Daily Prompt from the Daily post:
We all have complicated histories. When was the last time your past experiences informed a major decision you’ve made?
Just over seven years ago I met my Husband and we became friends, at the time I had just started seeing another guy. We had gone on a few dates and he was a really nice guy (let’s call him David), he had a great job and earned incredibly good money (approx. 90K p.a.). After about a month I had realised that whenever I went out with David he usually managed to find a poker machine at some point in the night and spend a bit of time there. This was a serious red flag for me as the last two men I had dated had hidden their poker machine love for some time into the relationship, but then two days after they had been paid they were out of money and looking for permanent loans from their girlfriend AKA me.
I had already been aware that my attraction to my new friend was steadily growing and I didn’t feel that was fair on David, so I had some thinking to do.
After the experience of my last two relationships I had serious baggage when it came to any kind of gambling, I had just seen too much of my money go into that coin slot and even when my ex’s won they didn’t pay me back the money I had loaned them.
The worst experience was one night my then boyfriend said he was going to the bar to get a beer, I asked if he could get me a coke while he was there, he then asked me for some money to pay for it. I only had a $50 on me so I gave him that and off he went. Lines at bars can be really long so it wasn’t until the time reached 45 minutes that I started to worry, I went looking for him and found him at the poker machines, he handed me my drink and I looked at it in dismay, because the pokie area was also the smoking area, my drink had gathered some friends in the form of cigarette ash. I pointed this out to him, he suggested I get a new one as it was only $2, I asked for my change so I could and he looked at me surprised and said, “Oh did you want the change?” Now quite aggravated I replied,
“Well I assume you used my money for your beer too so that was $4, my ash coke was $2, that’s $44 change… naturally I would want $44 in change”
“I don’t have the change” he said
“Why? What happened to it?” I asked. He gestured to the poker machine that had only $5 credit left on it, “you put MY money into a poker machine?” by this point I was raising my voice.
“Well, yeah. Is that a problem? It was just change” I was completely shocked and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t in the least contrite.
“Are you kidding me? How could you think it was okay to put someone else’s money in a poker machine? Part of that ‘change’ was supposed to pay for a taxi home from the train station. I now have to walk two kilometres home in the dark! Does that sound like a problem to you?” He then had the audacity to get made and said,
“I thought we were going by the whole ‘what’s mine is yours’ thing, I’m so sorry that $44 is more important to you than your partner having fun” at that point in my life I was stupid, insecure, young and naïve. I was stupid enough to believe it was a mistake because he’d had quite a bit to drink and that it wouldn’t happen again. I am cringing right now because I can’t believe HOW STUPID I WAS!!!!!
I learnt a huge and harsh lesson from that relationship and I was determined to never make the same mistake again. So when David started showing a penchant for gambling alarms were screaming in my head. I decided I didn’t want to risk it and broke it off with him. We parted amicably and still interact on Facebook, it turned out he didn’t have a problem with gambling so I felt bad for judging him prematurely, but at the time I couldn’t see past my past experiences.
Silver lining for both of us though – eventually I started dating my Husband after we both realised being friends wasn’t enough for us and David went on to meet a lovely lady who he is now engaged to.
So everything (luckily) ended up happy sparkle time 🙂
Ditch the Bun 