My boyfriend has low vision and a temper
I've been dating this really interesting guy for several months and while it hasn't been perfect, there's been lots of good in it. He can be utterly sweet and he is also smart and helpful and we share a lot of interests. I like him. My friends like him. I like his friends. He is legally blind, but functions really well at most things, can read, use a computer, cook, shop (with difficulty), etc. He says he can see me fine, he can read a menu at a restaurant. But then he surprises me. Like he was cooking steaks and asked me to check to see if they were done because he couldn't tell. I was happy to do that, but didn't realize he couldn't see well enough to do that. He is an accomplished photographer but I sometimes get the impression he uses a camera so he can look at things closer. Sometimes he takes a picture of me, then looks at the picture closely as if to read my expression. I'm not sure though. When I asked if he was doing this, he didn't answer.
The trouble is that when anything goes wrong, he almost always picks someone to blame. For example, we were supposed to go on a trip together and he misplaced something, so we had to go about two hours out of our way to go back to his house to look for it. It turned out to be with us all the time, but he blamed the whole thing on a friend of his.
He also loses his temper easily. Monday, at his house, was the worst so far. We were getting along really well. Everything was peaceful and loving. Kind of blissful, actually.
He made me some coffee but kept asking if it was okay before he made himself a cup. I finally walked over and said he should taste mine. He ignored me, although he'd been talking to me just seconds before. So I set the cup down about a foot to his right, where he normally puts coffee. He often doesn't answer when I talk to him. If I check in and say, "Did you hear me?" he always says yes, so I didn't think much of him not acknowledging me. But a minute later, he knocked the cup over, the coffee went everywhere, soaking his mouse and mouse pad and dripping into a drawer full of equipment and onto a wooden floor.
He just went postal. One minute I'm sitting there peacefully and the next minute, he's shouting accusations at me. I jumped up and worked hard to try to clean up the mess. He got me anything I asked for --towel, rag, bowl of water-- but mostly he stood there kind of helpless and ranting. He ended up calling me an "arrogant b****" when I didn't immediately obey a command to unplug some wires. I was afraid it would be really hard to reconnect them, so I was trying to think if there was another way. It wasn't like I was overtly challenging him. But he yelled that it was his house and I would do what he said. I was just appalled.
At first I tried to stay calm. I did shout at him once. Then I stopped.
After he got angry because I didn't unplug the wires immediately (I did it after a few minutes), he asked me to leave. I have cleaned up lots of messes and this didn't seem that bad to me, but he wouldn't cooperate with me. Instead, he began dismantling his whole office by himself. I packed up, made the bed and offered one more time to help him clean up, he said no, so I drove home feeling numb.
He usually calls me every day, but I haven't heard from him in nearly a week except for one email in which he said he'd mistakenly disconnected his own phone service and was getting a friend to buy a new mop to clean up the "sour milk." I had wiped up the worst of the coffee before I left, so I couldn't believe he hadn't just cleaned up the rest in a few minutes. There was no carpet... His email said he was still "really upset" and I got the impression he was blaming me for his lack of phone service as well as his spilling the coffee.
I guess I've been hoping all week that he would call or email me to extend some kind of olive branch. But nothing. It's now Saturday and it's like I never existed.
I'm just stunned at the suddenness of this relationship being over. Should I call him? Forget him and get on with my life? I've never been called a b**** before that I can remember and I didn't like it. Is this just a lover's quarrel, or is something fundamental really wrong? I need some perspective! All red flags? Still another abusive male or a disabled person who can deal with his own limitations. Was he right that it was my fault?
I guess I think that his vision problems make it hard to adjust to having anyone put anything anywhere he doesn't know about. And maybe that is more of a problem for him than I realized. But if he won't answer when I talk to him, how can I ever know if he's heard me? I have tried to get him to talk to me about what I need to know to deal with his vision problems, and he basically tells me he has no serious problems. When I ask what he can see and what not, he says he can't explain. He seems uncomfortable when I ask, so then I drop it. But when he was angry he kept shouting that he was blind.
I feel that when his vision limits what he can do and or causes things to go wrong, he is either in denial about it or using it as an excuse to not take any responsibility for the consequences. My feeling is that it's just something that is a part of him we would both have to live with, not something that is his fault, but not mine either. Because he has vision problems, I'm not sure what my responsibility was in this.
Sorry this is so long.
