My boyfriend’s brilliant. He texts me pictures of his breakfast and will watch one full episode of Murder She Wrote with me every day, without complaining (he does complain if it turns out to be a double bill). In short – he just gets me. He is also a musician and is currently on his third UK tour in the course of our almost-2-year-long relationship. This tour leg is 4 weeks (following 10 days in Europe then one day off) zigzagging around the UK to spread the gospel of “djent” (yes, djent. It’s pronounced “gent” by the way, and has something to do with time signatures, heavy metal, and frisbees) far and wide, like some sort of drum kit-wielding missionary.
I wouldn’t want him to do anything else with his life because if ever anyone had “a calling”, music is his. I really think there is nothing in this life that makes me feel the way that he feels about drumming. I’m a (not very good) musician too, but there’s no deep desire in me to forge a career from it. I have gigged, and recorded and enjoyed a little taster of what life might have been like as a professional violinist but it awakened no fire inside me to give up everything and dedicate my life to it (and that’s not just because the violin is much less cool than the drums). I haven’t got the patience, or what it takes to get up day after day and practise music, because in reality that is what life as a muso comes down to – hours upon hours of practice, hard work, hoarding receipts for tax returns and, of course, travelling – all for mere minutes on stage. But it’s minutes of doing what you love for a crowd of people who love you for doing it. That is true passion.
So where does that leave me; boyfriendless and climbing the walls while he’s away? Last time he toured I became extremely adept at a game on my phone where you smash bricks with a little ball. Maybe it helped to be distracted, maybe it helped to smash things – who knows. At any rate I reached a rather mammoth score of 9,000 and while that is a victory I will be regaling delighted peers with until the day I die, I thought that this time round I ought to do something more productive. So welcome to Seeya Sweetie, a diary of keeping the homefires burning and enjoying having the house to myself so I can redecorate it, spread art materials all over the floor and stay up til 4am painting the kitchen (true story) with no one to tell me that's a silly thing to do, all while my boyfriend shows the world how you pummel a double bass pedal in style.
Bird. Xxx
Footnote: I started out with a little market research and typed “boyfriend on tour” into Google, and here’s a few little snippets I found, from women in similar situations to mine. Not all were negative but... well, a lot were. Thanks to anyone I quoted here.
“Good luck, girls. It doesn't get any better. My boyfriend of 11 years is in Europe right now…”
“The veteran wives I know have been in this for 25 and 40 years, and they are bitter and resentful. Just to let you know, we all have college degrees and traveled when we were younger! We are not jealous, insecure people, but they keep doing things to make us feel second fiddle.”
“If you want a guy who loves you more than he loves his job, DO NOT MARRY A MUSICIAN! Sitting with my cats at 5 a.m. and I haven't heard his voice in 10 days.”
“I don't think I can handle it anymore-I can't stand the clubs and the drunk chicks. True I could be called insecure and all the things that are my issues, but really I would just rather not need to "try".”
“i know he misses me too but i just feel so far away from him and lonely...im also afraid that he isnt thinking of me as much because hes out having fun and im at home...”
Also, praise be, just as I was about to commit myself fully to a whining, clingy, inconvenient, complaining, embarrassing existence as a pregnancy-entrapment plotting "band girlfriend" who is apparently also a stripper, I thankfully found cavemancircus.com and their delightful list to help me avoid all of the above ideas, entitled "Pay attention ladies! Here are the 23 rules for dating a musician". Most of what you need to know about this website is that it has a search-and-replace function set to turn the word "ass" to "booty." This means that words like "embarrass", "assume" and "passion" actually, genuinely, truly in the course of the article become "embarrbooty", "bootyume" and "pbootyion". But, as with most insane rants, there was one solitary pearl of wisdom in number 23: "Keep the band separate from your everyday life. That’s your boyfriend’s pbootyion, find your own". So while this blog might have been indirectly caused by my boyfriend's pbootyion, the pbootyion for design is all my own.
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