Posted by:
Anon4This
(
)
Date: June 16, 2012 10:30PM
When I became ill with an automimmune disease at the age of 24, the man who had asked me to marry him and called me the "love of his life" changed toward me instantly. To add insult to injury, his primary concern was that my having the illness affected my appearance, because fatigue prevented me from going to the gym if I wanted to make it to work, too (I gained all of 13 pounds), nor could I afford the expensive hair, nails, and up-to-the-minute clothing I could previously afford, while paying on thousands of dollars in medical bills. Over the space of a few months, he started to look for faults and pick fights over innocuous things, trashing our relationship, deliberately, to try to give himself an excuse to walk out on other trumped-up grounds, so he wouldn't look, in the eyes of our friends and families, like the shallow low-life he really was for walking out on me because I was "defective". Of course, he made sure he found a replacement for me before he took off, and had the nerve to ask me if I would remain on the back burner for him while he dated my replacement, just in case he was making "the biggest mistake of his life". I refused. He married her a few months later, having the wedding reception where we had planned to have ours.
Fast forward a couple of years, to the next guy, whom I had met while I was at my sickest and who swore he would continue to see me even if he "had to see me through a glass window". He eventually also bailed, telling me, "I want to find someone just like you, only healthy". Among other things, he had a scary family medical history, and was concerned that when it caught up to him, he needed to be with someone he could be sure would be able to take care of HIM.
Mind you, I didn't need physical assistance of any sort from them. Essentially, I just got tired and had to rest up for taxing activites, etc. There wasn't anything I couldn't do, they just didn't like the fact that there was someting wrong. Like they were buying a horse.
Some friends disappeared when they heard I was sick, too. But others stepped up, and they're pricel;ess to me.
While I do feel very angry at those two men for taking up time I could have spent looking for actual decent human beings with whom I might have been in a much better situation now, I learned from them and from the flaky friends that I had some good things to offer that they didn't---like loyalty and character. I know how much it hurts to have someone abandon you for something that isn't your fault, but try to remember that it's their personal defects, not yours, that caused your friends/family to do what they've done, and you DID deserve better, even if they didn't have the character to stand by you as you would have stood by them.