#33: She’s been everybody else’s girl. Maybe one day she’ll be her own.

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.

So the decision was a hard one but it was the one I had to make. When we met I printed out some stuff from Getting Past Your Past including this article on boundaries to see if she can learn to start building them and this article on standards so she can start finding what is acceptable to her. Then I said as long as he is in the picture, we can’t even have a discussion about an us.

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.”