UNCOMFORTABLY CLOSE

The other day my boyfriend helped me bathe for the first time. It wasn’t in a fun way. It was in a “I’m recovering from major knee surgery and can’t bathe myself safely” kind of way. As I sat on a shower chair asking to be passed my shampoo, with my right leg aching in a plastic bag, I thought, “Wow, this is intimate. And terrifying.” For the first week after my surgery my parents had stayed with us, and my mom was able to take on the less glamorous tasks like changing my pants and attending to my wounds. But once they left it was just me and John and my vulnerability/helplessness had nowhere to hide. For the next few weeks, John is not just my partner but my caregiver. It is the first time in our relationship that we’ve had such a dramatic shift in our power dynamic. And I am worried that it will ruin us.

I don’t blame myself for this worry. Even if I didn’t have the trauma of my ex-fiancé walking out, it is always unnerving when there is a change to the ecosystem. It’s uncomfortable to have to ask someone else to do everything for you and it is exhausting to have to do everything for someone else. (Caregiver burnout is real and not something people should feel ashamed about! It’s one of the hardest roles out there and caregivers often need extra support and self-care to manage.) But I do wonder if I would be as worried if I didn’t have my history of things going terribly wrong. When things got a little tough with my ex, he straight up abandoned me. So while I intellectually know that taking care of your partner after surgery is simply part of partnership and one of the reasons people partner up in the first place, I am weighed down by the worry that if I ask for too much, if I make one too many requests for an icepack, John will snap and I will never see him again.

I voiced this fear out loud for the first time the night before my parents left for New York. I announced that the real reason I didn’t want my parents to leave was because I was worried once it was all on John it would be too much and he’d leave me. Yep. I said that out loud to all three of them, which, looking back, is a kind of strange thing to do. But I needed to get it out of my body and into the open. And once I did, I felt a little better. And then John came over to my corner of the couch, gave me a kiss, and assured me he wasn’t leaving. Which made me feel a lot better. Even though I didn’t totally believe him.

One of the things I’ve learned from my broken engagement is that people can surprise you. Whenever you consent to a romantic relationship, you are giving another person immense power over your life and emotions. They have the unique ability to rip the rug out from under you at any moment and upend your future. That’s just a fact. What’s less exact is how you let this reality impact your day-to-day life. There is a small chance that the stress of my recovery from surgery will cause a crack in our foundation that might ultimately lead to us not making it. But I can’t operate under that assumption or in fear of that possibility. That weight will break me far faster than any of the other stuff.

In order for me to properly heal, I need to be able to depend on John. I need to be able to ask for ice whenever I need ice. Being in physical pain is a nightmare. I don’t have the mental energy to also meticulously monitor the amount of help I need. I can be thoughtful about it. I can work my exercises around his schedule and let him pick where we order for dinner and try my best to wait until he is done with one task before asking him to complete another. (That last one easier said than done.) I can continuously thank him for his help and let my love for him be well known. But I cannot live in a state of fear that if he (inevitably) gets annoyed at the situation, it will ruin everything. I cannot become overwhelmed with worry that now that he has been my caregiver it will be hard for him to go back to just being my boyfriend. And I really can’t waste my energy obsessing over how my stomach pouch looks while I’m sitting on a shower chair desperately trying to clean myself before the pain gets to be too much to handle. Right now, I need to focus on getting better. And a healthy relationship gives you the space to be able to do that.

I have always craved intimacy. It’s why I prefer long-term relationships to the fun of a fling. I remember complaining to a friend at the start of my relationship that while things were going really well, I wasn’t comfortable enough with John yet to talk about my stomach issues so I wasn’t enjoying the relationship as much as I could be. (Strange but true!) I need to feel close to feel comfortable. But this past week has been a new level of closeness and dependency that has pushed even my limits. I’ve never before had to have a partner take off my leg brace to change my pants after I spilled water on myself on the couch. (I hope to never have that happen again.) But at least now I know that closeness is possible. I know that this person, in this moment, cares enough about me to clean up my pain medication-induced vomit not once but twice in the same week. And I know I would do the same for him.

We risk a lot when we let someone get close to us. But we risk even more when we don’t. I have no idea if I will spend the rest of my life with John or if something terrible will come between us. I don’t know for sure that this period in our lives won’t weaken what we’ve worked so hard to build. But I know I would not be able to do this on my own. And when I look back on our life together, him helping me bathe will remain a core memory that speaks to his character, our closeness and the importance of a good shower chair.

xoxo,

Allison