6/7/24
So, for anyone who either regularly reads this blog or have just casually stumbled upon it, you’d certainly notice that I’ve suddenly become interested in explaining myself. I think it’s something of a shame reflex.
Nothing bothers me more than feeling powerless, and nothing brings on shame more than feelings that I can’t shake. Why should I fixate on one person? Why put that much power in the hands of someone? Being in a situation like I am right now makes me feel a slave to my emotions, and I don’t like that experience.
But it’s important for me to remind myself how I got here. And to really explain myself to myself, I need to examine my marriage. I take complete responsibility for all of this, by the way, I wasn’t my ex’s fault that I made a series of decisions to stay in a relationship that I never felt entirely right about and that was objectively bad for me.
And I don’t want to rehash all of the bad decisions I made along the way. Rather, I want to focus on the fact that in the course of this 24 year relationship, I basically lost the plot of my life. My motivation was gone — all forward momentum in my career stopped. I had endless cycles of getting out of shape and then having to do massive work to get back in shape. I stopped making new friends. And this was all before the relationship went really bad.
I acted to sabotage the relationship at one point — and then when I was just about to leave it, I was emotionally blackmailed in an incredibly painful way. This kept the relationship on life support another decade — and much of that time I was under heavy surveillance from my ex, which destroyed some of my friendships and led to depression and a horrible experience with medications that took me forever to get off of (only recently did I discover, in fact, that I have a genetic mutation that messes with my uptake of Lexapro and I should never have been prescribed it.)
So, getting away from this relationship was vital for my personal survival. Since it ended, I’ve had a series of odd romantic pairings, including one that lasted a year that, in retrospect, was really another compromise for me, falling back into the old pattern that took away my motivation. But it’s really been this ongoing non-relationship, the one that I have with the person I call The Reader, that has refocused my life.
The first thing that this non-relationship has done is helped me to become completely comfortable with not having a romantic relationship. I no longer fear being alone, taking solo vacations, even considering the possibility of never having another romantic relationship. I feel fully capable of enjoying my life for me and not having to adjust it to anyone else. Having this kind of ghost companion in my corner has helped me do this.
This is a huge thing for me, because the reason I entered into and stayed in my relationship with my ex was fear … a sense that I couldn’t handle my life on my own and concern that I wouldn’t be able to find someone else. Shaking this has made me lose all interest in ever having another compromise relationship.
But there’s something else that I’ve taken from this non-relationship, and that concerns the real life experience that I’ve had with this woman. The work that we do together feels more like a genuine partnership than any time I spent in my marriage and, for the first time in my life, made me feel like I had access to someone who got me, appreciated me, and knew how to build on my ideas. It’s been remarkably empowering to me, and not something I have any interest in giving up.
Maybe that should be enough, but I confess to being greedy about this — I’d like to have that kind of partnership in all phases of my life. And perhaps there are others I could find that with, but having never had it before, it’s understandable that I would look first and foremost to the one supplying me with it right now. (Not even my parents gave me this feeling growing up — they always felt distant and removed from the things I did, not people who supported and empowered me.)
And maybe that’s where all of this self examination is going — to a realization that I’ve basically made a life choice on this. It’s not up to me whether I will ever be in a genuine romantic relationship with this person, that’s her call and there are many perfectly acceptable reasons for her to not want this.
But it is up to me to decide to make it my only option, at least until someone else demonstrates to me that they could provide the same things I’m looking for in a pairing. Perhaps it will happen. But if it comes down to this relationship happening or me never being in another romantic relationship, I’m at peace with that. I’ve lived my whole life without a true partnership, I can carry on that way.