04/21/15 - 2:50 p.m.

Crazy girlfriend troubles again. She's going to be unemployed, and I said if she couldn't pay her rent, I could pay her share (as long as she paid my share when she got a job). She said she wouldn't need that next month, but maybe June. I was relieved...

And then today at lunch, she said proudly that she'd checked her bank balance, and she would have enough to cover all of her bills next month. Relieved again, I was. But then she tacked on -- it sounded like an after thought -- "I mean, if you pay my rent this month."

It really sounded like she was scamming me. Twice I'd heard her say she had seen enough money in her bank account already to cover all of her bills. And this whole odd phrasing, where my kicking in only comes as its own tacked-on, after-the-fact second sentence. You can see why I hit the roof.

I asked her what her bank balance was. She gave me the numbers, and it was thousands of dollars. I pointed this out. She was ashamed, and didn't say anything.

So I spent, what, another two hours trying to figure out what the hell happened in that conversation. I think she just forgot where we'd left our earlier conversation, so she forgot that I'd been expecting her to cover her bills this month. She's tired, she's looking at her bank balance, it's okay but a little lower than she's used to, but then she figures that if she's not paying rent it'll be all right -- which is what she wanted. And she just doesn't register that that's different than what we had talked about.

So she springs it on me, without even knowing it -- an inadvertent surprise. And of course it'll be impossible for us to talk about. Because she's tired, because she's ashamed, because she's "got a lot going on", etc. I have to accept that's she's wounded, I guess, and that a lot of weird behaviors are going to come from that.

It's not as bad as I thought it was. She's not scamming me, she's just absent-minded in way that's going to surprise me with a huge extra rent bill. Both are (really) bad, but they're different -- and different kinds of bad...

You know what's funny? Her whole philosophy now is "I'm tired and unhappy, so there's no energy to care about the feelings of anyone around me." And sooner or later, that leads to a situation where I feel treated so badly -- that I start feeling the way she was. Is that toxic? I think I need to keep away from her for a while...

"If you are willing to look at another person's behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time cease to react at all." --Yogi Bhajan

I feel better today. I'm typing this update the next day, not particularly upset. By last night my girlfriend had agreed not to ask me to pay her rent next month. She'd gotten some rest and re-hydrdated, and thinking clearly remembered a 401K she could tap for emergency money.

I'd gotten kind of spun up -- once I figured she was misleading me, I began watching everything she said, and you see what you're looking for. (Especially since she was tired, so there was a certain casual carelessness to everything she said.) It all started because I felt like she was lying to me about needing me to pay the rent money -- and then when she couldn't actually explain how she arrived at that number, it looked even worse.

The truth is, she felt guilty even asking for money. And I had offered to pay her rent earlier, so it's not like she came up with this out of the blue. So when she braves up and introduces it into the conversation, she's feeling ashamed already -- which I took as some sneaky, underhanded guilt. That "lit the fuse" on the paranoia. But eventually I was able to see the whole thing -- and then let it all go.