Search Results: when to let go

To me, the idea of eating with others is far more foreign than eating alone could ever be to most people, or at least that's the vibe I'm getting.

As a kid, my father got home 2-3 hours before my mother did, leaving my brother and I to eat with my dad. My father provided for me, but that's all he did, he never helped raise me, teach me, all he did was insult, threaten and scold me and my mother at every opportunity.

My brother was the son he wanted and I'm the one he wishes he didn't have, that's how he's made me feel every day since I was born.

For this reason, I started taking food to my room to stay away from him. In school, the noise and frequent rejection from others pushed me to find a teacher willing to let me and a few others eat in a room away from the cafeteria. Even then, I never went to talk, I went because I didn't like my classmates and didn't like being around them.

I never felt welcome or belonging, only 2 people ever made me feel anything but unwanted. For all these reasons, eating alone was pretty much the only way to eat.

It has been 16 years since I sat at a table with just my parents and brother, and I will never eat with my father alone, and I'm sorry to say that I really do mean that.

In high school, I ate at the table closest to the door, I ate fast, usually just a couple minutes. I didn't talk to anyone, I just ate, took my enzymes and went to the courtyard to throw the football. I'd accepted that aside from throwing a football outside, me and others just weren't ever going to have any kind of relationship, discussion, we were never going to spend time together, so I kept to myself, and frankly, I was as annoyed with their presence as they were with mine. So the hatred was very mutual

As you've noticed, I've been more open but still, I have no shortage of hesitation to change eating from a necessary refueling of the body to a social environment.

But I'll get there. Is eating a social event for you?

Let's say you have a lazy boyfriend, you have to go away for a few weeks to visit family. You expect the place to be disgusting when you come back.

You come in to a spotless apartment with everything stocked exactly the way you like it, exactly where it should be, and before you can remind him to do the laundry, you look an see he's already folding it like a pro and steaming away every little crease that he finds.

How attractive would this be to you, a man stepping up and showing this devotion to you?

Full disclosure, I sucked at chores forever but now I'm downright obsessive with making sure there's not one hair in the bathroom, not one smudge on any mirror, and ensuring plates are spotless and then even still, washing them again.

If I was your boyfriend and stepped up like that, would it change how you see me by showing my willingness to change, or creatinf resentment in the realization I was capable but ignorant?