Gabriel Mizrahi

Anyway, all right, so... About a year and a half ago, he raged verbally at his boss and got fired, which made for a hard winter when the farmhand jobs he relies on only hire in spring and during late summer harvest.

Then, just last week, he raged at our landlord, who was making a reasonable request of us, and he also went to our landlord's house a couple days later and yelled at our landlord's wife over the incident.

Luckily for us, it's a small town and our landlord's wife loves me, so I was able to do some rooted in Al-Anon principles damage control, basically explaining to the landlords what is and isn't within my control and what I personally am able to do as a tenant to comply with their reasonable requests.

You ever take care of your side of the street so good you narrowly avoid being homeless?

Yeah, this is a great ad for Al-Anon, I will say that.

Truly.

I told them that I could not predict or promise how my sweetheart will behave, and they made it clear that if any verbal raging happens again, at least one of us will be evicted.

I made it clear to my sweetheart and my landlord that from now on, any tenant-landlord communications will go through me and not through my sweetheart.

I believe we're all on the same page about this, but I'm also aware that my sweetheart Jesus Christ is a completely unpredictable wild card.

I understand that I'm taking a certain amount of risk by being willing to be his partner.

And I'm doing some long, hard assessment of all of that.

My sweetheart can't really be communicated with about anything serious.

The only way I can get him to listen to information I need to give him is if I wait several hours or even a full day until he is completely calm and then leave a letter for him before he gets home from work when I am leaving for evening jiu-jitsu class.

He gets to read my diplomatically worded honesty and have his own private space to get angry about it if he wants.

By the time I get home, he's calmed down and usually takes it upon himself to acknowledge what I have communicated.

It would be easier if I could talk to him like a normal person, but I don't think that's possible with him.

And this has proven to be the least stressful and least exhausting way for me to assert what I need to assert with him.

I genuinely love him and would prefer not to easily give up on our relationship, though at some point I am willing to make that decision if this proves to be too much.

This isn't too much.

But for now, I'm looking for some short-term ideas for how to get even better at drawing boundaries, how to de-escalate conflict, stuff like that.