stares at me and blinks. It’s as though I’ve just landed here from another planet.

When we had the spare bedroom, I coped with it. I had a strict cut off time of midnight. If the telly didn’t go off by midnight, I got up went in the spare room—this was every night for the last six months before Arthur moved in—and I slept well. I got that I didn’t care what he was doing all night. I had a whole King-Sized bed to myself, I could sprawl all over it and it was bliss.

But even then, this isn’t new, at the old flat I used to sleep in the spare room more often than not and we had long periods where I’d stay in our bed, but he wouldn’t come in until between two and four.

He’s addicted to porn. 

Tonight, I was so tired that I felt sick with being awake for so long. I’ve been up since half one yesterday morning. He was pulling at me for sex and I figured that the only way he was going to leave me the hell alone was to give in. I thought it might help him sleep and he wouldn’t have the need to sneak downstairs to pull his fucking dick off.

I’m so angry I can barely type. And I will post this, and I will regret it—but he was the one who told me to do it.

He gets up and masturbates to young women. Is that all he’s doing? I don’t believe he’s having an affair in real life, he doesn’t get the opportunity—but is he talking to women on Plenty of Fish and having cyber affairs? It’s where we met. He’s getting very little sex from me and when he does it bores me senseless.

With the porn, he tells me I’m in the wrong. Every red-blooded man does it and it isn’t being unfaithful. All heterosexual men are turned on by a pretty young woman. It reminds them of their youth. I’ve never been attracted to anybody but him since the day we met. Well a couple of weeks after we met because at first I thought he was a dick.  When I used to masturbate, and even that’s a thing of the past. But when I did, I used to think about him to get me off.  When he does it, he’s looking at eighteen-year-old sluts  with dirty mouths and perfect bodies and I don’t exist.  I’m old, fat, and ugly, the porn—and the menopause—but mainly the porn, has put me off sex.  I see it as unfaithful—he sees it as physical. I have lived with it.

But it churns me inside out at night when I’m lying alone in the bed, imagining God knows What and waiting for him to come up. What else is he doing? He says, ‘Nothing,’ but how do I know that? To be fair, if he was talking to somebody, he’s a very loud cockney and I think I’d hear him, even if he was trying to whisper, he’d forget at some point and I’d hear.

I’ve just answered my own question—I’m in the wrong. I’m burning myself up with suspicion and paranoia and jealousy. That’s not normal is it?

He hates his ex-wife, seventeen years my junior, with big tits. He rarely sees his youngest daughter who still lives at home.  And since lockdown he hasn’t been to see her at all, though she’s visited here once the other week. On the occasions when he does go round there after work, is he giving his wife one?

These are the thoughts that go round in circles and keep me awake at night.  I think it’s probably only the porn—but one thought leads to the next, to the next until I’m convinced he’s banging every female in town and choking the monkey with every woman between eighteen and twenty-five, with a perfect body, on the dating sites.

We ask the same questions every night.

Why can’t you stay in bed?

Why can’t you go back to sleep?

Tonight, halfway through sex, I spent ten minutes trying not to ask—but it’s me, if something is in my head I have to blurt it out or I’d explode in splattered brain matter all over the bedroom walls. If it’s there it has to come out or I go purple.

‘Did you masturbate last night?

Well, there was no way of getting out of that one, whatever he said he was going to be in the wrong.  He ignored me.  I thought maybe he hadn’t heard.

‘Well?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I can tell by your balls.’

‘My balls?’

‘Yes,’

‘Well, I haven’t shaved them.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

I wanted to tell him to leave me alone and get some good sex downstairs, with his hand and a young whore on the telly.  But I was good and kept my temper. I blamed my lack of interest on the fact that Arthur got up and fumbled his way to the bathroom.

Every night the sleep argument ends with me saying, ‘I don’t know how much more of this I can take.’

I couldn’t go to bed through the day today because I had Arthur all day while Max painted his house ready for rental. And it’s the same tomorrow. Today, I stayed up and edited all day. I lasted until eleven, we went to bed at ten and had sex.  He went for a cig after, that’s fine, everybody wants a cig after sex. Then we both went downstairs at one in the morning because he convinced me that I wanted an ice lolly—at one in the morning, that’s crazy in itself.  I had to be the one to get up for them. I got into the kitchen and he followed me down. I was blazing because I needn’t have got out of bed if he was coming down anyway.

At twenty to three, he got up for a cigarette again and woke me. That was it, nought to sixty in one second.

I tell him he’s making me ill.

He doesn’t care.

And he’s right, why should he have to stay in bed if he doesn’t want to? Why is it so impossible for me to spread myself out all over the full bed, enjoy having it to myself and just go back to sleep?