Saturday, May 17, 2008
I about had a heart attack this evening. I went online to my bank account to check the balances, preparing to write a bunch of checks tomorrow. One of the lines in the list is my credit card with that bank, a Visa with a maximum of $10,000. I was expecting to see a balance owed on that card of about $700 or less.
Imagine my shock when I read a balance of over $9,356! No way! Ack!
Much running around, and shrieking, and dumping the purse to make sure I hadn't lost the card, and checking to make sure the previous payments had been credited, and tripping over cats that weren't moving fast enough, and searching for phone numbers, and trying to remember where I'd used it recently. Ack ack!
Then I took another look.
The bank had changed the format of the screen. $9,356 is the balance available.
Oh. Ne'mind.
Next thing you know I'll be locking my keys out of the car with me in it.
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In a recent post, another blogger said, "Any couples therapist will tell you that the minute the initial contract of the relationship is breached, all bets are off. " (If the author wishes so, it can be claimed or linked in the comments.)
Anyway, that statement hit me hard, and I've been chewing it ever since.
I guess there are some things that are invisible until someone points them out, and then they're obvious. I'd never thought about this before, but yeah, it's suddenly obvious.
It explains what happened in some of my old failed relationships. It would even explain my observation that divorce so frequently follows breast cancer diagnoses. "She's supposed to provide the care and emotional support, and now she wants ME to? I can't. It's too hard. I didn't sign up for this."
That "initial contract" bothers me, because I doubt that anyone actually thinks about it until it's breached. Until you get to the "didn't sign up for this" stage. Couples don't discuss what they expect from each other, what their roles in the relationship are.
People grow and change, and things happen, and to maintain the initial contract you have to be aware of what clauses must be immutable, or be willing to change the contract. But to do any of that, you have to know what the contract IS.
I looked at my current relationship, and I really don't know what the contract is. I'd sure like to find out before anyone breaches it.
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A related observation: Jay's brain cancer strengthened our relationship rather than hurting it, because it was obvious in our initial contract that I would mother him and take care of him and act as his interface to the world, even though neither of us ever said that.
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4 comments:
My bank pulled the same stunt - AND on one side of the Missouri river, it showed the balance available, one side showed the balance used. Messed me up royally one Christmas, because the numbers were almost equal.
Maybe you can use that "available balance" to buy yourself a new set of shorts after you soiled the ones you were wearing :)
Hmm.. I guess I don't know the pre-determined rules of my relationship contract either. I hope that I'm with someone mature enough to handle it when I've unwittingly crossed them.
Contract violation killed Jay's first marriage. They had discussed children early in the relationship, and then AFTER the wedding, she informed him she didn't want children. Any. Ever. The marriage was effectively dead, as far as he was concerned, within six months of the wedding.
That's why it was so odd that he then married menopausal me, and was happy. Children were not a part of our contract.
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