leggo_my_legs wrote:Thanks for the advice, Views. I'm glad you and your husband found each other. I had been looking for this post but couldn't find it!
I think one thing was that I was barking up the wrong tree, i.e. trying to date able bodied people who really don't understand and are only interested in someone "fit and healthy."
My prior LT relationship - where I had stepkids, dogs, cats, a house, and all that goes with it - ended, essentially, when he started sleeping in the spare bedroom. Why? Because I kicked him so much at night, he sometimes had scratches from my toenails and he NEVER got sleep. At the time, my RLS was very mild. We didn't do anything to bridge the distance that this created. Soon he was working second shift and our hours didn't coincide. Then he took up golf and I scoffed because chasing little balls in the heat sounds like a rung in hell to me. I started doing creative things and spending my time in a darkroom or out hiking or bike riding. One day we looked at each other and realized our paths had diverged so much that we didn't even know each others' friends.
I didn't realize - even then - that the LEGS were the basis of this problem. I correctly identified the differences we had and how it happened, but it didn't occur to me that I had to fix this.
I was incredibly lucky when I started dating hubby that he had celiac and completely understood what a person goes though with stuff such as this; with all my planning about whether we would get along, I did not take one of the most important parts into consideration. Two years into our marriage, the sleep hell started, the augmentation, the searching for doctors, getting 30 minutes of sleep in 2 minute spurts, etc. He stuck by me.
Most people here know I am in the final throes of a long distance move. Maybe because of that, maybe because my birthday is in the fall, maybe because of chance, I have talked to or seen three old flames in the past month, all who reached out to me. One, with whom I have stayed good internet friends, is a full time musician and the lifestyle of never having a day that you could count on for a date didn't work well for me at the time. Because of his crazy schedule, we connect on Facebook all the time and say we will have a lunch, every few months for the last 8 years, lol. We finally met last week. We shared respective stories of the last few years; I told him about the movement disorders and why I was moving and the hell of it all. He said that while he sometimes thought of me with fondness and wished we had seen if it would have worked out, he never could have dealt with what I went through and would have bailed.
So, the very long and wordy route to say - YES! Find someone who gets a forever problem. It could be someone solves this in our lifetimes, but that they would solve it AND develop a therapy that would help us very soon is highly unlikely. It will be years, if I had to guess.