L sent me a message today. I’m too tired to really respond or write about yet but if it isn’t a lie then she handled it in the worst way:
“ On Thursday when I got home and checked the mail, his license plates had arrived. They were the last things I had that were his. I called him and told him they were here, he came by to pick them up, and you decided at that very moment that was the perfect time to do some snooping. Congratulations- I’m sure you must feel very satisfied with yourself (I’m being sarcastic). Yes, I had a migraine, and yes I picked the easy way out instead of driving all the way to a police station to give them back to him. After the way I vowed to resolve things when we spoke earlier in the week, I can’t believe you would throw things away that fast without even asking. I wanted to be with you, I have and always will love you. I was so good to you for so long, I tried so hard, I am so broken and so upset by everything happening in my life right now, but you don’t care. I still believe that we should be together, but we are so disfunctional together that maybe that will never be possible. I’m sure you don’t care.”
The thing is, I did ask and she didn’t answer. She put “I think you should stay away from me” in the conversation long before any explanation. She’s waited four days or this email. She did promise never to see him again. The exchange should have taken a few minutes yet somehow she was out of touch for hours. I know she is weak but she had no strength at all to control the situation or to keep her promise to me. As for being so good to me, it feels like in the past few weeks she has paid no attention at all to my boundaries or my feelings beyond short momentary bursts that she quickly rescinds and counteracts. I do care and I did react in the moment, making this all the harder to believe in.
Maybe she is hurting and maybe she is weak. If so I feel sorry for her. But she has been lying and deceitful and hurtful for weeks. She keeps him in her life. There is always one more “last conversation with psychoex.” I have been through four times with her seeing him in person and being absolutely done with him. When will it stop?
I want the answer to be something other than “When I remove her from my life.” That future doesn’t seem bright anymore.
Well at least one situation is resolved. The police made L come over to confront her psychoex face to face in front of them. I guess this gives them clear grounds to arrest him the next time he sits in his car outside of her house for hours or harasses. They stood with her and the whole interaction took less than 15 minutes.
I’m really proud of her for calling the police and facing him. I just really hate having this drama and my life. Part of me feels like she asked for it by letting him stay with her but part of me also realizes that she is the victim of someone who found her weak points and knew how to put pressure on them. Sometimes I wonder if that is any different from when I left her and she kept trying to win me back or when she left me and I did the same. Perhaps the key difference is that I respected her boundaries and primarily kept it to replying to her emails instead of sending my own. I don’t know.
She still slept at my place last night, albeit on the couch. We had a mostly pleasant evening with special guest stars including the new Wendy’s Strawberry Frosty Shake and a dvd of There Will Be Blood. She also took back the stuffed animal I had won for her in Japan. I didn’t want it back in the first place and regardless of how we end up, it would make me happy for her to have it.
It was still a nervous night for both of us in interacting with each other. Yesterday before coming over she stated she “didn’t want to be running from one ex to another” which I found very hurtful though it is one way to look at her coming back to me, especially considering that she didn’t take me back till he had moved in with her and been there a few days. She still maintains it was all platonic even though he didn’t want it to be that way. I’m having trouble believing that.
At one point we were cuddling and I became very emotional about the idea of her leaving me again. I still feel like she is going to walk out on me at any moment for any reason, something tiny I do that leaps out in her brain and latches on to her thinking till suddenly I’m a horrible person in her mind, something unsafe. Unlike before though, she was willing to comfort me and confirm this wasn’t the case.
She said she had a major revelation yesterday- that when I’m telling her about things (at the moment I was explaining how you can set up email forwarding on gmail) I’m not trying to tell her she’s stupid or talking down to her, I’m just showing her how to do something. She thought it was a major breakthrough. I do too, if it sticks.
Ultimately I don’t know how the relationship will go but regardless someone I care about has found the strength to stand up to a stalker. That has to be a good thing. Since I helped her find that strength, I guess I should consider it a good day to be me. Since I took things slowly yesterday with her, I think I can still respect myself and the idea of taking things at a comfortable pace instead running at the breakneck speed of fear. At least in the moment, everything turned out alright. Can I ask for more?
L recently noted that the weekend always brings psychoex excitement and the business last week felt like getting a second weekend when it finished up exploding on a Friday instead of a Sunday. Tonight L is going to be crashing at my place because psychoex has called and stated that he is coming to visit under the pretense of picking up his contact lens prescription at a local mall. He’ll be stopping by her place whether she likes it or not.
I offered my place as a refuge since I personally feel no one should be subjected to stalking and should have a place to feel safe. I know he is insane and I know that regardless of how she views the situation he is a danger to her.
I’m sitting here listening to her asking the police to drive by her place to make sure he isn’t there. I want to make sure she says certain things to get the police on edge so they don’t try to convince her to see him or brush her off. I just hope the rest of this night is boring.
As I take my time to ponder the state of my current relationship with L, I also ponder the current meaning of this blog to me.
When I started writing here, I wanted a journal of our successes in reforming our relationship with the help of couples therapy. With all that has happened in the past month, especially her leaving me and letting her ex stay with her for a week before deciding she wants to get together, I find myself in a confused state. Writing about “missing yet getting over the one who left me behind” was much easier than “do I reject the one who rejected me?”
If you’ve seen my comments on other blogs, you’ll know I leave the title as Couples Therapy with a strike through it, symbolizing the breaking of our relationship a month ago. This is something I can’t do in the title mechanism of wordpress but it has lead me to wonder what the point of this blog will become. Originally when I first began blogging I wanted to analyze culture, something you can find the beginnings of here. I’ve thought of combining the two blogs, though I’m not sure if they make sense together.
If I stay with L, it goes against many of the things I’ve read at Getting Past Your Past though if we work through things this may still be a journal of our successful relationship. After asking Lirone how she expanded her focus beyond her initial premise, I find I must also find some way to expand this to keep it vital since it doesn’t seem that it can be the “beacon of working things out in a healthy relationship” that I once wished it would be. So where should it go from here?
In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey pays to have a painful relationship scrubbed from his memory but in the middle of the process he realizes the value of those memories and fights inside of his mind to retain any vestige of his time with Kate Winslet. After talking to L extensively this weekend, it feels to me like someone has gone through and thrown mud on every memory we have together. She claims it is me. We spent the day Saturday and a few hours Sunday trying to create sunny memories with some small degree of success.
After L decided that she wanted to be back together and the psychoex was out of the picture, I found myself in the oddest position. Without a doubt I was willing to help her get rid of the psychoex- he is dangerous and she is someone I care about. But now I am faced with picking up the pieces after this debacle and deciding what to do next.
We went to the a park by the river and ate sandwiches while watching oversized squirrels chase each other around the trees. We talked, laughed, smiled, and touched while periodically her or my hurt would spurt up like old faithful. We’re working through each other’s issues but there is a key question I haven’t resolved in my heart- will she respect me over time?
I’ve been reading the Getting Past Your Past posts which all suggests that she will leave me again and that she will have difficulty. The therapist has counseled me to be prepared to enforce my boundaries and insist on both her getting therapy for her issues and respecting me. After all the wrinkles and flip-flopping of the past month, our relationship resembles less a love affair and more a political campaign. It isn’t the way I want to live and I wonder if we can change.
Two key questions really come up:
Can I trust her after all of changes and mistrust?
Can we build something happy with the two of us together?
But the real question may actually be do I want to put in the effort. I started this blog a month ago to detail the effort of putting together our relationship through couples therapy and the couples therapist has pointed out that, after all this time, we are starting out at square zero. When we are together and positive I feel wonderful and our wounds seem to be healing, but should that be something to go through?
As much as I long to hold on to the happy memories and focus on the positive, after the choices she made this month I have to protect myself. As one friend said, “It isn’t your love that is in question, it’s the effect it has on your well being.” So I want to follow the day and reach for happiness, yes. But do I do that with her?
Yesterday she told me that, in her mind because of my actions in the fall, I am so much worse than the man I am referring to as psychoex- a controlling, narcissistic fellow with a nasty verbally abusive streak. For whatever reason, perhaps the overlap in time of her seeing both him and I, she has tangled us together in her mind. Until she chooses to sort me from him and realize my positive traits, until she chooses to reach for the bright side and try to work through her happiness I can’t see this going anywhere.
“Reach for the bright side.”
“Follow the day and reach for the sun.”
Light & Day by the Polyphonic Spree
(theme form Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
As of five am this morning, L had managed to eject her abusive controlling ex from her apartment. The decision now is whether I am willing to step past all that has happened in the past month and stand by her side. I have made a choice, but that does not lead to a decision.
After two days of fuzzy deadlines, last night found L finally forced him out of the apartment. On Wednesday she gave him the ultimatum that she had told me was going to be given on Tuesday: “out by tomorrow.” When he made no move to begin packing she kicked him out and promised I could come see that he was gone around 11 pm, except he “lost his debit card” so she gave him gas money and helped him find a hotel.
We were going to reconnect at around midnight to talk. Instead, I once more entered the black box of silence that she seems to like to live in as she sent me a one word text telling me that she was, “Finishing.” An hour later another text told me they were “talking.” At three in the morning she finally called and told me that he had played the “I’ll kill myself if you leave me” card, which in my life is so over drawn that I think I’d be cold and callous to anyone who told me that. I may have been callous in this as I sent her a text saying, “I don’t care what he is saying, it is time to make a choice between him or me.” When she came back we spent the next few hours talking though at the moment nothing is resolved, I’m unsure how to react to this situation.
As always, there are more complications. Two nights ago I decided that I would put on my detective/stalker/frustrated-by-being-lied-to hat and hung out with her roommate, who she is currently at odds with. While at the moment I chose not quite to believe anything but the actions I witness, at one point I was when the apartment staring at the empty couch where L’s ex was supposed to be sleeping. She swears that he never slept with her and spent each night on the couch. Her explanation was that he may have been in the bathroom, sleeping on the floor, or staring at her sleep. She swears she is telling the truth though that empty couch was such a powerful visual that I sank to the floor and wept for a moment before leaving. I chose not to confront her in the moment. I know being there was wrong but I am so sick of living in darkness.
L has made so many choices that lead her to spend time in the shadows of deception, not always lying but often laced with half-truths or important things gone unsaid. The first thing that should have clued me in was a month ago when I found out she had a second cell phone that she had never lost on those weekends when she vanished, she just didn’t tell me because it was primarily for communicating with a boyfriend she had while we were broken up. The past few months are rife with fuzzy deadlines, mixed messages, and tangled stories. I love her but I refuse to be a part of this web of obsfucation that seems to be such a part of her life.
I love her but I have made a choice, though it does not lead to a decision. I’m meeting with the therapist in about thirty minutes to discuss how to implement it. My choice is to stand up and live in the light, to no longer welcome these shadows of confusion in my life. The decision to make is whether that is a journey she is willing and able to come along on. The decision is also whether I can trust her to stand up for her self, her love, and her life and complete it.
I don’t usually like to quote someone else for my title, but after meeting with L yesterday I can think of no better words to describe how I see her. Yesterday, after vacillating for a month, she decided that she wanted to be with me for real. Yet, as usual when we try to get back together, there is a wrinkle.
In agreeing to talk to her, even though I really made the decision to let her go on Sunday, I sat down and carefully looked at my boundaries. I thought out my standards and I had a long cross country discussion with the therapist (she’s currently in California on vacation- I think she needs to take another one after helping me). I reread some posts from Getting Past Your Past. I decided to focus on this list from Susan’s article on five platitudes which I hope she won’t mind if I repeat here:
You get what you put up with.
Hungry people make poor shoppers. In this case meaning if you’re hungry for love you may chose poorly.
The “one” will never stop loving you. I had trouble with this one since I know that I’ve left her, but maybe that meant something too.
In order to find the right person, you need to be the right person. One thing I’ve been focusing on is becoming a better person than I am.
Love is an action. It doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what you do.
So, in looking at that list, I decided to focus on the final one. I know that since L and I first decided to get back together I have been doing that action but had she? At times, yes. Though in a way she has left me three times in the past month. I went into the the discussion open minded but cautious. I couldn’t give her a leap of faith but maybe there was room to let this grow.
Then came that wrinkle I foreshadowed. Her ex, the one she had seen for a few months in between us breaking up and getting back together, had reappeared last Saturday. With no job, no place to stay, and a pocketful of sweet words, he has been crashing on her couch for three days. She denies that he is dangerous, but everything she ever told me about him paints the picture of an abusive and ugly situation. He seems to be one of those people that, if she were trying to build boundaries and find herself as a person, would keep crashing those boundaries just so he can control the situation.
I want to support her in this challenging time but even she sees that it is bizarre. I’m not sure I can handle being with someone who would welcome that sort of stress back into her life without the ability to say no. She says that he is going to be gone by today then we’ll talk. She needs to tell him face to face and hope he’ll leave- something I think is incredibly dangerous. I had hoped she would involve the police (since he basically followed her to find out where she lived) or at least have a friend around when she did it, but she has chosen her path and there is nothing I can do to alter it. I can only decide if I can be around to help pick up the pieces after this piece of self-inflicted misery. I hope she finds the strength to start building her boundaries. All her life she has let people, even me, walk on her in ways that are inappropriate. I tried to help her build them but in the end, those boundaries are something you can only build for yourself.
On to the song: Girl by Tori Amos
“She’s been everybody else’s girl. Maybe one day she’ll be her own.”
Life twists in unfamiliar ways and now she is begging me not to reject her. L sent me an email this morning saying that after thinking things she wants to give this a try. After a few hours she sent me a few more emails begging me not to abandon her… she once worried how she can trust me, now it is my turn to wonder.
When we first got back together, the weekend beforehand she vanished and went out with another man. When I forgave this and started a relationship again with her anyway, she was shocked that I would. When she left me two weeks later in a state of confusion, I could empathize with the difficulty she was having. Eventually we decided to try a month of low communication while not seeing other people- when she abandoned that last Thursday, four days into the process, part of me feels like we’ve thrown away any hope for a happy ending between us. But maybe it was already gone that weekend that I took her back with total forgiveness. Or maybe I threw it away back when I first left her over the summer. Or maybe… or maybe…
There is such a littered trail of missed opportunities in the relationship, when one of us could have done the other right but instead chose to do to something hurtful or sad. When I started back with her I committed to making the right choices, not the wrong ones. It seems, we have been balanced by this most recent turn in our relationship. I trusted her without reservation once. I trusted her with giving space twice. I don’t know how I can ask my heart to go through that again, especially if she has been with other men since then.
It would be too fast, too inconstant, too shallow… the feelings in her seem to be moving like stream three inches deep overflowing its banks. Nothing stays the same for very long yet ultimately nothing moves. We are meeting tonight to talk about being together. I do not know if I will want to or not… should I base it on her actions towards me, her words now, or her story of the past few weeks? I’m going to trust in my feelings but I also feel I must trust in the standards I’ve been reading about. It’s time to set some boundaries- if she left me for a three day period to date other men, how could there be any hope for us? If she didn’t, how could this situation be changed to a positive outcome and still have us together? I’m not sure I see the path but I hope I do after talking to her.
*click* *buzz* *whir* What you hear is the sound of my mind resetting and trying to puzzle out another way to win her back even though I’m starting to realize that maybe, just maybe, this is not meant to be.
I know yesterday I felt low on hope and even posted about that. I spoke with the therapist and described the feeling as “walking into a dark closet and sitting there waiting. You enter with hope but after a few days the sensory deprivation starts to make you feel a bit nutty.”
She reminded me that I was free to open the door at any time and leave. After thinking about I decided that the end result, being with L, was worth the wait. My commitment reconfirmed, I settled down in the dark to wait for a few more days when what should appear but my beloved, signing online and with something to say.
I’ve looked back now at our attempts to fix our relationship and see a path littered with short-lived and half-hearted attempts at change on both ends. We were back together for two therapy sessions and two and a half weeks before she decided to walk away (not counting the month of glorious dating we’d had prior to that). I’d offered her space, time, and unconditional love for a month to sort through her feelings to see if her love was deeper than her pain- on day four of that commitment she vanished. I have a few friends convinced that, had we been married, she would ultimately have vanished on me one day.
When we broke up, she made all sorts of promises about a new healthy mindset and a dedication to being happy- to working through issues and to really connecting with her partner. I didn’t believe her last fall because of a string of times that we never followed through on such things. I didn’t want to give her hope about a future for us till I had hope that I could follow through. Now it seems that many of those attempts at change were facile- maybe she believed herself truly committed but she never truly was.
I’ve been told that she told often dangled the bait of a healthy relationship in front of me only to pull it back as I committed. I’m not certain that amount of blame is healthy or accurate but it feels that way at the moment. When you’re dealing with a decade long relationship it should take months of trying to give up, not days. Before I left her last summer, I spent two years trying for couples therapy and two months trying to romance her before giving up.
In the fall I was unpleasant, I was distant, and I went out of my way not to give her hope for us. If she wanted to be happy she had to do it on her own, as her own person. I was less than nice, sometimes cruel, and I was lost, confused, and in pain. Now, in her confusion she has repeated my mistake and thrown away someone who wanted to give her everything and, much more special and rare, was willing to work for it.
Love may need to be easy sometimes, but love also takes dedication, commitment, and effort especially after a decade. As the Tears for Fears song says, “Don’t you know that love is work?” I must now face that I was willing to work but she was not. It really shouldn’t surprise me. Some people don’t want to be happy. But why then am I already working on a new plan to win her back? What does that say about me?
I checked my horoscope today and it told me that since I’ll be so busy with work I should squeeze in a “phone call to my honey.” So I did. I suppose one of the things I’ll need to accept about this whole “break” idea is that maybe she just doesn’t want to talk to me right now.
I must say, though, that it is really hard to square the great time we had together on Sunday with the need for a communications black out. When I entered this I believe the idea was that it would give her space to work through her hurt to see what lies underneath. In the midst of it, the break feels more like a slow long death of a relationship.
What is the point of waiting around missing her? Shouldn’t we be together? She said before that she appreciates the space and time though I don’t know where she is now with that.
I’ve noticed are emails this week become a bit more stiff and formal this week and when I mentioned I had some free time this weekend, she didn’t jump at the chance. This looks just like the break I signed up for, the break I suggested as an alternative to her just shutting down the relationship. Why am I having so much trouble with it?
Well:
Hope. I don’t want to fuel it but I don’t want to crush it. She doesn’t want to give it or take it away. I’m like floating in a squishy green mass of Jell-O that has almost set, but isn’t ready to serve yet.
Desire. I’ve been working on becoming a better partner in so many ways from listening to just having fun things to do- I want to put my skills to use.
Over-thinking. I wonder what she is up to? I miss her. I think about her.
Decision making. Everything seems stuck – I can’t move away or towards her, I’m just in orbit.
Power. She has it all right now, in a way. She doesn’t know what she wants and I want her.
Doubt. Do I really want this relationship to build from this point on? So much bad has gone both ways, can it be saved?
Over the weekend, as she gave me hope and signs, I believed. On Sunday, when she kissed me, I was afraid to feel the hope that flowed through my veins. She was afraid to give any long term signs of anything.
I’m reminded of the Counting Crows song “Anna Begins” with the lines:
But then I start to think about the consequences
Because I dont get no sleep in a quiet room and…
The time when kindness falls like rain
It washes me away and anna begins change my mind
And every time she sneezes I believe its love
And oh lord…. I’m not ready for this sort of thing
I was not worried and I was not overly concerned, just like the speaker in the song, but now each minute ticks by slower as I wonder if I’m wasting my time. I try to focus on other things, but at the moment things all lead back to her, making me wish I could just turn that part of off or program it to focus on other things like in this xkcd comic (click to enlarge the image):
I want to assert that everything will be alright, but like the Panic Weekend this could just be a month long wait for a long slow goodbye. Hope is a fuel for this and right now, my hope is at a low. I was hoping that by following my horoscope she would give me a sign, but instead right now all I receive is neutrality. Scientists confirm this: space is cold.
Emotional Panic Meter (10 being outta here): 6 (4 after half a xanax)
Everything Will Be Alright – A Journey To The Center Of The Self 