How do you know when it’s time to leave? I mean, give up, obviously.
As the days wear on, the complications continue to obstruct the goal. Well-attached and secure love relationship. It is getting harder and harder to skip the fact that she’s in flux.
Note to self: quit becoming attached to unavailable women. You knew. This one even told you. Told you more than you wanted to know about her trauma. Maybe we trauma-bonded in that first five-hour sprint of a conversation. Fascinating. Alluring. So attractive, I knew my thinking was clouded from the first hug. Shit.
Now, I’m deep in the middle of it. Is this an extraction or a rescue? I am not going to fix her. I am not willing to continue to bliss when it is flooded by the undercurrent of strife, stories of her husband, and how hard it is letting go of the dream of your marriage. She says, “He left me.” Yeah, about that…
You don’t stay 18 years in an abusive relationship. What was she getting out of it? How does a child-man serve her purposes? Musician? Younger. Much younger. Not cute. Not all that attractive, she would say.
“Okay, so what attracted you to him in the first place?”
“And what made you stay after the 20th time he abandoned you?”
“So, now he’s left you and destroyed the dream? What was the dream again? Where were the good parts?”
I’m sick of hearing about him. I’m sick tonight. I didn’t want to go over to her house again, start all our conversations up at 9 pm. Try to set a bedtime, blow past those ideas. And…
It’s too much. Alone tonight is better than partnered with a married woman. I can’t get over that. Perhaps when she’s divorced. And then has six months or so of life as a single person. That’s when the growth happens. I know it. She should know it. She does not know it.
Now, she’s been pointing me toward the opportunity of jumping into “next” and I think it’s time for me to do just that. No matter how solid the physical attraction is. The truth is, she is not available. She has much work to be done. She can’t hear me ask her to come visit my house. She doesn’t want to. It’s just easier if I come there.
Yeah, it’s not easier for me. It’s a compromise. And so far, you have compromised zero. The one argument we had out in public showed me that you overreact to me raising my voice even a little. No one around us felt like I was attacking you or shouting. I wasn’t. I was frustrated. You can’t answer questions truthfully when you know there is no good answer.
“Maybe this relationship is just about sex,” she said.
“Um… that’s a problem for me, if it’s true for you.”
“I don’t know…”
“I know. I am not interested in a sex-first relationship. It demeans all of the conversations we’ve had up to this very moment. You deny our relationship and discount the feelings as just about sex.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s how it feels.”
Alone is where I want to be tonight. I have invited her three times to come visit me tonight. She’s got three reasons to say no. Tomorrow, they are going to turn the power off at her house. There’s a generator to keep her fridge cold. She’s determined she can tether her wifi and power for her computers off the generator. Yeah, good luck with that. Is that preferable to being here with me, in my house?
Without saying the truth, I know the answer is yes. She wants me in her house. She wants an easy replacement. She wants “fun without fighting.” And that’s not how it works. Sure, I have that intention as well. “Let’s not fight.”
She’s often ready for the fight, flight, or freeze. I wonder if sex is a hyper-focused form of fawning?
I’m disappearing. I reconnect with myself tonight. Let her spin in her house, with her electrician coming at 7 am to turn off her house.
Me: You are welcome to join me
Her: I have to be here in the morning
Okay. Yeah. I see. Sleep well.
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