Slowly Opening Eyes

December 18th, 2012

     Today was day one.  It has now been over 24 hours since we last spoke.  I’m still feeling the effects of denial as I still imagine talking to you, seeing you, making love to you.  It was a fairly productive day; I tidied up my house a bit, finally removing the evidence of my recent illness.  I went to the gym and did a half-hearted workout.  I had my recurring daydream about training you, but this time with the bitter realization that it would never come to be.  God it hurts to think of all the things you said you wanted to do with me but never did.  You talked about making meals, getting drunk together at a party, going to a music festival, going to see The Hobbit.  Every time, I believed you had some intent of following through but whenever I pursued it, you were unavailable.

     Today is the first day it has truly sunk in exactly how unavailable you are to me.  You probably always will be.  Now that I’m so deeply associated with the break-up with your ex, seeing me will forever conjure those memories.

     I’ve been reading this blog today dealing with the subject of dating emotionally unavailable men.  It was already starting to dawn on me how little my needs have been considered this whole time when I found out about your other girls.  This blog has further opened my eyes to how I’m doing the exact same thing I was doing with my ex.  I’m carving out large chunks of myself in the hopes of being more satisfactory to you.  I’m stamping down my needs into silence to avoid rocking the boat.  I am abusing myself.  I’ve come to realize that I’ve sacrificed too much and I cannot stay.  I don’t need to see you one last time.  Our last night together was the most beautiful I could imagine.  That night it finally felt like you were there, in the present with me, and happy.  You approved of me and appreciated my art, my body, my presence.  It was what I had wanted these last nine months.  It was too much to bear to feel you pull back away after that level of intensity.  I can’t keep up with the hot/cold yo-yo game.  I feel pulled too thin.

***

     It took Natalie Lue’s blog Baggage Reclaim to show me how much I had been stifling myself to be with M.  With my ex-fiance, I was fully conscious of the sensation of walking on eggshells.  My ex would have a rage reaction to things that upset him, so I very intentionally tried to change my behaviors in order to limit those rages.  With M, the dynamic was much different.  With him, I was not afraid of rage, but rather of judgement and abandonment.  He had made it all too clear that jealousy and clinginess were unacceptable and he had proven to me by his first abandonment that he was not afraid to throw away what he had if I over-stepped my bounds.  For whatever reason, this did not feel like abuse at the time.  I saw it as a man expressing his needs to me.  He claimed to be in pain from his last relationship and in need of space to heal.  I saw his condemnation of jealousy to be a sign of his spiritual enlightenment.  He did not see people as possessions and felt everyone should be free to act according to their own will.  I now understand these to be tools of abuse designed to control his victims.  By creating feelings of fear and guilt, he was able to keep me quiet, so I would not express my discomfort with how he was treating me, lest I be branded as “jealous” or “needy” and suffer the consequential abandonment.  It worked like a charm.  My fear kept me so quiet that most of our phone conversations were me listening to him go on about whatever was on his mind and affirming every word out of his mouth so he would feel safe and accepted. 

     Lue’s blog and her book Mr. Unavailable and the Fallback Girl taught me about blowing hot and cold (acting in love one minute, and completely distant the next), future faking (making up stories about all the things we would do together in the future so that I would be emotionally reeled in without him ever intending to follow through), and the fallback girl (keeping me on the backburner so that if things went awry with his primary relationship, I’d still be on the sidelines to swoop in when he needed me).  It was the first step in seeing abuse in M’s pattern of behavior. 

     At this point, I still believed the root cause of M’s abuse was his break-up with his ex.  I was seeing him as a wounded, but emotionally unavailable man that had trouble with commitment.  I believed that once he finished grieving his last relationship, he would be capable of being with someone in a meaningful way.  I realized I had compromised myself and I needed to get out so I could begin respecting myself again, but I still had NO idea of how deep his pathology runs.  At the very least, Lue’s book had opened the door to realizing that I myself was not to blame for his poor behavior.  I was simply with the wrong guy at the wrong time and I needed to get out.