You're projecting, Martin. And what you're projecting says a lot more about you than it does about me.

Since you love bringing the subject of my old boyfriend up here in the Mudcat so much, I guess I ought to set you straight on what happened.

My old boyfriend was 18 and I was 16 when we met. I'll call him Butch just to make things simpler. His father had been ill with Multiple Sclerosis since Butch was about six or seven years old. He (the father) had a particularly bad kind of MS, and by the time I met Butch, his father couldn't move at all and could barely speak. Butch was not at all prepared, emotionally, to deal with this situation, and it wasn't common for families to seek counseling in situations like this way back then. So Butch resented his father terribly for not being "there" for him as he was growing up, and he pretty much wrote his father out of his life, even though his father was lying in a bed just down the hall.

About six months after Butch and I got together, his father went into a coma and after about three days, he died.

Butch was devestated because he felt the tremendous guilt from the way he treated his father in his declining years. I think Butch probably did the best he could under the circumstances, but I can also understand how he would experience guilt after his father died.

Butch told me that he didn't want to end the relationship with me, but that he couldn't see me for a while, and he asked me to wait for him. I waited for him for a few months, and eventually he said he wanted to start seeing me again. We were together for probably a total of about three to four years, but it was never the same after Butch's father died. We eventually grew apart and went our separate ways. No hard feelings for either of us.