Precipice

The girlfriend and I are considering breaking up.

To recap, I met the Girlfriend shortly before I left Russia in 2009. To my surprise she remained a loyal and steadfast part of my life for the three years I was in Saudi. We had a week-long vacation every two-three months, and I visited her in Russia during the summers. She was on Skype ready to talk pretty much every single night at 9.00pm.

From the beginning I was pleased, but skeptical. She is a responsible and serious girl; I'm an English teacher. Enough said. I was honest with her from the beginning about the realities of my life as an English teacher, which puts me on par with being a migrant farm worker or a carny.

But you know how that goes, human nature being what it is. The more I told her she should find a better guy, the more she said she wanted to wait for me.

Three years, I told her. I would stay in Saudi Arabia for three years, with the intention of saving six figures.

And she hung in there.

(I should say I was faithful to her during this period; unless you want to count some pervasive "sexting" with various girls over the first year or so.)

So after Saudi, Plan A was to bring her to America to study English for a year, meet the folks, and decide if we wanted to get married.

That fell though, as mentioned. She was denied a visa by the American consulate in Russia on the grounds that she didn't have enough strong ties to Russia to ensure that she would return.

Plan B was that I would go to Russia for a few months in fall of this year, and we'd there decide if we wanted to go get married. Or, possibly, we could go to someplace like Cyprus or Malta for her to study English for three months, or maybe even go together to someplace nice Russians could go easily, like Brazil or Indonesia.

But now we're on the Precipice.

Being denied the American visa was like "a cold shower" for her, she said; it showed her that everything I'd been saying about the possibility of life with me was completely true. It would be a succession of problems with documents, sudden job changes, no fixed home, no pension or social security, and irregular hours at my work.

So she wants until the end of August to think about it.

"I waited three years, you can wait until the end of the summer," she said.

After which point, I might be single again.

I'm not TOO shattered at the thought of it; what is a life of travel and fucking random women, if not training for a life alone.

But then again, I'm 43. I don't particularly want to be one of those grey-haired fat red-faced men that prowl the whore-filled bars in Bahrain and Bangkok and Rio and so forth. Or the old English teacher living alone with some cats.

What's more frightening, life alone, or life with somebody?

I got no answer for you on that one. . .not yet, anyway.