I got to talk to Troy! Yay! Sort of. To the talking to him, not the yay. lol. He tried to Skype me, but it wasn’t working very well. I think he was using WiFi on his phone, so the connection was really bad. We tested it out before he left and using Skype phone-to-phone kinda sucked. I was using 3G on my phone and he was using WiFi. Today he was using WiFi and I was using my computer. He said he’d try to figure out what was making it not work so that we can try again later. It’s 8:18am in Kuala Lumpur right now, so he’s got a full day of work ahead of him before he can look into it and he may just decide to go play instead of trying to make Skype work. That’s just how he is. Staying in touch with people isn’t a huge priority with him. But we messaged back and forth for a few minutes after we determined Skype wasn’t going to work before his coworkers showed up and he had to go. Their hotel is by a couple large malls, so they all went out and checked them out yesterday afternoon. Then we talked about my meeting with the bishop for a minute and then he had to go. I wish we had had more time. It kinda feels like I didn’t even get to talk to him. Oh well. He has been emailing me periodically, so that will have to do until we get this Skype thing figured out.
As for the bishop, that was interesting. He gave me some paperwork to fill out so I can get my temple sealing cancelled. From what the paperwork says, it may take a while. I have to fill out the paperwork, write a letter, get a letter from the bishop and then track down my ex-husband to get a letter from him. If Caleb refuses to write a letter agreeing to the temple divorce, we have to do some other stuff. All of that has to be submitted to the First Presidency and then I have to await their decision. Mom said her temple divorce took about a month, but my institute teacher said his daughter has been waiting several months. I guess if I can at least get it all mailed off before I move to Malaysia that it will be okay.
My bishop isn’t too thrilled about Malaysia. He said that part of the world is amazing and that he thinks I will like the experience, but he doesn’t want me to move to follow a guy he doesn’t think is good enough for me. His whole basis for that is that Troy isn’t really into church and also because he knows my kind of guys. My ex-husband ended up leaving the church for a while because he wanted to get back into the smoking/drinking/partying lifestyle (and also because he was leaving me for a girl he dated in high school) and the last guy I dated was a Baptist who was a huge control freak. So, he knows I don’t make the best choices in men. But Troy is different. He may not be a perfect Mormon or a perfect guy, but he’s real. He doesn’t pretend to be someone he’s not and he doesn’t make excuses for who he is. When I’m with Troy, I never wonder if he’s lying or pretending to be the kind of guy he knows I want. We’ve talked before about the kind of guy I want and he said he was concerned about us because he’s only about half of the things I have on my list. He’s fully capable of being most of them, he just needs to decide that’s what he wants to be. I’m not going to try to make him into what I want. He needs to decide for himself that that’s what he wants to be. I know he can do it. He has the potential to be the most amazing husband and father, he just doesn’t want that right now. He said he’s given up on those things, so he doesn’t even want to try for it. So, we’re just taking life one day at a time. Sometimes it frustrates me because I want something more substantial than one day at a time, but I just have to keep reminding myself that we all have our own dragons to slay. Sure, he and I could fall apart in Malaysia, but we will both have learned something and grown from our time together.
Another thing the bishop is concerned about is that I will be trapped in Malaysia. That’s a concern I’ve had, but not in the same way. He thinks that once I get over there that Troy will make me entirely dependent on him and then I will be completely in his control and cut off from an escape plan. As he was talking, I couldn’t help but think of the book and movie Not Without My Daughter. It’s about an American woman who marries and Iranian man and they take their daughter to Iran to visit his family and the guy pretty much makes her his captive. My bishop told me that I need to keep a money reserve set aside and not touch it no matter how much Troy pushes me to and to not ever let Troy keep hold of my passport or bank cards. That almost made me laugh. Troy is always offering to pay for stuff for me and knows that I struggle financially sometimes, so he helps me out sometimes, even when I tell him not to. I feel like I’m taking advantage of him when he pays for my stuff. I felt awful when he bought the battery for my car on Thursday, but I don’t have the extra money to buy one and the one in my car was dead. So, I have no worries about Troy surreptitiously depleting my funds to keep me hostage. lol. I told him what my bishop said and he laughed and told me not to worry about that. I don’t. Any time I doubt about going to Malaysia, it never has anything to do with how I think Troy will treat me. I’ve never doubted that if we break up that he will help me get back to the United States. He’s not the kind of guy who will just abandon me and leave me to fend for myself in a foreign country.
The other side to that one is that my bishop doesn’t want me to become financially dependent on Troy. He said that living with Troy is a bad idea (which I told him I wasn’t going to do it from a morality standpoint) because if Troy and I break up, he is concerned that Troy would kick me out and I would have nowhere to go. Good grief. I keep wracking my brain and trying to figure out how my bishop got this opinion of Troy. I’ve not talked to my bishop a whole lot about Troy and never anything that would cause this type of opinion. I have a friend, Becky, who doesn’t have the best opinion of Troy and some of the bishop’s words echo a bit of what Becky has said to me. But Becky tends to think the worst about men in general and blows things way out of proportion a lot. She thinks that because Troy isn’t hugely into church that he’s an awful person. Kinda makes me mad sometimes. Troy may have made some mistakes in his life, he may not be perfect, but who are we to judge him? Who are we to write him off as a lost cause? Since when is it our place to judge the mistakes of others and not give them a chance to show the good they have? Why is it okay for me to make a mistake and still be a good person, but not him? It really infuriates me when people have that mentality. Troy is an amazing person. He is a good man with a good heart and he cares very much about other people. Does he act like it most of the time? No. lol. Drives me crazy how much of a butthead he can be sometimes, but now that I know him better, I can see the good he has in him. I used to think he was the biggest jerk ever. I would get so irritated at the sexist and sexual (mild) comments he would make. It took me a long time to realize that he only said those things because he likes to push people’s buttons. Once I stopped getting irritated at his comments, he quit making them. I think it may have also been that I told him how disrespected I felt when he made comments like that. And maybe that I told him that comments like that are probably the reason why the girls he likes don’t want to date him. lol. And maybe because I told him that he came off as a class 1 jerk when he said stuff like that. haha.
So, overall, Troy is a good guy. He may have a lot of rough edges (and I mean A LOT!), but he’s a good guy.
Anyways, back to my bishop. We talked for about 45 minutes about Malaysia and all that. He felt better about everything once I told him I’ve already priced out flights to Las Vegas and I know what the baggage fees are. I am only taking clothes with me and my computer hard drives, so I won’t have a ton of stuff to pack. Not like now where it’s my entire apartment. Blech. Plus, my brother will be in Australia next summer, so if things go really bad between me and Troy and I can’t get a flight home for a while, I can always go to Australia to visit my brother. But I don’t see things going so badly that I would need to get out of there ASAP. Troy isn’t that kind of guy and I like to think I’m not that kind of person. Sure, we both have our flaws, but I don’t see either one of us as the type of people who would hate so badly that we would make living in the same building unbearable to the other.
I guess one of the concerns I have about moving to Malaysia is the fact that Troy said he doesn’t love me and isn’t sure he would ever marry me. That makes me wonder why on earth he wants me to go. Why did he invite me to go with him? Why is he working to get it so his company will pay for me to get over there? It just seems like a conflicting word/action situation and it confuses me. It makes me want to pull back and I wonder if I should even go. We both have a contingency plan for if we break up, so are we both not really into this relationship? Well, I don’t think he has a contingency plan. He doesn’t need one. His work is paying his rent and utilities and they are giving him a phone and a car. Me, I have to pay my own rent and utilities and for my own phone. Plus, I have to see if I can even keep my job. If not, there’s no way I can pay for everything over there. Plus, there are all the costs of getting over there to think about. So, I’m the one that is going to get screwed if things go badly over there. So it makes me wonder if this is really a good idea.
Well, I should probably end this. I should go to bed soon and I’ve totally trashed my living room. Earlier I was going through all my boxes of things to scrapbook and organizing it all. My living room is very much a mess. I want to get it organized before I move so that when I come back I can just start working on it. But we’ll see if that happens. Having Troy gone will certainly help me have more time to do it. And give me time to think about whether or not this is what I really want or if I’m just scared of the change. I can’t even rearrange my living room because I hate change so much. I guess we’ll see what happens. I miss Troy a lot. I really wish we could actually talk. He’d help me sort this all out.
