"Gets on soapbox*
One of my best friends has his first child on the way with a local girl he married. He's a local guy, too, but a little more intelligent and witty than the average local. Anyways, it's obvious that the girl married him for the money he'll inherit. And she drives me up a wall, even though I am respectful to her and whatnot. Everytime we go out, he must buy her something. She's never home, and she is likely doing stuff (chemically) behind his back despite being pregnant. The thing is that he DOES know, he just seems to have reserved himself to yielding to her will.
She's sexually frigid to him, she's always asking for money and things (although it isn't outright ASKING, it's this manipulative sort of dancing around the point, which isn't cute, but rather annoying), and she has chased off all of his other male friends by sleeping with them or trying to sleep with them (I'm the liberal yankee exception, I guiess).
The irony is that she is insanely jealous of any girl he talks to beyond her (despite seeming to only tolerate him and live off of him)...the jealously is so high that I have occasionally pissed her off byu referring to something I liked or that was interesting to me that one of his ex's liked. Like I'm supposed to know everything about his ex's.
The latest thing happened when he and I went to Oxford to pick up a video game for her. On the way back, we stopped and grabbed a bowl of pasta and a beer. She got pissed off that we were eating somewhere! Not because we had stopped to eat, but that we had gone anywhere above McDonald's without her. He's not allowed. He told me she wasn't mad, but the next night he called me from the restaurant...she had managed to guilt him into going back and buying her a huge meal.
Anyways, I had nearly given up on love due to the frequency of those types of relationships that I have seen. But I realize that it IS different elsewhere, that my failures here are NOT my shortcomings as a person. I've lost many friends and relationships while here--and I admit my responsibility and fault in some of them--but I now hang on to the hope that I can leave here and start somewhere fresh with some semblance of a "normal" life elsewhere. What is normal? Not sure. But lately it seems I'm missing out on some of the normality.
*Steps off soapbox*
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