H just moved out, 13 months post-bomb

[Dawn of Hope]

Hi, AAL, thank you for posting to me! I really appreciate your kind and thoughtful words.

I do need to clarify something about my friend. She is M (2nd M; 1st H was the sort of lying, cheating WAS many of us come here to talk about, and she D him by the time she was 25). Her would-be OM is not M; he's been divorced for years and is now concentrating on his same-sex one-night-stands (yes, he's quite the prize, all right...he is also in his late 50s and is back to living with his mommy). He led her on for a while--heavy flirting leading to petting, as I understand it--and she told him she was going to leave her H, but after her H lost his job, she figured out there wasn't enough money for her to live separately from her H, and she told OM she couldn't move out, and after that OM told her he didn't want a R with her (or anyone, in fact), not then and not ever, and he went from hot to consistently cool or cold toward her, and has not been more than civil to her since. Yes, this is SUCH an emotionally and morally healthy pair....

My friend does at least understand that she is in MLC and that from an outside perspective, her desperate obsession with OM is completely off-the-wall and just plain WRONG. I don't like to hurt her feelings, so I have pussyfooted around it a bit, but I think she knows my position on this pseudo-R of hers quite clearly. But she goes on and on about how she was having actual dreams about this exact man when she was still in grade school, even though she didn't meet him until 30 years later, and how as soon as she met him, her confusion about her life's purpose was instantly resolved and she just knew she was born to M him and have his babies and make him happy...is it any wonder that sometimes it is all I can do not to scream and smack her silly??

Yesterday she was telling me that she was just utterly convinced that God meant for them to be together--she just knew he was the one for her, and because she never felt that same connection to either her first H or her current H (with both of them she "knew [she] was settling for something less than what [she] really wanted"), her M's to them "didn't count." I almost put the phone down and started beating my head against the table when I heard that.

I'm not her current H's biggest fan--we have some philosophical differences, and he has some habits that would drive me crazy within a week, like the fact that he is addicted to TV and he hardly talks at all!--but I don't think he's a bad person, or even a bad H to the right W. I really feel sorry for him, not only because he knows that the only thing stopping his W from walking out on him is the fact that OM doesn't want her...but also because she talks about OM all the ^&*( time, even to her H!! Talk about pouring salt on wounds you created yourself!

I had really hoped she had made some progress through the MLC tunnel, because in the last six months or so she cut back to only spending about a quarter of her conversation talking about OM, instead of the 90% it was for a couple of years before that (I can't tell you the number of times she would call or we would get together, and I would be a hairsbreadth away from saying, "I'm really happy to talk to you, but we have to put a ban on any mention of OM for the rest of the evening" because I thought I might scream if I heard another word about him...and also because I wasn't sure she could manage to go more than 2 minutes without mentioning him!)...but yesterday it was right back to the old ratio, and she'd been crying all morning and half the night because OM was cool to her the previous evening (not blatantly rude, just cool and uncommunicative, which isn't all that abnormal in their relations of the last year or so).

Yes, she is one of the few people who stays in touch. And she is one of my closest friends, and I love her and don't want her hurt. But yes, I have to agree that she's selfish to keep talking to me about her OM when she knows perfectly well about my sitch, but there aren't too many people she _can_ talk to about it because she's hiding it from most people...shame, perhaps??! And I really hate conflict, so I've never gotten up the nerve to be totally blunt with her and say what I really feel about this, which is, "I never ever want to hear about OM again! You have talked about him so much I have heard enough to fill ten lifetimes, and you are twisting my arm every time you do it because I'm on the other side of the coin, so it's like sticking pins into me every time you moan about how much you love him and how cold he is to you! The way he is treating you now is total poetic justice for what you have done to your poor H! I don't care if you think God created OM especially for you, you're MARRIED! Act like it!! What the ^&*()_ happened to the woman I met fifteen years ago who was so dedicated to the purity of her M that she wouldn't even ride in a car alone with another man, huh? What is WRONG with you that you quote the Bible to everyone and even used to beat people over the head with it, and now you think your first two M's "didn't count" because you've fallen in love with somebody else?! You are such a flaming hypocrite! And how the &*%^&*( can you possibly believe he's your soulmate and God meant for you to be together when you tell me all the time how much he avoids you and clearly wants nothing to do with you and won't even look at you? Does this make sense? Some soulmate, huh? How does that fit into God's master plan of making you to be together? And what about your H? You tell me all the time that you love him and don't want to hurt him, but you're doing it on purpose! It's like you're saying, 'Oh, I want you to be safe and happy and healthy and have a good life,' and all the while you are stabbing him over and over! You are so %^&*( in the head you should be locked up!"

...No, I never said anything like that. Wow, I didn't know just how angry I am with her!! Whoo...okay, calming down now. I don't lose my temper much, and I have managed to keep a lid on it for almost two years (last time was the day H dropped the bomb on me), but if I were going to lose control of it with anyone other than my H, it would be either her or my mother. But I didn't lose my temper with her yesterday, even when she finished up by sort of insisting on picking an argument with me (I do not enjoy disagreements, so I was trying to avoid it) about whether Jesus was okay with D'ing a S who had committed adultery; I said no, but was lousy with explaining how I justified that stance (I could use some help with that if anyone has a persuasive argument or Biblical references!); she naturally said yes, Jesus was fine with it, which she was sort of obligated to say because she D'd her chronically-adulterous first H. Did I talk about this part of the conversation in a recent post? If so, I apologize for the repetition, to the three people who are still hanging in there with me despite my long-windedness!

Anyway, on the "telling her what I really think" topic, all I ever managed to do was to seriously step away from her for a while when the bomb dropped for me, because I really didn't think she would be able to be sympathetic and shut up long enough to listen to me, and also because I was not at all willing to hear about her WAW/OP woes...and because I didn't know how much of what I said she might pass on to my H. On that last bit, she doesn't pass through very much of her conversations with either of us to the other...maybe a little general stuff, but not much else. But she's about the only person who actually talks to us both, although that may change. I just sent out a mass email to announce that I am dropping the home phone, and most of the people who received it have heard something about my sitch, but a few haven't, and a few more haven't been updated in quite some time, and some of them were closer to H than to me. So I'm starting to get some responses, and I am replying, cautious about what I say, but not trying to hide the truth.

So, that was waaaaaay more about my friend than I intended to post, but maybe it will entertain someone. It's like listening to an ongoing soap opera with her. Maybe if I think of it as a soap opera, it will help me to detach and not get so impatient and angry when she's talking. Either that or I need to grow some guts and tell her to cut it out when I get sick of listening...although hopefully more politely than the rant above. About the only thing I get out of this is to understand just how utterly warped a MLCer is in their thinking, and how impossible it is to make them see reason, when it's not a sitch in which the outcome is vital to my life. Helps me understand just how frustrated friends of my H probably get if any of them are trying to disabuse him of his delusions.

Okay, I've written a bunch more stuff, but I think I will break this up into separate posts. This is already way too long as it is. More in a moment.

Peace,
Dawn