Gabriel Mizrahi

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.

How can I do that?

Signed, starting to breathe hard because I'm finding this feat hard when it comes to my tricky sweetheart.

I think when I came up with that sign-off, I was probably experiencing some secondhand post-traumatic stress from this letter, and I just lost my ear for rhymes.

That's figuratively.

Literally.

Yeah.

Do you guys have a good rack on a fire retardant blanket?