Not sure what we're "talking" about tomorrow, so here's me putting together what I'd like to say to him, and trying to boil it down to its essence.
Things I Was Told At One Point
"I won't be with anyone while you live here."
"I'm with people." (LESS THAN ONE MONTH LATER.)
"I'm not serious about her." (WHILE SLEEPING WITH ME.)
"It might be serious. I'm not sure. I'll let you know." (WHILE SLEEPING WITH ME.)
"I'm living alone for a year."
"She's here a lot." (LESS THAN ONE MONTH AFTER I MOVE OUT.)
"She should probably pay rent." (DEFINITELY LESS THAN ONE YEAR LATER.)
"She and I need to talk about her moving in with me." (STILL CONSIDERABLY LESS THAN ONE YEAR LATER.)
The story keeps changing. Sure, I get it, you are a spontaneous, reactive lover, absolutely. Which we talked about when I explained to you that I made this request not to get into another relationship partly so you WOULDN'T jump straight into another serious relationship that couldn't actually possibly be serious.
Now, do I have any real right to make any demands on you at this point? No. I'm only pointing out how fast that timeline changed, and that every single change hurts me all over again. I don't feel that I meant very much to you if you can set these boundaries and break them so quickly. I can't believe what you SAY, because your actions do not align with what you say. Stop saying things you can't back with action if you're only saying them to not hurt me. Your actions hurt me. Repeatedly. Over and over again.
In less a year, you've been living with someone for three months, and I'm supposed to, basically, move on from my feelings about all of that, and also accept her unconditionally. That is a lot, and I have NEVER done this before. EVER. I spent three years getting over a marriage *I* ended and my next relationship was YOU. I care for you and our relationship exponentially more than I did for that ten year marriage and nearly 15 year relationship. Do you get that? Do you understand how very, very badly I hurt? And the list of things I'm supposed to just... ignore because hey, you don't love me, you love this other chick now, and ugh, sorry, what are you supposed to do, can't I just get over it? Well. Sure. I can understand that request to make your life easier, and that you didn't ask for this, but I can't deal with my pain right now.
I don't have the TIME to deal with my pain, because you also keep saying that I need to accept you, I need to accept her, don't push you away, don't push you away. Dude. Every single time I see you, I am hurt again. I don't know if it's necessarily fair to say that you hurt me as an action on purpose, but I am passively hurt by the disconnect between where I am and where you are. Every single time. And yes, it's worse right now because I am ENTIRELY isolated. I don't leave the house more than about once or twice a week, I see no other people I know in person apart from you. That's reality, and clearly, I cannot deal with it. I do not know how, but I am trying. And guess what? NOBODY knows how to deal with this, because this shit is UNPRECEDENTED. But don't push you away, pretend a friendship can be forged on this uneven ground, and most of all, get over it.
I accept that you did not ask for this situation, but I have told you before, "You have no say in how long it takes me to process my own pain." If this is another situation where you are incapable of accepting me where I am, maybe you don't need to be my friend. You like to tell me that you don't need me nearly as much as I need you, and this is one of the reasons I was so furious about the testing. You demanded my help, you refused to take my advice, then you freaked out and refused to solve your own problem and I had to offer to do something that I HATE in order to get you to stop sending me paranoid texts. I've loaned you my car, I sent you the information on the insurance so you could rent a car on your trip multiple times, I drove you to the fucking hospital when you got fucking rabies. I agreed to wake up to drive you to work so I could have my own car and not inconvenience your girlfriend because she doesn't like to wake up early on a Saturday. I am not only actively trying to be your friend, I am inadvertently allowing myself to be your fucking doormat to show you, YET AGAIN, how hard I am TRYING to be who you need me to be.
So, OK. Be your friend. What do I need to do to do that? I have to completely re-think who I think you are as a human being in light of all this. Because my understanding of our relationship was that you were someone I was willing to be with, and to work with, and to accept, but you decided you were over me and waited months to tell me. And then I had to ask YOU if this relationship was actually over, or if we were dragging it out to the end of the lease, and you were like, "Yeah, it's over," meaning that by the time you told me in September that things needed to change, or else, you were already done thinking they could. So for you, yeah, if you've been over me since early 2019, what the fuck is wrong with me? I can sort of see that perspective even though I do not understand it. Except, well, you didn't TELL me. You said, "Please change this behaviour," and watched me struggle and struggle and made every single time we left the house to do something important to you anxiety inducing because I didn't understand HOW I would be wrong, only that I ABSOLUTELY would, but, OK, try, try, try to be someone I don't even understand how to be, and you never said, "By the way, my love and regard for you is conditional on this list of your shortcomings being gotten over right the fuck now."
While this was happening, I was also going, "OK, I won't talk about how much it upsets me that I have to pick his drunk ass up and let him throw up all the way home and pass out in the bathroom, I won't talk about how much time he spends at the bar, I won't talk about how much I wish he was on medication or in therapy, I won't mention how badly I wish he would be transparent about his tobacco use, because unlike me, he cannot change those. He said he can't, because circumstances make it impossible right now. I accept that, I can wait. I have to keep trying to change right now, and this hurts, but maybe seeing my hurt will help him realise that he could probably just compromise, since he can't work on himself and I've made that compromise. Maybe."
Now. OK. Yes, I should have taken a good, long hard look at this and said to myself, "WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?" But I didn't. Because I thought I was in a mutually supportive, unconditional situation and therefore you couldn't actually be asking me to tolerate your bad behaviour and simultaneously change my own. Clearly what was actually happening was that you were struggling just as much as I was, but needed fewer reminders because your problems were not as bad. Yep. That's some deeply unhealthy shit I'm carrying around in my head, about how I am the biggest problem in any given situation, but you reinforced it. I hope it was unintentionally.
I also didn't know I had a deadline that wouldn't change no matter how much I struggled. Does this make your perspective *wrong?* No. It just means that we came to Denver with different perspectives, and I didn't know that. Had I known you were saying, "Hey, this is not a long-term relationship, because I am not interested in that kind of commitment, but please come with me to Denver," I would have said no. I should have clarified, but it didn't even occur to me that I needed to.
If you were interested in a long-term commitment in the same way I was, we would not be in this situation. I've been able to decide that a long-term commitment ends when I'm in danger. That's why I ended my marriage. I tend to tell people that it's over the lies, but it was the knowledge that I would continue to be put at direct risk (financially, medically) because his behaviour would never change, and there was no way to accept being put at risk, except to stop having a trusting, sexual, intimate relationship with him, and that's neither a marriage nor a committed romantic partnership, that's just living with a selfish, reckless, self-destructive asshole.
And I believed the same was true of you because you didn't tell me that your marriage ended because you cheated on your wife because, I still don't really know why, you were bored? I accepted your story that your divorce was mutual, but understood that is was more her decision and had the impression she was just shallow. I had to create that story because I wasn't told the truth, and wasn't told the truth until September, while you were telling me, "Oh, by the way, I broke up with you already, but I'm not going to make that official yet even though there's nothing you can do to change that, because I don't actually believe in unconditional, long-term relationships." So, really, I should be upset with you for doing the one thing I asked you never, ever to do to me: lie to me. I should push you away from me and never, ever go anywhere near you ever again.
So I feel like a crazy person because, from your perspective, how dare I still hurt and love you, and why can't I just be your friend? But, if all these things are true, if you can lie to me, and hurt me, and demand that I change my behaviour to make our relationship more convenient for you, who the hell are you? Are you someone I even want to be friends with? And you keep asking for favours, and you keep asking me not to push you away, but you keep showing me behaviour that tells me that I don't know who you are, and my dude, you are not the only one who needs to see she can trust you. I am trying, and trying, and trying, and doing so is hurting me. That's not a great path to walk down with me, because I've learned, and I'm not going to let myself continue to hurt for someone else as easily, and certainly not knowingly.
Because I understand that, yes, if we're going to fix this, we do need to fix it. We need to figure out what this relationship looks like. Because I genuinely do mean it when I say I will do anything for you, and you really, really don't. That's unequal, and I either need to start setting boundaries, or I need to walk away, but I feel like doing either of those things makes me the bad guy. Then I'm just like your ex-wife, who you say hates you, but whom I begin to suspect was just tired of the same thing I am, an insistence on a relationship that she was not allowed to re-build it in terms of who she discovered you are. But I don't know that, and can't know that, because that is YOUR story that I will only ever see through your eyes. And I am learning that you omit the truth. Sure, everybody does, but you keep doing it in the same ways. "I don't cheat on people! ...Except my current girlfriend, you, and my ex-wife, I mean, yeah, I cheated on all of you." I know we've talked about this, but I point it out again to say, "What other stories shouldn't I trust?" Because I have trusted and stood by you through some seriously unbelievable shit, and I sometimes wonder how many other lies I've been told, and I try to trust you anyway. Except that your actions keep saying, "Ugh, just hurry up and trust me again in spite of all evidence to the contrary."
I am pushing you away because you need me to be someone I can't, and if this is why you broke up with me, well, why do you even WANT to be friends with me? You've admitted you lose nothing in my friendship, you've admitted you can only have an intimate partnership with me if I'm willing to be someone you need me to be.
But I agreed to accept you as you are, and I've agreed to do that right up until you put me at risk, so I'm still trying. I'm not willing to say that, "Oh, all those times I've wanted to die, that's your fault," but three weeks of living in a haze of self-hatred punctuated by your demands to magically fix it all, when I keep trying to explain that I can't, and don't know how, and need time where you aren't hurting me, HURTS ME.
I want to be completely wrong about some of this. Please tell me how I'm wrong. Except that I also know that I automatically assume I'm in the wrong, and I have two therapists from two different relationships telling me that I'm not wrong. So. I mean. It's not looking good.
Except that beyond all of this, I find you an intelligent, insightful, aware, kind-hearted, giving person who wants to be seen as a good person who does good and helpful things and tends to work hard to be that person. You are so fucking cool, you know things, and you do things, and I have been so proud of the ways in which you are willing to fight for things you believe in. That's the man I love; someone I thought I deserved, and was willing to work and live with, and who had respect for me.
I doubt such big parts of all that, now, that I don't know how to reconcile them. Help me. I'm saying to you again, "Be who I think you are." You asked me to be someone I told you from our very first date that I was not. You're still asking me to be someone I can't be right now, and am still trying, and I'm still afraid of failing, because what secret deadline is there this time? And all I get from you when I say, "I feel terrible about the person I cannot be for you," which is what I'm saying when I tell you I want to die, or I hate myself, or any list of things is, "What do you want from me? You have to stop this. I'm sorry." And because I believe I am the problem, and because I want so very badly to accept you as you are, I don't know how to say, "I want you to be aware of your behaviour toward me, and try to change it." Because maybe I have no right to make that request, and maybe you can't actually change, anyway. And if you can't, then you're going to keep hurting me and we cannot have a relationship on that basis. And, frankly, I begin to think that if you CAN change your behaviour, you could probably have changed it regarding our relationship, and, OK, yes, I want very much to try to go back and fix that, but that can NEVER happen, because here's this entire other person that I'm supposed to accept instead. And somehow not feel replaced? Or worse than replaced?
I can't reconcile all this. I'm trying to boil it down to its essence and I've got over 2700 words up there that you will never even read.
"We're very different people," you say, but I don't think so. I think we're very, very similar people who have one key difference: you expect people to change for you, and I try to accept people as they are. Maybe the part that's missing is that you don't think you'll require any changes from me as a friend, but, your actions don't show that. And I'm trying to hard to accept that. I'm open to suggestions, but not hopeful, because I don't have any.
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