day 1

cheetah has lived with me for eight and a half months now. but we had another argument, and i’ve decided it’s time to start keeping a sparse log of what we argue about, so today makes a great day 1

the current encounter really happened yesterday, and it was a two-stage argument:

1. the coupon

i was cooking a complex meal, something kind of special. i’m in the middle of the hardest part, actively keeping my cheese saus from cracking while combining everything else into it, when cheetah wants me to take a coupon from him that he found somewhere

cheetah is definitely smart enough to figure out that this coupon isn’t going to be useful until the next trip to the grocery store. he probably could even figure out a good place to hold onto it until then. but i don’t immediately drop my spoon and take care of it for him, and so he gets sarcastic and mean, and then we start arguing

best i can figure for why is that it was a pure power play – the point was to interrupt me at an inopportune moment and be praised as the hero who had found a shiny. i failed to fulfill my roll and this pissed him off

2. the dinner

we’ve been battling about food for days already now, truly

we got into this again. the meal in question was chicken mushroom alfredo. he’s brought alfredo pasta home from work a couple times lately, and the other day he wanted me to make some. but we ended up arguing that night instead, and so it was yesterday before i finally got around to making it

i thought it came out really well. i haven’t made an alfredo in a long time, but i pulled this one off pretty close to flawlessly

he wouldn’t even try it

so i was hurt from that. and thus i tried to explain why – you know, to communicate and discuss like he says we don’t do

to me sharing food is an important part of a relationship. pretty much every day we’re together i try to share a meal with cheetah

usually this means i do a lot of cooking for three, cheetah eats two parts of the three, and i get the rest. further, he does a lot of complaining that i feed him crap, and he’s unhealthy for it. i usually pose back if he doesn’t like my cooking he’s welcome to cook for us instead. in fact, and i mention this again yesterday, i would really appreciate if he would return the favor of being cook more often than he does

but from there, the argument went haywire

yesterday cheetah carefully explains that my assumption we should be sharing food at all puts unfair demands upon him. further, it’s presumptuous of me to try to share my food with him. finally, it’s totally unreasonable that i would want any sort of equitable relationship where he shares food back with me

at the time i found myself questioning what is it we do together then? for our relationship to work, we have to do some things together, right? physical touch has been out for months. working on things together is a total non-starter. as shown by the coupon story above, he won’t budge himself ten minutes or ten feet to save me a chore without an argument. and apparently as of recent days, i am no longer allowed to do anything that helps him either

so what is it we actually can do together, i asked?

cheetah took himself to work yesterday by bike for the first time in two weeks. he left me a wad of money on the table, labeled “gas money.” you know, in all our multiple years of interacting, i’ve never even once asked for gas money. but suddenly he decides he should be paying gas money. i guess because he thinks paying me for the help i give him somehow absolves him from needing to show gratitude for that help. it doesn’t, at all, but i’m sure he wants to believe it does

i left his money and drank his vodka instead. i was asleep by the time he got home. he brought home more alfredo pasta from work, i notice, even though there’s leftovers of mine still in the fridge

today he’s too mad to even talk to me. he stormed off again by bike, and it’s hours before he has group so i’m not really sure where he went or when he might be back

but i guess that’s the rules of our relationship now

if i planned around him or did anything for him at all, it would put the undue expectation on him that somehow he might actually have to do something to support me and my goals someday, and that’s such a repulsive thought that he finds it easier to avoid me completely

i dunno, i’m just guessing here what’s in his mind

what i really don’t understand is how he thinks relationships work. to me a relationship is built by mutually supporting each other. believing in each other. helping each other with each other’s needs and goals

at the end of it all, i don’t know how to be close to cheetah

i mean physically is one thing, but i don’t know how to be close to cheetah emotionally either

if doing things with each other isn’t our relationship, and doing things for each other isn’t our relationship, what’s the basis of our relationship? doing the things we need to do, entirely by ourselves, out of pure spite for each other?